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Cleaning up my secondary to be my page for original content. Some reblogs while I move stuff back over to my primary.

[blueeyeddl]

Someone I’ve known for 20+ years just posted this on my Facebook wall and I’ve never felt more seen in my entire life.

[blueeyeddl]

Reblog to be visited by the Jeff Goldblum of Happiness, who will help you recognize that Everything Is Fleeting, Including Sadness.

[pigmenting]

i ask the universe questions and it sends me rain, blackberries, pink skies. answers i haven’t figured out the meaning of yet.

[rowenkb-blog]

He smells like a clean-cut man; respectable body wash, and fabric softener, but fucks me on dusty basement mattresses in the middle of the day. Twenty minutes of mindless bliss where I'm not consumed by missing you and where I can pretend his teeth on my flank are yours. Where his hands tangled in my hair while my mouth is oh so busy belong to you. When I get drunk and tell him that I hate that he's not you, and he realizes that he is competing against a ghost on a pedestal, he still quietly forgives me; comes back for more.

[rowenkb-blog]

We used to stand in my kitchen in our underwear, eating leftovers from the fridge; my belly swollen with baby, and you, stoned and doting. I’d wear your hat, and you would run your hands up my hips and under my shirt, and kiss me on the countertops. You weren’t afraid to touch me, you wanted me, while he wanted something unattainable. He searched dark bars, neoned keggers while you snored softly in my bed

[rowenkb-blog]

I go on to tell him quiet love stories I’ve never told another boy; to someone whose hands could take my words, rip them away from me and crush them between his fingers. Instead he says he gets it, he knows what I’m trying to say. He is patient while I finish my beer through tears, and waits for me to catch my breath. Your name doesn’t sting my throat with him.

[rowenkb-blog]

On the day my birth father added me on facebook, my sister tells me she’s just so depressed over you dying. My brain is a nasty place as I open my big mouth to remind her how long I knew him, and everything that he meant to me. As if we are fighting custody over grief. I’ve been feeling selfish. Angry. I’m tired. And then a strong wave of sadness knocks me off my feet again. She sits in her seat awkwardly, as I quietly weep. It’s been this way for days.

[rowenkb-blog]

On Living With A Manic Depressive.

He steps through the back door and the dining room looks different. He takes his jacket off, hangs it up, and quietly enters the kitchen; sees her on her hands and knees scrubbing the cabinets. His voice is soft when he talks to her. Tells her it looks nice, asks if she needs lunch. He knows she forgets to eat on days like these. She won’t look him in the eye, and when she talks it is in a wavering loud voice like she is trying not to fall apart. She asks him to hand her the broom, so he watches her sweep the linoleum 4 times and then scrub it by hand. He cooks her snowmen pancakes and bacon while she showers-but really is in there, naked with a green face mask on while she scrubs the dirtied cast iron tub. Multitasking. Every few minutes she takes a break to sit down and curl up into a ball to ugly sob and re-convince herself not to do something stupid. Not to go buy a bottle of alochol. Not to send out hateful messages to anyone who has ever hurt her. Not to leave. She comes back into the kitchen and eats half a tray of special rice crispie treats cos it’s better than getting drunk. At least way she will just sleep. She scrubs while she waits for it to kick in, and he sits and focuses on being present. A friend calls and he quietly mutters into his phone that it’s not a good time. His voice implying that he’s worried but he doesn’t know how to say it. He knows she’ll wear herself out eventually - come down.

[rowenkb-blog]

Things I Don't Know What To Do With

My favorite blanket died in the dryer, a few weeks before the whole damn thing started smoking and quit working. There’s only two people who would know what losing this blanket means to me, and one of them is dead.

[rowenkb-blog]

pete.

there are universes out there where I don’t sit up in the middle of the night sweaty and gagging and tearing at my clothes, fresh from a dream where I watched your teeth dig into my shoulder blades and your knees on the back of my legs holding me down, and your arm tucked around my empty stomach to hold my hips up like the out of body experience I have lived a thousand times already

there is some parallel something where exclamation points in text messages don’t make my stomach drop and meeting boys with your name doesnt make the edges of my world fuzz and go black and I don’t live in constant fear of how I’ve never changed my number

somewhere else, I wake up relieved and not sick on the eight year mark just like I expected today would be for the last year cos last year was the year for letting go, right?

[rowenkb-blog]

I lay crying in the tub, where beer bottles line the cast iron lip, while your best friend tells me we will be okay. It just takes time. Somewhere in this grieving process I became We, and even on my worst days, I thank fucking god I’m not alone in this anymore.

[rowenkb-blog]

We are so close to ten months without you and I crave the way he texts me at 3 am. That frustrated sleepy sigh as we just miss each other between cat naps and flirty texts. But the innuendos, the toe-dipping into new territory feels like getting undressed with your ghost in the room. Still, every conversation floats back to your name and I wonder which one of us needs it most, and why we need it so.

[rowenkb-blog]

Driving home from her house, I wipe my dusty fingers off on my jeans and realize this is what I have left of you. A ziplock, dense and dusty. I’m holding a bag of my dead ex-boyfriend and for the life of me, I can’t understand how it wouldn’t smell like you if I opened it.

[rowenkb-blog]

Nine Months

She hands me the cd case and it feels like a weapon. I unzip it and remember the weird way you wrote your “m"s and I wonder when the weight of this all won’t suffocate me. When songs come on the quiet stereo while I sift through each disc, and I won’t want to disappear. When someone can talk to me, and they don’t use cautious words and hesitate over which tense to use. When it doesn’t feel like even your sister is tip toeing around me, scared I’ll shatter.

