#queue(dreaming)

[pressedandroses]

[Image text:

writing a letter to– i can’t tell my palm leaves a mark on the page the bottle starts to boil over spilling my words over the desk seeping shifty heartaches heady side-eyes, soaking my paper planes in shooting star tears it’s spreading my desk is a mess, my plant and pens my yarn has turned dark blue my medicine melts into the words legs wet with thick ink thick ink thick ink it’s cotton in my mouth thick ink thick ink think ick it’s pooling under the desk wiping it in with my tissues, my blankets, my papers, homework, receipts, apologies wet wet wet and sticky with my thoughts how do i clean myself of this how do i clean the ink out of this puddle pressure spilt spectacle my arms are stained and my clothes even with them all off naked with blue marks of your thumbprints and feather-touch melodies and my breathing stops

“look at the mess you’ve made,” she kneels to me, a hand on my cheek it’s so warm and my eyes are a puddle of its own mess. she smiles, my own presses her palm to my face and it’s warm and it’s dry and all the ink warms and dries. “let’s get you cleaned up,” she says. and i quietly let my breath slip the ink bottle drips and it’s empty and my sheets are clean and my hands are inked and my desk is a mess, but not uncomfortably so and she’s with me to clean the mess, wet rags soapy suds, smelt of fake roses a miserly tap-water stench but still she wipes her forehead and the floor is as good as new and the papers and letters are a bit messy but just like they always were and not a single bit more and she sits with me, holds my hand with me breathes with me, a middling silence a rocking boat of the quiet lake

“i’m here,” she says and i’m here, she says the water is calm and the bottle is empty once more. the ocean breaks in her eyes, but the waves are subdued. i’ve since stopped writing to you. the ink is too runny.

— v.a.

/End ID]

[pressedandroses]

wrapped in tangles the strings pull tight, they glisten, teasing their sheen for a puppet, i worry myself to be and you perform, a crowd of hundreds a future in vibrant monochrome. but who knew the finishing blow would be "and i love you so"?

— v.a.

[pressedandroses]

you’re on the floor with me again. it’s covered in my hair and dirt and tiny scraps from many carton-box meals. the tiling is uneven and unsteady, gaps in the flooring staring up as dark grey and dusty settlements.

and it’s not particularly nice to be here. it’s too hot, with the sun so high in the sky that it’s almost like she’s staring down at us from a moral high ground we could never hope to reach, but it’s too cold, with the air conditioning so cold that my legs freeze up and your ankles feel like they’re on the verge of a cramp.

the room smells of nothing in particular, if i were to guess, but maybe i’m just used to the scent of my self-loathing soaking into the sheets and my desk and my mousepad and my pillows. and maybe you’re used to it too, since i’ve brought the fragrance of my purest self-erasure and right to self-desecration out to every outing i’ve ever been to (including that of my own).

you could probably recognize myself, not as myself, as long as you could taste my flagellation and the resultant bloodstains as a mist in the briny air. like a shark, it would be easy for anyone to taste the drops of blood i’ve made by cutting into my heart and soul even in the ocean of love that people have tried to drown me in.

but, you see, i don’t breathe underwater. my lungs don’t fill with saltwater and deltas and beds of cracked condiment layer cakes when i inhale. the alveoli don’t contract and fill up with the compliments and deliver the oxytocin to every inch of my body, as it needs it.

instead, i choke. i choke and choke on the kind words. i can’t drink them or swallow or hope to fill my gullet with the goodness i so desperately need. it flows right down into my breathing and i struggle to keep in time with the waves. and people take pictures, you see? they hope that swimming will let me know that i can breathe.

but i don’t breathe underwater.

[pressedandroses]

place me in your pocket. let me settle with your keys, your tiny pocket lints, your on-silent phone, and the spare change you have after buying ice cream for your little sister, your mom's medicine, and your dad's box of cigarettes.

— v.a.

[pressedandroses]

god, what roses must bloom so brightly to bear bastions of billowing bees and to baste bashful brushstrokes across the bursting belly of the abrasive but borrowed sea?

you must be watercolour for the pigments you portray present perils past permission lent by sorrowful patters.

you corrode catatonic a mournful merry wisp like a ghost in the night who can promise nothing but careless cavities to hold empty words and moments to-be-forgotten.

yet i am left to live in the mouth of a cave so closed and casket to be locked by the dreary forged day.

clear your cupboards for my half-teaspoon resolve. and let me kneel at the mercy of your mellow dice.

it will crush me and corner the cradle we constructed as crescent-caked callousness clean the canvas off which i came to

crave your care.

— v.a., blooming

[pressedandroses]

[Image text:

this is it, right? a grass pillow for my petal-laced dearest a tire swing held steady by a broken jump rope daisies waving to the sky, a waltz in the sunlight, reaching out to the endless blue motes of dust and barely-pollen inciting a small sneeze but nothing more mossy rocks like rivets into boilerplate earth my dewdrop placements seem real enough the leaves cast shadows from a sun on the wrong side but it’s a watercolour and the paint is too runny for me to fix the shade there. you always told me that watercolours were hard to work with. i think i see what you mean, although i’ve stopped picking up the brush there’s a dance you have to play with it but i never learned with my two left feet (you were always better at holding a beat steady) a slow-weeping hill, there bleeding a love-leeched memory i’ve cried on this hill before, i think. but it didn’t look that beautiful through my tears.

-- v.a.

/End ID]

[pressedandroses]

is this a tide pool love or am i drawn to an ocean-bound home my heart is your birthright please don't waste me, my darling

— v.a.

[pressedandroses]

it's an ocean of wanting. your throat dries on this raft. but you can't drink a sea of promises when it's lathered in the salt of your sins.

— v.a.