hey there! this blog hasn’t been active in almost 2 years, so I’m really surprised that it still has followers. originally i took time away from this space to focus on my novel. i have a near-complete draft, but i took a break from writing sometime in early 2020. i work in healthcare, and the pandemic left me feeling overwhelmed and burnt out. during my time away, i moved houses, took up crochet, baked a lot of bread, and played a lot of the sims and animal crossing. but i am, at long last, trying to find my way back to writing. my eventual goal is to rework my novel into something readable :) but for now, i will probably use this space to drop some fragments/prompt responses, as well as reblog others’ writing.
if you’ve stuck around so far, thank you for being here and i hope you are doing what you can to take care of yourself during this stressful time!
☆ I watched Ren swim from a healthy distance. Ren was the kind of boy any father would be thrilled to have as a son--except his own father, that is. He had a politician’s straight white smile and practiced hands. He was more disciplined than anyone else our age, from his hundred-lap swims every morning, to his protein shakes for lunch, to his nightly study sessions. He always knew what to say, a trait I wished would rub off on me. He was a legend at our school, known for far better reasons than I. I watched Ren’s arms cut a graceful arc through the water, watched his powerful flip-turn at the end of the lane. My muscles vibrated with kinetic energy. I was sure a part of me would remember how to do these things, if I could ever set foot in the water again.
Ren surfaced at the close end of the pool and shook the water from his curls. I showed him his time. “That state record is yours,” I said, handing him a towel.
He grinned, not his diplomatic smile, but his real one. I tried to smile back. But his brows knit together. “Everything good, Ez?” he asked.
He was too good at reading me. I backed away from the edge of the pool. “Yeah,” I said, trying to stay casual. “Everything’s good.”
☽ Riley: the phoenix, the sullen / Ezra: the drowning boy, the believer / Alex: the quick-tempered, the sharp-smiling / Ren: the champion, the velvet-eyed / The Monster: the unmaker
♡ Ren rises with the sun, goes for a run or a swim, and reviews his notes for class while he guzzles a protein shake like it’s his job. Alex plays his music at stun level and spends longer than he would like to admit picking out an outfit, he wears it like armor and school is the battlefield. Ezra’s likely been up since the night before, but he still wakes up on time, stretches, takes his pills with an ungodly amount of coffee, and surveys the street from his window like a king overseeing his lands. Riley rolls out of bed ten minutes before it’s time to go, picks out her clothes from a heap on the floor, and makes sure her sea glass necklace is fastened around her neck before heading out the door.
when is a breath a breath--when is it a cry for help?
i think i found the line. when she screams i bolt.
i leave the house in just my socks. it’s raining. i go to the creek
to watch it overflow. it swells like a wound with pus
and i think about all the frogs that used to live here, so many you could
scoop them up in buckets, wet, soft, docile.
the frogs are gone now. i don’t know where.
i think my breath is a cry and my cry is for help.
i left the door swinging open, summer drowning the air.
cool indifference spilling onto the front step.
when is my body a body and when is it a knife slicing through the frantic dusk?
somewhere in the house my mother sits on a ruined throne.
she is calling out. we cannot hear eachother.
forever isn’t just a word. i know that now. i want to remember you the same way the dawn cracks open the field, golden, fleshy, like a piece of fruit. all violets and clover blooming from the hollow places. all life tumbling in the grass. this is how i know that these times won’t last: it all feels too precious. sitting on the floor by your bed trying to comprehend that this is your hand and i’m holding it. i think about lifelines. i think about how one day you’ll let go of my hand for the last time. i’m a glass cabinet full of china plates. just trying to do whatever i can so that when you look back on now you won’t feel the aching parts. the sun without its blistering burn. our pasts will be stretched and sweet like taffy and we’ll call these the good old days. i’m trying to be the bandaid but god, i am still bleeding.
in this one, the boy stays.
a white light shrinks from an ocean to a river
and the river runs backwards
up the boy’s face. his flesh knits together
and he is as new as god’s breath upon the clay.
