secret blog (shhh) @younganddoomedd - Tumblr Blog

good fucking riddance

The smoke from the ontario wildfires is blowing into the city. One of these days I'm gonna take a hammer and smash my phone into 1,000 pieces.

I wanna throw a cement block through the windshield of a waymo, look a flock camera in the gaping maw of its lens and scream until my blood vessels explode. I curl my body against the cold rungs of the third floor fire escape and stare at the space where the stars should be. That itchy feeling again. Once, I described the urge to relapse as 'excruciating boredom.' Restlessness that tears you inside out. I'm staring out of the window at the street below, it's 2 PM and I finally mustered up the strength to get out of bed. The air quality is suffocating and I can hardly breathe. So, I smoke a cigarette. Mostly because I have decided the world is ending. On the corner of my street there is a laser hair removal advertisement proclaiming services for as little as one hundred dollars. Pressed against the basement window is a television screen, playing the same video, over and over again. On loop. A smiling woman against a stark white backdrop. With flawless skin and a brunette bob, she struts towards the camera and raises her arms to expose two perfectly airbrushed armpits before flipping her hair with careless delight and dancing away into nothingness. The focus blurs. The recording begins again. She is a constant in my otherwise solitary existence. The smiling woman greets me as I return from work under orange skies, I don't look directly at her. I am unnerved by the vacancy in her eyes. The superficiality of her expression. I avoid her gaze as I stumble down the street laden with bags of groceries, struggling to push forward up the concrete stairs. Wrists rubbed raw from the plastic handles, sweat stains creeping down the sides of my shirt. I have long-since decided that beauty is viscerality. Scabbed lips and yellow teeth. Pupils moments away from collapse. The sun expanding into oblivion. Halfway between divination and a nervous breakdown. We get drunk on the fourth of July, thousands of people stand fixed in awe, cheering for the multicolored explosions overhead … even this far away I can smell the gunpowder, and even this far away, even this many oceans away I can see a crowd of faces much like this one, looking up at their own sky in abject terror. When I snap out of my body and yell like a lunatic that I hate this country several passerbys laugh and record me. Why don't you leave it then?

I finally throw out an umbrella that is littered with pepper ball holes. My coworker tells me she is ordering her autumn wardrobe off of SHEIN. Sometimes I wonder if I'm going insane. Sometimes I wonder if we're ALL going insane. I don't have the money to make rent this week. On my lunch break, I walk to the Dunkin two streets over and pay five dollars for an ice coffee. Every morning for the past week I have woken up from a dead sleep and coughed a hunk of bloody phlegm into a napkin. Or an old sock. Or an unlucky fast food receipt. I am making box mac & cheese for dinner tonight because all I know how to prepare are ready-made meals. The gas stove shutters on and a weak but persistent flame licks at the base of the pot. A nagging feeling but you can't quite place it. You come home late, I lay in bed waiting. I get high and watch old detective movies. I get higher. I masturbate. I finish. I cry. Last night I pressed myself against your back while you watched TikTok videos. I wait still, for you to notice. I kiss the rungs of your spine down to the small of your waist. You fall asleep with the videos still playing, phone slipping from your limp hand until it comes to rest against your face. Carefree and peaceful. You look so cherubic when you sleep. What were you watching as you drifted off? I squeeze myself under your arm and place my head against your chest. Your hand falls limp across my shoulder, grazing my skin on its way down. Good enough. Goodnight.

When I dream, I dream that I am a young mother. Soft hair, swaying hips, an easy laugh that rises like hope for the growing life inside of me. I hesitate before opening my eyes and wonder, for a liminal moment, if I'd met her somewhere before; and if I had not, then why I was left with such an unmistakable pang of loss as I lay beside your still-sleeping form. When your father visits town you hide my things in the closet. Under the bed. Anywhere they'll fit. We laugh about shoving him in front of the B train and something tells me you're not joking. I kiss you like my life depends on it. Mostly because I've come to understand that the world is ending.

Masked men with guns pin a woman to the ground and a placid prerecorded female voice cautions the crowd against obstructing justice. An eery loop over the loudspeakers, 'Warning, the police will be making targeted arrests. Do not interfere. Warning. Do not interfere.'

Staggering home drunk I watch the smiling woman toss her hair in mock joy and realize that I have heard her speak.