Her small hands offer me ashes, thin lips like yours gives me the name of the people who will blow what’s left of you into a glass piece for all the bowls we smoked. She sends me links to the websites of places that make urn jewelry, “so you always have him with you.”

“I wanted you to have them before you had to leave again.”

I bought one of those necklaces already. For a woman who lost her husband of almost 50 years and still cries at the dinner table with my hand in hers. It feels surreal to look at them again for myself, for someone I had wanted a lifetime with and will never get.

“We were soul mates, you know. We never would have worked out. We tried. But we both knew we were made from the same stuff.” I confess, while I rock her baby in my arms. I word vomit about our miscarriage, about the long months of wondering if my babies would come out with his ears or your mouth, about sneaking into your bedroom all of those nights, and how there’s this new boy who is so easy to talk to-

“But you can’t let him in, cos you feel like he will take my brother’s place.”

“Exactly.”

And I feel guilty that I’m sitting on the floor, voice quivering and tears spilling over. Recounting my grief, and falling apart, when she lost a brother and I just lost a… you. But she hugs me before she goes; she is patient.

[rowenkb-blog]

For a brief second, I sigh a breath of relief to know there is a person in this universe who can know my body the way you did. Whose hands find each soft curve between my neck and my knees, and whose lips are hard against mine; sure.

But when the depressive spell slips in the front door, the clean cut man smell makes my stomach hurt. Quality body wash, and liquid detergent. His sweat leftover on my skin smells like soap; not green, not sunshine and blacktops, not you.

When the mood drops, when he has a bad day and doesn’t offer constant distraction, I feel heavy guilt in my chest. I miss you. Fuck. I’m always missing you. And for an hour on Memorial Day, I don’t, and I forget, and I let go, and I hate myself for it.

[rowenkb-blog]

(Working Title: Wildflowers)

On Thursday, I have to drive by the crash site and I let myself look. Someone recently said they left seeds on the shoulder to grow something beautiful out of something so painful. Your daughter’s mother made a metal sign with a photo of your daughter and her daddy.

I don’t cry. It hurts, but I think of the wildflower seeds pushed into May dirt and breathe.

A little after midnight on Friday, I’m standing in the center of a crowded bar when your favorite song comes on. My chest fills with weightless warmth and I dance my hardest, alone. My legs sore, sweat dripping down the nape of my neck, the moment: ethereal.

Every new person I meet this weekend carries little attributes that remind me of you. A smell, a crooked grin, the way you stand. One boy hugs me with arms that feel like you. I try not to get lost in it, and feel ok. Friends and I sit in fancy bathrooms with gin and talk about what grows from grief and loss: a cousin who sculpts everyday, a mother who is singing again, how I am writing more than ever.

[rowenkb-blog]

a poem in which she gets engaged

she gets engaged. she gets engaged while I still sit on the bathroom floor nightly sifting through the explosive aftermath of her making spring flowers grow along the shoulder of the road where your body lay in glass and blood seven, eight months ago.

our anniversary is coming up. nine god damn years of hungry hands and open mouths of mix cds of green summer trees and our bodies rolling in snowbanks and she gets engaged

she claims to have loved you harder, longer, more purely than every girl that came before her but moving on doesn’t hurt her someone else sleeping in her sheets doesnt make her ill they share a Facebook account she probably puts her hands on him leaves bruises and scratches, screams, alcohol on her breath, brain clouded with coke and doesn’t think this is how I killed the last one

if you’re looking for a number a time frame for how long it took to decide to spend the rest of the life she shouldn’t have, doesn’t deserve, with someone else as violent as her it took seven months and one day

I’m still here I’m still counting days still shredding my skin under ragged fingernails every time I hold myself as tightly as I can, so I don’t crumble I cry on airplanes in cars in my bed on old dirt roads we used to kiss on in bathrooms twenty-three hundred miles away from home anytime I’m alone I still feel the pain in the back of my throat just like the first day I scroll through nine years worth of messages whenever I can’t sleep I can never sleep

but she gets engaged like it hasn’t been not even a year since the police found her stunned and slurring her words and you and your daughter dead on arrival since she wrote these emotionless statuses trying to convince everyone that she’d always miss you

who am I to define the appropriate length of grieving the person you shared a bed and a cat with but when that person is dead at your jealous hands I feel like you could wait a little while longer I feel like you could at least pretend to miss them but she doesn’t instead she says yes to the first person too stupid to see the pattern of fights and car crashes

[rowenkb-blog]

I watch the back of her steel blue head as they wheel her away, so small in the stark white hospital bed, listen to her tell her team in scrubs ghost stories while lifting her left leg as if to let it float away. The floating leg is the sign the versed is working, calming her from our seperation. She didn’t need it. My anxious little tornado came bravely and willingly.

I eat lunch alone in the cafeteria and watch an off duty nurse watch me fidget and bounce and push my food around. I find a bathroom on the seventh floor and curl up in a corner chair, counting the dings of the elevator down the hall and the clack of social worker heels across linoleum. I spend ten minutes brushing my teeth, watch two Harry Potter movies and trade relieved sighs and congratulations with the other mom in the waiting room as each surgeon comes to update us.

I sit in more silence and wait. Wait. Wait for the PICU nurses to come find me. Chew ice and pick apart sour patch kids til my lap is covered in sugary dismembered gummies. A nurse in a striped sweater enters “Are you Zoe’s mom? She’s asking for you.” My breath hitches and my faces threatens a complete breakdown, remembering every other surgery -smaller than this- and the sounds of her crying from rooms away. I walk to fast and quiet, but there’s no crying. I slip into a cold room with tubes everywhere, hiss of oxygen, clicking IVs dripping medicine steadily, and the soft whisper of her snoring.