his veins fling themselves giddy against his wrists.
songs fly back into the mouths of mourning doves.
in this one, the wrongs are undone and rolled up onto a spindle,
and the boy swallows the spindle and opens his eyes.
he wakes up in a field just before a storm and learns to stand again.
i was 16 and broken bones. i haunted the corner by your locker
and prayed for a breath of your air. hostage to the patterns you cut
through the crowds like a disciple hostage to his living god. you showed me
the mark you left on the crook of your elbow and a switch flipped
in my puny brain and it was like, let me hurt until all the broken pieces feel right,
no longer shoved into place but cascading raw and glistening from the secret
painful places, let me lose all parts of me that were ever sanguine,
let the outside match the inside, finally, at last.
you moved on. i kept opening and opening.
wow your writing is beautiful. I’m so intrigued by your novel. Will you let us know here when you’re going to publish it and where?? 💖
wow, so tumblr is garbage and never showed me a notification for this message so i had no idea until now that i’d received it. but thank you so much! my novel is still a first draft, so i likely have a long way to go before publishing it, but i certainly will let you guys know here and on my main blog, @mobbekun, when i have more news to report. thank you so much for your kind message! i apologize for answering so late. hope you’re having a great day!
today our grandma drops the spoons, one by one, and they sing like bones on tile. her body goes next, a puppet with cut strings, a slow-motion folding of limbs, and my aunt runs to catch her, a daughter holding her mother, and i slide off the chair and onto the carpet, my spine wintering against the window where we fed the hummingbirds in may. our cereal bowls, milky, untouched. i have just outgrown being a heavy stone in my parents’ arms, my legs a field of scabs, my mouth a ghost town of baby teeth. if i bite down hard enough i can catch my grandma’s soul, keep her here with me. i don’t want to tell how this story ends. i am old enough to know narnia isn’t real probably, but i am young enough to pause each time i pass the gap in the backyard fence, holding my breath.
i told everyone who would listen
that i’ve seen you surface triumphant
from the pool water thousands, thousands of times.
best friend, ‘fly-swimmer, i’ve seen you shake
the water from your hair like it was nothing.
i always swore i was one of god’s outcasts
and would never be caught dead in a church,
but that night i knelt in the hospital chapel,
a penance of hardwood pews, and begged
for whatever entity to reach down and push
your soul back into your body where it belonged.
and i swear i’ll go to my grave with this guilt
that i left you there, outside the house,
smoke curling around your ears
and a smile that means i’m not all right
that i got to you too late, and you were sleeping in the quarry
with the cold water licking the base of your skull
and i pulled your dead weight out of the water
and cracked your ribs to keep you alive
and later they’d say that i saved your life
but it doesn’t feel like i saved anything
when you were made for medals around your neck,
born to hoist a trophy. i told you once,
“i don’t ever want to hurt anyone”
but i step on unknown bugs
every day of my life. i inflict damage
without meaning to.
sorry doesn’t even begin to cover it.
it is 12:48 where i am and i am reading your writing and it's so good i am crying and it's the first thing i've felt all day oh my god
thank you so much for this. i know i hardly ever post here–i work long hours at a stressful job and i’m working on my novel in what little spare time i have–but the fact that people still read and enjoy my work here, the fact that it makes someone feel something, is all the encouragement i need to keep going. i hope the world is soft and kind to you today and every day. <3
ok so here’s how it went. the bus driver tells us we have fifteen minutes. we shuffle out. all of us here. side of the road in the middle of nowhere. but i imagine houses in the distance. even the middle of nowhere is somebody’s neighborhood. the gas station is off white, defiant in the weeds. a moat of rainbow colored oil slicks this castle a shiny defense. the thin red line at the horizon makes it shine and shine.
i could have run, you know. with my backpack and my sneakers. i was born with a hitchhiker's thumb. i could have used it. but i didn’t. that should count for something.