In that weird sleep deprived fugue state where I'm unable to discern if I've dozed off or been laying here for hours but whatever the case I can't fall asleep and I'm getting the weird psychedelic visuals you get in these moments but more intense than normal and I'm remembering that my absolute #1 fear is just spontaneously snapping the tether and losing my mind with no warning, like a stroke, and that makes me want to be with you more. I keep thinking about the comet over salinas and how easily it could have been a missile, or how it could have struck us with no warning and all we would've had the power to do was gawk at the sky and accept our fate. I think about how I probably have near death experiences every single day that I am entirely ignorant to. And maybe one night I wake up at 3 in the morning with my vision erupting in kaleidoscopic shapes and I fall inside of myself forever, and I never get to go to Boston, and I never get to hold you again. I think part of why I feel such an urgent call to see you is because I always feel that I'm on the brink of death and part of why I dread insanity is rooted in the belief that I've always had, that all I am is my conscious mind; and when my mind goes - be it through physical death or through cognitive decline - my body ought to disappear along with it. I have witnessed the consequences of what happens when the body is allowed to remain while the brain devours itself. Texting this to you is helping me ground myself, I think of how sleep deprived we were on our trip, how every day I woke up after a tragically brief and terrible night's sleep. How I would rest my head on your shoulder the instant we boarded the bus, slumped against you, drifting off as the sun rose over the rolling countryside. If only you were in my bed now, I would wake you and try to explain these thoughts as I had them but I am nary as eloquent when I speak. You make me feel safe in a way that no one else does. Right now I am comforting myself, by telling myself that if I stave off/fail to go to sleep for a few more hours then I can call you, and the sound of your voice will finally allow me to rest. Maybe this is what death is. Maybe every night we are rehearsing for the last time we shut our eyes. When we are overcome by the irrational sensation that we are falling and jolt ourselves awake, I have been told, our body thinks itself to be dying and tries to thrash itself back into existence. Like an overturned junebug twitching on the concrete. And subconsciously I am doing this, incessantly tapping at characters until they become words assembling themselves into sentences until I talk myself back into reality, until I convince us both that I am here. I have nothing of importance to say and I never have. Outside there is a lightning storm. Two nights ago, I dreamt of lightning. It's strange how dreams blend into memories blend back into dreams, how occasionally you will experience something mundane that will prompt a vague feeling of deja vu. Perhaps linearity is an illusion and we are undergoing our lives all at once. A friend read my palm once and told me I had a strong lifeline with an abrupt end, it did not taper off, indicating that I did not go easily. I did not find this notion disquieting and thought it made complete sense. I feel sleep trying to take me and I am struggling against it.

That night we took too many stimulants and stayed up solving the mysteries of the universe I saw the sunrise and thought, if I could, I would never shut my eyes and drift away again. And when I finally do I will imagine the sunset over the boundary waters. The borderless rabbits and birds, flying lazily over the frozen bay. I see you, as if in a home video, walking off into the distance and remember how desperately I wanted to follow. How geographical separation is not practically that different from death itself. Just as I cannot reach out and hold my lost relatives I cannot reach out and hold you, and so this sleepless bit of rambling might as well be a futile prayer sent wayward into thin air like a message in a bottle tossed to an inbound tide, a letter washed back up onto the shore from whence it came ... lodged in the sand, never to bridge the chasm. Vancouver might as well have been the afterlife. It certainly looked like heaven, while I sat on the ruins of some half-demolished concrete structure watching the sky explode in orange and pink, colors that grew gradually duller until the only light visible emanated from the skyline across the bay. I knew you were somewhere within it but could only hope you'd return to me. I wondered which twinkling light was yours just as I sometimes scour the stars. It's thundering now. The sky has opened up and the rain is pounding at my window - we don't get storms like this in Oregon. One of the glow in the dark stars on my ceiling no longer glows. For whatever reason, it is invisible unless I shine my phone's light towards it, in which case I can barely make out the outline of a plastic five point star in the sea of luminescence. I hope you catch your train, I wish I were there with you, slumped against your shoulder as the countryside rolled by. Drifting somewhere unknowable until you pull me back outside of myself to let me know I am here.

Thinking about how my friend and I rented a UHaul to move our shit into a storage unit at the end of freshmen year and drove around a graveyard blasting midwest emo bc we figured that the ghosts of the teens who occupied it were probably deprived of the mountain goats and appreciated the vibe.

#something poetic about this

is it unethical that I ai erased the scars on my shoulder to post a half-naked thirst trap disguised as an arthouse self portrait series?

I'm thirsty, but my water is across the room. I have to piss, but getting out of bed requires more effort than I care to exert. I have a laundry list of menial tasks to accomplish pinned in my notes app, it goes as follows: apply to jobs in boston; top surgery(?); do porn; mail drugs. Every night I stand in the bathroom mirror in my underwear and pick the scabs off face until it's inflamed and bleeding. I refuse to wear a retainer, I refuse to go on acne medication. The way I figure, my body is gonna do what my body is gonna do - this is flawed logic but these things are superficial, I dumped the pills into my cupped hands and counted them out, 65 ... I told you I always take the path of least resistance. You booked a train to Boston on a whim, I envy the hell out of that. I'll continue pretending to understand how insurance and credit work, I'll quell the itch to run by pretending I have it in me. Now, one of us is brave and one of us is stupid. Maybe you're neither. Maybe I'm both. Today I ate a family sized box of mac & cheese and half a salad. I never shut kitchen cabinets all the way, force of habit, instinctually I vanish into thin air. I rollerbladed through Walmart. Everyone here is already looking at me like a leper who breached containment. Fuck it. I know what the reasonable choice is and I know what'll make for a good story. Do I have an STI? My mom says I ought to see my pediatrician. I don't want a woman who's known me since I was a toddler shining a flashlight between my legs. I keep forgetting about my birthday. Not forgetting, exactly, I'm peripherally aware of how soon it is, I just cannot force myself to care. I went on a walk yesterday around 9 PM to hunt for abandoned half-smoked cigarettes but admitted defeat when it began to torrentially rain. Damn Oklahoma weather. Electric tendrils winding their way across the sky like the face of God. I've lost 15 lbs in the last nine months. My face looks gaunt and my body is marred. We rewatched I saw the TV glow recently and you didn't understand it. I guess you don't need to. Well, I'm trapped in the midnight realm. That's a decent basis for comparison. The roots of my hair are visible again ... and this time next year it'll be down to my shoulders for the first time since middle school. Nothing much to be said. I will regret staying until I leave.

