So it seems that just when I have figured out how to drain concrete feelings from the past, the past catches up to me with a telephone ring and a callous hand. I find myself in a place, the sound of a ticking clock and frames of reality that could easily be mistaken for memories. They’re not old photographs, this is his hand brushing my arm and his eyes reflecting the winter sunlight, bright as ever. It is a representation of my weakness, that I can fall into step with someone formally dismissed from my mind as if we hadn’t missed a beat – a few years of hatred and bitten lips – and continue what I wanted to be real for a stretched period of time that shouldn’t have been allowed firstly. I haven’t forgotten my flushed face, cracked sobs and shaking ground that I struggled through alone, when these people could have helped me but rather chose to ignore my melancholy breaths and desperate eyes. It’s unfair, the ability to dust it off, that they will not suffer as I had, even when it takes two people to hold a relationship. There hasn’t been a second in between, my subconscious whispers, when he looks at me the same way he did when we first found each other, when he laughs like we’re unfamiliar to stress and bitter emotions and strangers to battle, when he speaks to me with adoration totally void of any recollection. Maybe it’s easier this way, under almond sandwiches and iced coffee, making out in my compact koneko when it’s drizzling and dim outside, snapchats of smiles engraved in my mind that I will never truly get to keep. I’m the only one that has a direct line to the most sensitive corner of my brain, I pour out genuine thoughts that prickle my tongue and deeply wound those with perked ears. These sentences, however, do a grand job of pushing people away only to pull them back later on when I don’t need them, and they don’t need me. I seem to dance into stories of folded page corners, faded text and supple rips. Damage is suddenly a second nature to me. I am falling apart to the noise of voices I’ve trained myself to forget, tracing tones I was certain would become a mystery to me and now I feel like my entire world has flipped upside down, tangling and hanging my morals like ruined Christmas decorations. Before long, I will find myself absentmindedly pulling blades of grass from the lawn hugging my elementary school.
You should have seen him, looking at me as though his presence hadn’t previously cried myself to sleep night after next. I spent my school days in confusion, and focused on stinging words and disapproving expressions rather than the images swimming on the projector screen in bland classrooms. You should have seen him, a writhing mess on my passenger seat. Underneath me, with glazed eyes and a smirk of a smile, moaning and breathing past records I had played in my mind like imaginary movies, lips I have been wanting to feel against mine for years over years over years of pent up sexual frustration that was unraveling in a matter of seconds in the furthest corner of the parking lot. You should have seen him, before he left for college, blown brown eyes and moles littered across the column of his neck that ran up his chin. Cheeks and a forehead kissed multiple times to sleep, crumbled by myself silently and prayed that he’ll ask to see me first, and hopefully, not for the last time.
Winter has a knack for stripping me apart and breaking me down.
Nicole scolded me for traveling across country, and spending over a thousand dollars toward a choice, when I’m in fact homeless and struggling between saving for an apartment, college, and a dream concert. This, however, was my escape from all of that, for two weeks – a moment that could never be granted again and was pulling at my heart – that, in honest realization, was overall priceless. Money felt like air on my palms, as I awoke to a beautiful sky and a light breeze, divergence lapping at my toes and strange gazes wrapping me up like a warm blanket of security. She doesn’t know what it feels like to be a weak number of a hundred in a blue room with buzzing and blissful bass, to sit beside a former best friend that she hasn’t seen for years and talking, laughing like they used to, like they’d never spent a day apart previously, she doesn’t know the string of words that got caught in her throat when she stood before a valley of luminosity, deep in the night, with airplanes close enough to graze with her fingers that feigned star silhouettes, she didn’t run at full speed, with newly blossomed friends that would sink into her soul and embed themselves forever, through thick forest embellished with dirt trails that carefully slithered upward, she didn’t hear the praise of being an outcast with a southern accent from dozens of open minded and welcoming westerners, passing weed around like it was delicious candy and tentatively listening to her introduce herself, savoring the words falling from her trembling lips because they may never hear the same words from the same mouth. Lastly, she doesn’t know that this opportunity has rested below my skin, searching for a way out for uncountable years, and was finally able to break free, and from the reason I needed to travel across country – because the life I live is a constant, unbearable weight and for once in my life I wanted to chance seeing something breathtaking, beautiful, and bask in the originality that I have never been accompanied by. There is no price, to any of that, even as I sit under a tin roof that will never quite feel like home, separated from material items who watched me grow up, holding on to the last petal of hope I have between the fingers of old friends, my automobile, my mother, and my mind – there was no money to begin with, there is no regret clawing at my chest, no sadness I feel behind my eyelids with flashes of sunsets on the Pacific Coast and low lit diners – solely experience in the most intricate, delicate form imaginable.