what i do instead is i go inside the station. it’s somehow darker than outside. dull fluorescent beams. i’m feeling like the dead bugs caught in the fixture. i take a piss with my butt hovering over the seat. when i look in the grimy mirror it’s like looking at another person. my DNA is not my own. at the group home i forgot who i was. i suppose that was the point, right?
i use your emergency money to buy candy, the kind you never allowed me to eat. the girl at the counter has red hair. her eyes say fight but the set of her mouth says flight and it’s like i know her. the tension in her limbs. her instincts battling each other. her body a war zone in a red polo shirt. and i want to take her hands in mine. i want to tell her to take a smoke break, then i’d show her your emergency money and we’d run away together, make for the freeway, an ocean of stars to light our way. you would say i was being dramatic. but i want to save her, or be saved by her. maybe they’re the same thing. maybe unwanted girls recognize each other, like there’s something in our souls that’s the same. something slight. something yearning.
what i do instead is i ask her about the mountains. she says they show up all at once, like one minute the horizon’s flat, then, boom. i don’t believe her. then i tell her my name. i don’t know why. maybe i just want somebody to know it.
back on the bus, the sunrise bleeds through like a stain in the laundry. and then we come over the crest of a hill and i see them. the mountains. they split open the sky’s soft belly without mercy, and black birds of prey pour from the wound. i am hurtling towards something that a few minutes ago, i couldn’t even guess the shape of. but now it’s real.
there are lilies at your funeral, blanched and limp. may came hot this year and rainy, but the day they lay you to rest the sun is out. the grass is greener than anything. i am sweating underneath ty’s jacket and stiff white shirt. i picked it out of his closet last night while he lay on the rug, and we both avoided thinking about our stoned bodies lying right here, all four of us, just last week. golda and ty and you and me. i resist the urge to get down on the floor and dig through the carpet fibers trying to find your leftovers: an eyelash, a whiff of your stale scent.
now i am suffocating in the smell of ty’s room, it is all over me and i am inside of it, and i feel like a kid playing dress up in this too-big suit, an imposter in this crowd who have money to have things tailor-made for special occasions like weddings or the death of an eighteen-year-old boy. across from me are your parents with two feet of space between them, grieving their separate griefs. i have never seen your father in person, only in pictures in your house where he breathes out of those frames like a forgotten god, but i heard you sob about him enough times, saw you bring the bottle to your lips in his name enough times to feel like i know him well. he is just one of the demons you summoned to your marrow, night after night. and your mother, she just looks small and sad. i used to think adults were so big and wise, but now i am one month away from turning eighteen and becoming one of them, and the closer i get the smaller they seem, the more i realize that they carry all the same petty hurts that we do, maybe more so, since they don’t ever seem to talk about it, just shove it down until it festers and becomes something unrecognizable.
and you know, it makes me want to be honest, it really does, because how many times did i sit there, so close to you, and not say what i was feeling? and you sat there, staring at me, and did not say what you were feeling, and we were two bodies wanting to be one body together but neither of us could move, and so we breathed the same air and that felt like eternity. and in my head there was always one more day, another chance to get it right. we were always so tired, but there was a kind of immortality in our worn down bones; we were sixteen and then seventeen and then cusp of eighteen together, and then you went over the edge and you left. you left. and there was no more time.
let me go back, back to when you were still breathing, so i can shake you by the shoulders. so i can smash all the alcohol bottles, i don’t even care if you punch me, if you hate me. it won’t last forever. nothing does. better yet, let me take your still-breathing body and drive it to the hospital, say the scariest and most honest thing, which is matty, you need help, followed by the second scariest thing, which is matty, i love you. that’s what i should have said. exorcise the demons. put the lilies back in the ground, let their roots grow tangled and wild. instead, i settle for the next most honest thing i can think of, which is matty, i miss you. i say it to your sleeping form, and i say it out loud.
on some other plane, you are alive, and i am alive, and our souls meet, untethered. and there, the days truly are endless. i have to believe that.