Shitty end to an already shitty day. This is the first of what I imagine will be a torrent of unsent letters … that is not a real promise so much as a personal resolution. Although you will not admit it I can’t help but entertain the fear that this behavior wears on you. Regardless. This may be, as it often is, absolutely incoherent. But I feel I ought to write something to cap the semester off. Maintain the tradition I have begun, mediocre airplane prose of which you are the sole target audience. So for all the good my rambling has accomplished, once again, I am hurling myself at the speed of sound towards a period of sluggish liminality - a vacuous three month holiday where I return to an unwilling quasi-childhood. I dreaded this for some time. But realistically speaking, it is significantly better or worse than the life I’ve been living since January? Why does the monotonous stability of my parent’s household turn my stomach even as I fantasize about running away with you to a strange city? To San Lucas? It’s not very complicated. At least, when I am half a country away, I am able to handle whatever trouble life throws my way as the person I authentically am. I am loved unconditionally, I am not a failed 20 year investment … So, yes, It’s devastating to be so far apart. I realize that’s an overwrought cliche, but we’re both full of those. I’ll say it anyway. I can’t help but feel as though I lost a limb. Last night we did the whole routine for the thousandth time. Wordlessly, now. Smoking on the bench. Showering. Flipping the light switch off and holding each other in bed … but this time something is impending. A goodbye. Some goodbyes are ceremonious. Most are not. When I parted ways with X we exchanged a simple ‘see you later!’ When I left you at the bus stop this morning after we splurged on pastries from a local cafe, I kissed you, lingering over the soft skin of your lips. Thinking, how in god’s name am I going to survive alone?? We, who have seen too much together. The package deal. You, with whom I fired my first handgun, travelled across California, pissed on fancy street-corners and screamed profanities at law enforcement … And, I know you see this too, like sunspots in the granular black of your closed retinas … her face, obscured by a matte sheet of faded box-dye pink hair, as she hunched motionless over the edge of the twin bed. How you coaxed her back into the land of the living with trembling hands and gentle words. And again, when she called me, voice breaking. So we pounded on our friend’s door and flew down the highway in somber silence. Like that night in the toolshed. Stay in the house, I’ll go looking. Stay inside. How she returned, emerging from the woods, jovially insisting that she had found a boat down the trail … you caught on before I did.

We never spoke about it but I picked up the notebook paper that’d slipped out of her book bag, “I had a boat one time. Then I lost it by swimming. Swam so far the lost means of finding my way back to land. Soon enough I found my way to the desert. In losing control I found freedom. I stopped dreaming. Speaking. Writing. I only had a brain for survival, mouth for eating and hands for turning…” I haven’t shown you yet. Maybe I won’t. Some things should stay private. All day I’ve been replaying the same video, taken months ago during a drunken jam-session. Two of my friends singing ‘Colorado Girl’ by Townes Van Zandt while another friend steadily thrums the rhythm onto a washboard. “I’ll be there tomorrow, mama don’t you cry…I’ve got to see that loving Colorado girl of mine…” It’s more melancholic than the original recording, more precious … a bittersweet memory suspended in electronic perpetuity. When I boarded the bus I sat opposite to the window you stood near. I watched you walk down the street towards the train station. As the bus pulled forward, you began to wave in my direction. You had no way of ensuring I would see. Maybe it wasn’t for me at all. But, maybe you know me, and you knew I’d steal every last remaining glance I could before your smiling face disappeared behind a wall of traffic … until the bus rounded the corner and we both understood that it was over. We would have to face the big cruel world all on our own. I dug up the video again and pretended I was back there with you. On a homestead in rural Portland, sneaking shots behind a pickup truck and picking out the same tired songs on guitar with inebriated vigor. And when I returned to a vacant campus to see my own barren, stripped down mattress and blank white walls, I remembered the way my body had fit into yours mere hours earlier. I tried to suspend my disbelief. You were in your room, it looked the same as it always did. Soon you would come over. We would have another night. Another day. Another adventure. I sent you a message ‘I miss you.’ A text bubble on my phone screen: I miss you too, love.’ The knife twisted in my gut and I fought back tears again. Christ…is this what it’s going to be like? I memorized the feel of your face against mine, the crease of your dimples, the crinkling of your eyes. The warmth of your head in my lap. The sweet inflection of your voice. I know it’s naïve to suggest that we would find each other in any lifetime but I’m still 19 … I’d like to think I’m still allowed some naivety. I’ll admit it freely - I crave the warmth of your chest pressed into my back, the fervor of your mouth crushed against mine. I hate this goddamn airplane. I hate that with every passing second I am getting further and further away from the life we built together, from the people we made each other, and closer to a life I dread returning to. Whenever I am able I will go to Boston. We can pretend our whole summer was spent in faux domestic bliss. I can forget the mounting anxiety that I am my mother’s son, that I am going nowhere faster than anyone was prepared for. In a week’s time the marks you left on my neck (a welcome parting gift) will fade entirely. You will be a voice in my phone. A series of mannerisms I subconsciously picked up in our hundreds of hours together. A smile in camcorder videos I watch, and rewatch again. ‘Well I’m going out to Denver to see if I can’t find…’ I’m descending into Oklahoma City. I hope you’re well. I hope you know I love you. I hope you know that I will summon a vision of you when I am lonely and imagine whispered conversations in the oppressive emptiness of my bed. I’ll be there tomorrow. Mama, don’t you cry.

forward to an academic essay I do not want to start

IDK come back to this once, I’m uninspired. They should invent vapes that are good for you. Maybe like, a vitamin D vape. Or vitamin B. I’ve been told by semi credible sources that it’s pretty hard to develop scurvy if you ingest any amount of citrus but tbh I remain unconvinced. Surely the human body requires more than one glass of orange juice a week. Speaking of scurvy, I would love to be a pirate. Actually I’d probably hate it, I just crave release from the confines of capitalism. I wish google docs had a dark mode, the white page hurts my eyes. Kevin Atwater just dropped a new album…to bad I’m in a healthy relationship. In a week I have to go work with kids for several hours a day, five days a week. I’m good at my job I’m just nervous about … remarks. Between the obvious transfaggyness and the visible scars on my arms I’m anticipating many unfiltered comments (from children and MAGA parents alike). Fuck you google docs don’t tell me how to spell I’ll spell words however I damn well please. This is a critical part of the creative process. Warm up time. Saying whatever is at the forefront of my mind. Do I reek of cigarettes? I can’t smell it if I do. My mom might. I ought to start packing later. What the hell do you mean I move to Oklahoma in a week??? Reassuring myself that it’s not moving, exactly, just an extended visit. Interim between seasons of a show. I gotta stop romanticizing my life…there’s probably a June Henry line about that. Apologies for the brain dump…it just makes the actual essay less intimidating if there’s a solid paragraph (albeit, of nonsense) on the page. Should I have taken an adderall? Probably not a great idea. It’s only really been unhelpful thus far. Shit — I have to finish my take home exam before Colin notices. Fuck florescent lights. And fuck the PPB. Last night when they started arresting someone on the sidewalk I was so overcome with rage it was like my consciousness wrenched itself away from my body and I couldn’t control my actions. Generally I avoid leaning into that kind of anger because blind rage is unproductive but last night I indulged the impulse. I shoved my way to the front and started screaming in the pigs faces and I would be lying if I said that wasn’t immensely cathartic. Maybe I wanted to get sprayed by pepper balls, maybe I wanted proof that I wasn’t losing my mind. My friend said something once about how living in this country is like any other abusive relationship. Sometimes marks are gratifying because when your leg is covered in welts from the riot police it’s confirmation that you’re not going insane. I haven’t written a song in a month. It’s usually a compulsion I satiate with an afternoon hunched over a guitar. For some time, I drank myself to sleep instead. I’m done with that for now. Getting clean for the summer. I really gotta start this essay before I force myself between a rock and a hard place. I just need to uncover the niche in the subject that allows me to write with the same candid sardonicism. That’s why anthro essays are dead easy. I miss traveling with Colby. I wish we could get back on the road together but lately all we’ve done is lay in my bed at the end of a day apart. Neither of us want that although we’re both drawn to domesticity. Can’t have it both ways. I want to punch a cop. I want this essay to be over with already. I would never dream of using AI. I think I want to go back to Oklahoma…for a little bit. Is that stockholm? I know that’s not real. My earbuds are dying and I lost the case a month ago when I was drunk. Fuck. Shit. Argh.

objects in motion

It's Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026. The semester winds to a close. In two weeks, I will have finals. I will say my goodbyes. I will pack the contents of my room into cardboard boxes, and one by one haul those boxes onto the bus before dumping them unceremoniously into a storage facility a few blocks away. Maybe moving wouldn't be so difficult if I were accustomed to it. Consolidating everything I own into a handful of FedEx boxes does not come naturally to me but it's a practice I'll perfect. This is what your 20s are for, I've been told. Learning to rent a room.

I have written before, about place and memory, when place is no longer a physical space for your body to occupy but merely a specter of recollection. Does it sound like I'm talking out of my ass? I'm not writing for anyone else. I swear, I won't let you see this. Yes, you, with your vampire teeth and pretty eyes. How could I be honest? How could I admit that I woke up this morning and instinctively reached for you? Who knows, maybe I'll drunkenly confess that it was disappointing when I rolled over to face your gently sleeping form in the early morning light and found only unoccupied pillows.

Who am I kidding. All I ever am is honest. You said I inspired you to write and tried to show me, but I refused to read it. Sometimes the knowledge of observation taints the purity of the thought. Some things are best left between you - an anonymous Tumblr blog - and the indifferent world wide web. It's nothing personal.

But it's cold out for April, I walked into the bathroom to splash some water on my face and got a whiff of that 7 AM chilled-overnight petrichor scent. Very Halloween. So I thought about October, how the months stretched out before me like a dark and insurmountable tower. And now, with all my money spent, eaten, smoked, drank, given, tossed into fountains and flushed down the toilet. With all my whims indulged, I prepare to wander South like kind of goddamn homing pigeon. Force of habit. Second nature. Except, that tugging in my gut is no longer calling me back to Oklahoma.

I will tell you that a compass, when placed next to a strong magnet, will impede the device's ability to locate True North. Which I say, not because you are that magnet, not because you have blind-sighted me or screwed up my intuition...but because you have allowed me to finally break out of my magnetic stupor. Cut-loose and aimless, or, whatever I said the first time. This summer I will take the train down to Texas and I will board the cheapest flight to Boston. You make Montreal sound like Atlantis. You'll take me there. (Once you told me you wanted to take me to every beautiful place you'd ever been). I don't speak a word of French but I'm learning Spanish. I want to sing the songs you love together, stoned out of our minds on a Tuesday night. Dile ya a tus papás que no vas a regresar, te vas con un loco que no te para de amar.