and just as i am imagining us as two lilies growing side by side in the sunbaked earth, golda squeezes my hand and brings me back to this lifetime. “he really loved you, you know that?” she says, and her eyes are red but her voice is strong. “i mean it, jude. he really loved you.”
matty’s nose is bleeding, thinly, on a month’s worth of grocery money rolled up into a cylinder. he inhales fine white powder off the mirror: i call this an unwintering. matty takes the snow inside of him and becomes a blizzard. it is thursday night. maybe ty and golda will join in, but i have to keep my head clear. early morning i will clock in at the pet store where i will sell dog food and asthmatic hamsters to the locals and they will wrinkle their long pale noses at that fecund animal smell and leave before it gets on them too much. but for now, it is thursday night and matty commands the room the way only someone who has never worked a day in their life can: the world is his always. we are all just trying to keep up.
he is eight shots deep in something that smells like rubbing alcohol and out front his car is shiny like a bullet. and when we take his keys away (come on matty, you can’t drive tonight) we feel like we have stopped death. so we walk instead, matty with that obliterated smile and no coat in the middle of february. it dawns on him that tomorrow is valentine’s day. he tries to kiss golda, she shoves him away. he tries to kiss me, i let him and he apologizes after. his lips are chapped sweet and i blink and shake my head and say it’s okay matty, i know you didn’t mean it. but i wish he meant it. i wish he meant it.
i will never know why matty picked me to be friends with. ty and golda make sense, ty lives on the same block of mansions, looming high and identical, and golda drives a porsche and has a mouth like diamonds, she is sharper, more lovely than any of us boys will ever be. but me. my hands are callused from carrying bags of dog food and sometimes the birds shit on my work shirt but ty says that when matty sees me his eyes get soft and all the sharp edges disappear, and he laughs as easy as breathing. i tried to tell myself that this feeling of want is a longing to have hands as trust fund smooth as matty’s or as much food in the fridge as he has. but last week i sat with matty on the one of the velvety couches his mother had just ordered and told him bad jokes to stop him from shaking, and he smiled at me through tears and it felt like the first goddamn honest thing that i’ve ever seen. and that’s when i knew. it’s more than just a poor kid wanting what a rich kid’s got. i am both relieved and terrified and wondering which emotion is going to win in the end.
in an all white bathroom as big as the heart of a whale, matty throws up mostly alcohol and his shoulder blades shiver against my fingers. this is all i can touch. just here, this trembling articulation of bird-brittle bones. this spine like train tracks, down and down. i’m holding onto control only barely, only by my fingertips. wondering how someone who has been given everything can still want so much, can destroy so many pieces of himself just to feel whole.
matty’s nose is bleeding again. when our mouths meet it tastes like metal.
(in response to @nepenthenet’s prompt “17 year old multimillionaire”)
boy with red mouth handles me by just his fingertips
as if i am fire and he’s testing how much of me he can hold
until he catches the smell of his own burning flesh
we made a list of everything that scares you,
so when the fear rises up hot in your gut
you don’t have to say anything, you can just
find the list and point.
our days are about navigation, about
steering you through a hostile world,
a paper sailboat through a churning creek.
there is a panic button on the inside of my elbow–
a fact i did not know about my anatomy
until you started pressing it when things got bad,
now i always wear short sleeves when i’m with you
so your fingers can easily find my skin.
and i'm just trying to figure out how to tell you that you're all right--
that darling, everything you are is all right--
for the times when my love cannot breathe // v.d.g. (unfinished draft, 2015)
1) we have memorized the way the light bleeds our bodies to ghosts on sunday afternoons. the softest kind of foreshadowing. 2) this whole town worships hollow saints. our names look best written on yellow memorial ribbon. 3) the detective says, maybe some girls who disappear don't want to be found. 4) we learn quickly how it feels to be baptized in our mothers' tears. 5) we have never known how to be good.