But you are not why I picked up my laptop to write for the first time in months. God knows, I've written enough about you already.

It's just that last night got me thinking about home again.

You and I were on the bus with a friend, headed downtown to catch our connection back to campus. Final bus of the night. As we pulled into a stop, an elderly woman gingerly hobbled on, slowly, as though the ground beneath her was shaking. Her eyes were obscured by sunglasses but her lips were pursed in an unmistakeable expression of perplexed anxiety. In her hands, a canvas grocery bag adorned with pictures of smiling produce. She wandered past the bus driver like a ghost and sat down a ways away from us. My friend and I joked conversationally, and the woman turned to face us, perhaps assuming that we were laughing at her. I couldn't see her eyes through the dark shades but I didn't have to. I'd seen them before. I'd know them anywhere. She spoke softly but unmistakably, "Are you afraid of me?"

That sobered me up like a cold plunge. My friend reassured her that we were not afraid of her, and asked if she was lost.

"Should I move and sit by you?" she asked earnestly.

"What?" She repeated herself. "Of course, if you want to..." my friend answered, unsure of what to say. She feebly stumbled up the aisle of the moving train, white-knuckling the backs of the seats for support before finding one across from me. The next stop was ours. The bus slowed to a halt, as we rose to make our way out onto the curb.

"You can't get off the bus yet..." she said, but rose with us anyway. You stopped in your tracks and looked at her, kindly,

"This is our stop ma'am, it's not your stop. Where are you going?" She blinked at you, clearly unsure. You asked again. "Where are you going?"

"Home." The bus had been stopped for several minutes, the doors were closing over and over again. I jammed them open.

"Where is that, do you know where that is?"

She concentrated, thinking hard. "Hillsboro."

"Okay, get off at the next stop and take the green line." You replied. Her face remained unchanged. She continued to stare vacantly at us, as though we were going to lead her back to wherever she came from. Whenever she came from. Whatever specter of recollection she thought she was returning to. You told her again. "Get off at the next stop and take the green line," but it fell on deaf ears. "Not this stop, the next one, get on the green line." She nodded absently. She hadn't heard you.

I knew she wasn't getting home when I let the door snap shut like an executioner's blade.

We watched from the sidewalk as she lowered herself into a seat by the window and stared, unseeing, into the passing night. As the engine roared to life and the bus drove on, leaving in its wake only silence and a steadily mounting guilt.

I regret very few things in my life.

When I was 16, a homeless woman approached me while I was reading in a park and asked if I had a pocket knife. She needed to fix the rags she had used to bind her feet. I had no knife, but offered her my car keys as a consolation. I looked down and noticed that we had similarly sized shoes. Give her yours, chimed the voice in my head. It would be easy to cover up. Maybe I forgot them in the swim team locker room and they'd been stolen, I was always losing things. Besides, I had other shoes. And at this point I had the money to buy more shoes, identical shoes, even. If I really wanted to. They were old beat up converse decorated with faded sharpie doodles of the solar system, constellations, song lyrics (I exist, I exist, I exist). They were a little too small. I didn't need them. It was the right thing to do. It was the good thing to do. I really didn't need them.

She handed me back my keys, thanked me, and walked away. I didn't chase her down. I didn't even try. I walked back to the parking lot, still wearing my shoes, and felt sick to my stomach with self-disgust. And still, I drove away.

So I tell myself now that the bus driver, or a passenger, or some other good samaritan surely must have noticed the woman and called the authorities. I tell myself that she found her way into a bed. Perhaps, herself, a homing pigeon. Sleepwalking back into her memories.

I think about my mom's relative, the old man who'd sat on the freezing curb waiting for a bus that wasn't coming. He was still waiting patiently when a jogger found him in the morning, glassy eyed and unbreathing.

I've never seen a dead body.

I've experienced loss, but only at a distance. Only after it was incinerated and carried away with the wind, or with water, or with time.

Today, I will pretend it's Halloween. I will make believe we have months ahead of us. I will get too drunk and fall into your arms and say it again, for the thousandth time, although this time I will really mean it. I don't want to go back to Oklahoma. This is not to say that I don't want to go home, love. I don't want to leave it.

I wonder, when I am old and empty and waiting on the freezing curb for a bus that isn't coming, where will I be going?

Back to you?

Happy Halloween.

This is what your life is for, I've been told. Learning to give everything away.

a loose collection of thoughts while I still possess the brainpower.

Today, I nearly googled the point at which it was considered socially acceptable to stop concealing self inflicted wounds. When they've scabbed over, when the skin is pink and new. I have a fever. I don't, I just feel like I ought to, and maybe I'm not talking about wounds (but you knew that). Do I have a moral responsibility to hide the gory, visceral parts of my body away from the world? I'm going to Tijuana with some friends in a week. I haven't told my mom. I haven't spoken to my mom in weeks, or anyone else in my family for that matter. If I could sever ties, cleanly, erase any memory of their estranged child, I think I would. I went home for my grandfather's funeral (guess I should've written about that, and I did, in the margins of loose leaf notebook paper and the back of a to-do list), I crept away around midnight to smoke one of the cigarettes I had stashed in my suitcase and drink a plastic cup of acrid cabernet sauvignon. Less romantic than it sounds, I froze my ass off and every moment that I spent under my mother's roof was agony. They think I'm a car crash waiting to happen and I'm starting to suspect it might be true. Sometimes I feel as though my hand is bound with a marionette string, that I am being slapped in the face repeatedly while all of my appropriately concerned friends yell "stop hitting yourself!" I don't remember last night but the tumbler on my desk reeks of stale vodka, I'd very much like to wear a tank top outside but Google will not provide me with a sufficient answer. We're so wrapped up in ourselves, I am, I know. Entangled. Last week, on a rare, sunny day, I found myself alone on a mossy stone bench overlooking the ravine. I was stoned. These days, I often am. I carefully drew a fraying spiral in the back of my academic planner, coming undone, I wrote "we are born at the center of ourselves and spend our lives escaping...eager to take up time and space." There's something enrapturing about the image, I find myself staring at it in quiet moments. I'd get it tattooed if I had the money, but I burned my cash on a one-way flight to San Diego. Life is too transient. I wonder if Los Angeles is as magnificent as you described. I suspect it is not.

Flying back into OK from PDX. Solo travel is fantastic for us ruminaters of the world but not so much for the terminally-lonely-even-when-sorrounded-by-people. Somewhat of a venn diagram. Never had to kiss someone goodbye at a terminal before, parental figures aside [but that doesn't count]. We were supposed to spend our last night together but you had an essay to write, and so did I, but I had been high for 12 hours. So instead I cried myself to sleep listening to au pays du cocaine. I sat upwind of you this morning while you smoked a joint so my mother wouldn't smell the evidence on me, took great pains to wash my clothes multiple times, said I was gonna stop after finals but plans change. Tried straight, unfiltered tobacco last night. Hit like a fucking truck. No wonder people have been smoking it for thousands of years. Maybe I'll turn to God [whatever that means]. I'm sitting in the Colorado airport as I write this waiting for my flight to board and the people next to me are having a heated conversation about scripture. 'The church is fallible,' says the girl about Catholicism, citing the misinterpretation of the Bible and it's all so fucking absurd and I don't want to go back to the South. Aisle seat the whole way. Shit luck. It's unfortunate that excitement becomes mundane when it's commonplace. I've gotten so used to buses it just feels like more public transit and I'm bone-tired now, the kinda fatigue that settles over your body and the sort of headache that drums and builds and doesn't go away. When you can't see out the windows of a plane, you feel the descent in your inner-ear, an instinctual tug in the pit of your stomach, some ineffable warning call: 'you are falling.' I don't mind that so much. I like it. It's the anticipation of the landing that gets me, like waiting for a gunshot to the back of the head. Brace yourself. Bang. And when we hit asphalt I tuck my knees into my chest and shut my eyes hard and think about dying. I think I would sooner hang myself with the fraying goodwill scarf around my neck than let my life blip out by pure happenstance. I look out over the rows of people, and wonder - how will they die? If not here, when? They're still arguing, the people next to me and maybe it's the travel-weariness but it's making me sick. Funny. When I was in the air, I was overcome by the impulse to pull out the token I keep in my wallet; my grandmother's sacred heart pendant. But it would've served no purpose besides giving me something to latch onto. An illusion of security. A modicum of control. That's the most any of us can ask for, all we really want. A hand in our own deaths. I am convinced my mother will see me and she will know. What, specifically, I'm not sure. But I have lived a lifetime since I left. It's almost Christmas. The high is 80°. I want a cigarette. This plane is hot as hell and I don't want to go home. I don't want to stay in Oregon either. At what point does a habit become a ritual? At what point does 'I love you' become an ultimatum? It has to get worse before it gets better. I miss you. Cold Turkey. Patron saint.

more miscellaneous thoughts

you finally told me you loved me, I was surprised by how easily the words slipped out. I knew you'd be the one to say it just like I know you'll be the one to take it back.

it was the day after thanksgiving, you were sick with a head-cold, I came back from the store and found you laying in my bed.

I hid the shopping bag under the desk, ducked down, slid the box of cigarettes under a pile of clothes like contraband (I decided, you would either feel guilty, an executioner watching the hangman wrap his own eyes in gauze. or, even worse: you would feel nothing at all. you would approve).

on thanksgiving, it's raining again. you left your umbrella in the bathroom of a house party so I study the droplets collecting on a coil of your hair as you take a long drag from the joint you bought with my last $5

when it's my turn, I don't cough.

I am dead. I am dreaming. at least, my conscious ghost has been yanked backwards down a long, thin corridor and I am watching the scene through a keyhole. a pinprick screen. I am clinging to your arm for dear life, this is not the first time I have found you as an anchor.

the house is packed, shoulder to shoulder, crushing us like a tidal wave, shifting us towards the wall in the corner of the living-room where we collide, frenetic. frantic. tearing into each other's faces like wild dogs in a cage match. we will not let the ocean carry us away.

my mom texts me an article about 20 foot waves. 'be careful.' she is picturing her beachcomber son, eyes on the ground, back to the water. caught in the swell.

shooting star plummets to earth, burning up in the atmosphere. crashing through your ceiling. we find ourselves in your bed as we so often seem to.

all we ever wanted was everything.

the next day I drink too much gas-station wine. I am mourning the impermanence of everything, everything I have ever lost and will one day lose now that home is a memory I can't go back to. we are jaded pretend-adults sounding out a word like 'freedom' and this can't be all there is to it, this can't be what we've been running towards. I watch your home videos, see pictures of you, frizzy haired and wide-eyed, beaming up at the camera in fuzzy foot-pajamas. I would have known that smile anywhere. those elusive dimples and canine teeth.

what happened to us?

I try to ask you this, I try to tell you.

I was such a good kid.

I whisper sorry, over and over again. you hold me and promise forgivness but don't understand that I'm not apologizing for the tears. I am sorry you're sad is what I manage, but what I actually mean is

once you confessed that you experimented with cough-syrup, just to see. just to try. it was late at night and no one was awake, so no one came to help when you puked your guts out, when you drifted away in bed leaking brains, steeling yourself for a sleep you would not wake up from.

I am sorry, because in that moment you cried for your mother and she didn't come. didn't cradle her baby in her arms or hold a cool washcloth to your head. I am sorry because we're just kids.

I see them, rooms of children, with scarred arms and bottles of cough-syrup and it nearly makes me sick.

I blow smoke in the direction of mars, we were supposed to have colonies up there by now. it's almost 2026. two decades, I've been eating and shitting and staring at the sun until my vision clouds.

I love you and the bed is cold. I don't want to die of cancer. I don't want to die at all.

Then, what can I say that I haven't said already? I pencil a diagram into the margin of my notebook, a radiating spiral, expanding, curling out towards something larger. Emanating out from an epicenter. This is history. And, I think, that maybe this is the root of your disease. Unable to support the gravity of its own mass, a star collapses in on itself, and now your mind, distended with memory, wrenches and pules in every direction, retreats back into the focal point like the head of a pin, like an overripe cherry-tomato. You go supernova. Nothing, and something all at once: a logical proof for the existence of eternity. Something, and nothing all at once: it is true that our absence outlasts us. And I have only known your absence, refracted against the sharp edges of the few precious confessions I have pried from my mother's white-knuckle grip. Admissions of guilt. I wanted to speak your language, just enough to write a poem, but en yvlonkv fragments under the weight of my hand, eggshell shards and gunpowder. Onvk hiyomen vlicecet os. Which I say only because I have not yet learned the word for 'ending.' Which I say, because I do not intend to forget. If you listen carefully, hold some scientific instrument or another up to the right sky and strain your ears, you can still hear the big bang reverberating like the drone of a singing bowl. Teenage runaway, cut-loose and aimless, struggling against the event-horizon. Tell me, would you resent me for fleeing? Little soldier boy, I am older than you were when they cut out your tongue with an army knife, when they taught you to behave like a real este-wvcenv. When they shipped you across the sea. Now I am trying to believe in liberty as I am trying to believe in justice as I am trying to believe in God, but there is not room enough inside of me. So I retrace my steps, turning in tighter and tighter circles until I am spinning in place, frenetic and stationary, frantically clutching the outline of you as the lilting hum fades so I offer my satellite up to the heavens but I can feel the drone in my teeth, and I am running it over in my head, again, again. You killed for this country.

Again. My mother was five, she asked if you had ever taken a life. You did not answer and in that silence she knew, and she did not speak, and there was nothing, and there was something all at once. Again, your father. That house you left and did not go back to. Yellow oak leaves blanketing the ground like fallen stars. Fallen angels. I have tried to piece you back together. Again. My mother, worn-down and clouded by bad wine, returns my paper, that's not how it is. And I want to scream, shake her by the shoulders, to smash the glass against the living room floor and bury the shards in my palm. The pieces of you I have left. Then tell me. Tell me how it is. Tell me stories about little-people and ehosa and spells of forgetting, about little boys who lose their way, about little boys with guns. Little boys in uniforms. You killed for this country. You killed for this country. Something, and then nothing, and now you have been an absence twice as long as you lived. Again. Again. Again. The first time I smoke a cigarette I am outside at a house-party, the air tastes like Halloween, honeycrisp. Again. You died of lung-cancer; when I exhale I watch your ghost rise out of my body. And, everything we know about you we learned from Hollywood, from Wovoka. From sanitized revisions of English papers, scrubbed clean of speculation. I have compromised my credibility. I have offered words where she has none. But I have so few, and underpinning the chasm between strangled sounds is a faint and dying toll, a plea for answers neither of us have. Working our own lives into the mythology of your absence, collapsing into the vacuum at the center of ourselves. Anger, crystallizing into silence, into obsolescence, obedience, until we learn to cut our own hair and remove our own tongues. Until we are tethered together so that we might move forward, but never away. Out, but never free. Until we are suffocating in the dissolve of your endless heat-death. Until I am nothing, and I am nothing.

1. I am very dehydrated

2. Last night I emailed my estranged uncle (or, maybe I am the estranged one. Not sure how these things work) and I asked him to tell me about Jack Miles. I'm not sure what I wanted the answer to be. A timeline, maybe. But the anecdotes he shared were minimal, trivial. He asked if it was enough. I haven't responded yet but when I do I will say yes and I won't mean it.

3. I finally mailed the letter to my grandma that's been crumpled at the bottom of my bag for weeks, I was scared to send it. I want her to know about M, but I don't want her to ask. Maybe I'm making up for impossible conversations, maybe what I really want is to commune with the dead.

4. Graceland Too is about an mdma trip

5. I want to try shrooms

6. M smoked six cigarettes yesterday and I had no idea. The pack was in my desk, I could have checked. I could have known.

7. She says this was her last pack. She said that last time.

8. I will do anything. I will do anything. Whatever you want me to do, I will do.

9. I stayed up all night again.

10. There are loose sheets of legal-pad paper strewn around her room. They're covered in tiny cursive, sometimes I indulge my curiosity and read a few lines. I struggle to make out the words, but it's usually poetry. I feel like a voyeur. Some things ought to stay private, I of all people should understand that. It's an impulse I'll learn to swallow.

11. I say I hate smoking but all week I've been thinking about that pack in my desk. Empty, now. Maybe that's for the best. It had to be one of us.

12. I miss Oklahoma but I'm not sure I'm ready to go back.

13. I've already destroyed my liver. Or, at least, I think I have. Might as well ruin my lungs while I have the chance. How much longer do I have, anyway? What am I preserving myself for?

14. M and I are gonna go to the coast this weekend. We keep talking about it, at least. We have been for weeks...usually late at night, when we're lying in bed.

15. We don't fuck. Just, take off our clothes and lay together, completely naked. There is a wonderful vulnerability in allowing someone to hold you like that, when there is nothing separating their skin from your own. She stretches out on top of the covers, as I thumb the silvery spiderwebbed marks on her hip. Like Aphrodite, she says. Then laughs, as if shaking herself awake from a dream. Well, Hermaphroditus at least.

16. We're going to take the bus down to the coast, get stoned on the beach. I remember that I am trying to speak her language. When she slips the carton into her pocket and tells me I cannot possibly understand, I stop arguing...stop offering words of encouragement, stop fighting entirely. Instead, I shrink into myself and watch as she blows smoke into the morning air. We're under the bridge overlooking the ravine, the creek, the towering pine trees. She's wearing a beanie and a tank top, in spite of the November cold.

17. My Uncle Bruce died. She says this casually, and I search for an undertone, and implication. I am stunned out of my silence. 'Oh, shit...when?' Three days ago, she responds. Placid. I rack my brain, trying to conjure up an image of M three days ago, trying to study her face. I should have noticed. I could have asked.

18. Like the time I was putting my coat after a long evening of sitcom reruns and spit swapping. I tell her she is beautiful and she buries her head in my shoulder. I think she's laughing, silently, until I hear the first sob.

19. I do understand. I do, I try to tell her. Knowing it's only a half-truth. To realize you are destroying yourself. That the knowledge alone won't save you.

20. I am hot. Feverish. Sweating bullets for no reason other than

21. Tomorrow is my shot day. Well, technically today is my shot day seeing as I'm writing this at 2:30 in the morning.

22. You play 'cold-turkey' by John Lennon and tell me he wrote it when he was getting clean off heroin. I have never tried heroin. You ask me if I would, and I don't answer right away. I'm not sure. Bet it's harder to get clean off of than cigarettes, you smirk. Pearlescent canine teeth. Dimples, crows feet that disappear when you stop smiling. I search for the indents but find nothing.

23. We don't say 'I love you' because love is such a demanding thing. A set of expectations waiting to be broken.

24. I don't say 'I love you' because I am afraid.

25. I cannot remember one instance, in my nearly 19 years living at home, of my mom and dad professing their love for one another. I assumed they did, they must have. Yet I can't help but wonder. My dad, forlornly staring out at the backyard he shared with his aging parents, the miniature city he carved out of sandstone harvested from lake dirtybird illuminating the dusk with tiny LEDs. I will never settle, I tell myself. By which I mean, I won't stay in one place long enough to get stuck there. Not again.

26. I feel like I am just now reaching adolescence. Maybe I will feel this way until I die.

We’ve never had this. We’re not sure we will again, so we’re ravenous, insatiable addicts in the early morning. Swim a little further out. Be brave this time. On your floor I paint your eyes kohl and glitter and you kiss me in the lamp-light, cinnamon whiskey goes down smooth as listerine … Jesus Christ you are beautiful and I am collecting you like water in my hands, desperate consumption/drip onto the pavement. Liquor to my head, tongue to your chest and I am exposed. Flayed alive. Make me feel like a woman, you whisper. This is all I have ever wanted. One week til Halloween. I say this only to fill the silence. 55 degrees when the rain lets up and you stand smoking in my jacket while I shiver downwind. Campfire and american spirits. I fall asleep inhaling your hair and dream, vividly, of carnage and canine teeth. Cigarette on my collar … acrid and lingering. I wake up coughing and your hand soothes my bare back. My room is filthy, the bed is vacuous, I curl up in the corner imagining your fingers grazing the hollow of my collarbone. Perverse as it is holy. Holy as it is perverse. In the dark my lungs spasm and I swallow the urge to spit you out. Unflinching, unbreathing. Keep quiet. Soon it will be morning. Overcast, rainy autumn afternoon. You stand naked against the 3rd floor window. I marvel at the wonder of your body. Revel in the magnificence of creation. This is Biblical. We are heretics. And soon, the sun will extinguish itself. Trace our bodies with chalk like cadavers, marking the outline of our entangled silhouettes onto the clean-white of your bedsheets, ignition, flash photos of the crime-scene - this place is a confessional/when my face is buried in your hair, choke out, you wanna be pure/white-hot molten secrets churn in the cavity of my chest. Seuter the entry wound and I will forget. Speak it into me and feel the words die on my lips/cigarette under the heel of your boot/junebug pulped and shapeless/crushed into the skin of my neck. Sealed in blossoming violet. Now it is mine. It is mine.

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