2/12/25
one thing i have learned this february is that when you meet love, real love, light love, the knot in your stomach does not tighten it unwinds

2/13/25
with one word you could summon me, make my emotions rise up again to destroy me to go to work for you and to convert me, do anything to me, and that is the problem with me more and more these days is that i am recognizing how problematic i have always made this

2/16/25
maybe what i need in the upcoming year is to get the fuck away from everyone i want to get close to, just leave them and maybe we never hear from each other again, maybe it’s the cure of the madness of wanting intimacy, how irrational it makes you, how suddenly it changes you

the life you lived once, happily, without the expectation of him. you were happy before. your body did not know the drug until you injected it, until you were the dealer. let’s fix it now. we can do this. we can get through this again. we can want someone without wanting to tie them to us forever

you, dabbling in everything to the point it hurts you. where you can’t yank yourself back because you got yourself everywhere and now it is too late to mend how he sees you. you do all this instead of playing it safe like your mother said. you are no longer following the script and now you’re in grave danger. and what will you do? return to your mother and cry? when she told you what loving was like?

they don’t deserve you and you don’t deserve it back, whatever it is. let it go. you won’t have it. again it isn’t yours yet. it isn’t yours to even talk about; at least that’s what it always felt like. this isn’t my territory. and yet love knows me. love knows i talk about her.

to say i will never know how real love operates in the body is a relief. i am so afraid what it would do to me if i had it for ten years, fifteen. i can hardly do ten months. and so whether it is a drug or vaccine or sleeping pill to numb every hard, cold thing only to end up being the hard thing in the end — well. i don’t know what it is about being wanted. they say we are all one, so is it just the desire of another body? do i so repel what exists inside my own?

to say it now is to surrender. it could grant me peace of mind. i would like for someone to see me and not be able to carve me out of their mind, but i am not so sure i am ready for it.

maybe you will be so lonely even men will split their eyes and look around you and you will remain just as invisible as you have felt. maybe patterns in your life never shift and they continue on in this exasperating, painful way. maybe that’s always what it’s like.

2/17/25
“THIS.
IS.
THE.
TIME.
TO.
BE.
DUMB.”

-wisdom from a friend

2/18/25
oh my eagerness to kill this. to have it actually be nothing at all. to witness in you one slight disappointment and have it poke holes in all my intense thoughts of you. i would take a cut and watch it bleed just to know the worst always happens in the beginning, always unfolds painfully before it can grow good and soft, before it can cause real damage to what i am, to what i am

a bloodlust, just to know pain isn’t something i’ll always be anticipating in the future but something i can experience always in the nows. cut me in the beginning so i’ll know you aren’t good, so i can run like i always. like i’m so good at. you can’t cut me after i have decided to love you. you can’t do that

a bloodlust, to avoid: there being a light pointed down my slippery muscles to show the tendons, the sweet bloodstream, flowing innocently and cool, unaware of their vulnerabilities. one little snip by a sharp thing to have it all come unraveling, wet and red and blinking into death.

so easy to deny her love. so easy to tell her no. you can’t have it. tell her the world always ends before it can begin for her. tell her so she doesn’t experience the prolonged pain of learning later what he is. i want her to be happy; at the same time i know i have been preventing it.

no you’re right. by incessantly doing nothing, i have not lived. maybe it wouldn’t have turned out to be anything but maybe i should have opened my mouth anyway. maybe it would have moved something in my life. maybe my career would have shot off from the ground, yanked me somewhere good. who knows. i kept my mouth shut to show my heart was not yours. i did not tell you i wanted to be the one to love you, if that could be a thing, if that could be possible for you. i kept my mouth shut, as i’ve done. this passive and pretty and feminine position. oh i resent her.

i write for you, and still you are a wispy piece of a thing made up in my head, cool and detached and imaginary until tomorrow evening, until that wretched dinner where i will tell you everything and make it your problem and will receive a response that will certainly wreck me in half for maybe a week or so. from chin to forehead i am filled with the red ink of embarrassment after you tell me, after you. tell. it isn’t impossible to think someone wants me, but it almost is; it always is.

but the confession will have moved something at least. made space for something else. you are real. that is the difference between you and the last one: you are quite real. i could lean across the table and graze your hand.

(does he have a mental illness? then what the fuck else is wrong with him to be acting so nervous around me? is it always filled with this much agony, to want to be near a person and to be unable to demand their nearness, not yet?)

hey. so you are just a silly boy in college.
i wear my body the way i wear it and you will like it and you will take everything i do and say and you will not ask questions or make requests or want me altered in any way, you will only say thank you for your time, thank you for the meal.

wait. you are only: a boy in college and you don’t have the power to rip me in half with your answer. i could confess and i could be devastated, but i choose. and i choose whether or not i am devastated and for how long and if at all, actually.

really all it is, is that he is just a boy in college and that i promise in thirteen years to be exact (who knows) you will not only be more than ok but you will have knowledge that i currently don’t have and you will find this situation very cute, very innocent very haha very aw. very babe. you will say, it really is a dumb thing here you have on your plate. just eat it, swallow the bad parts. these moments are good for your bones.

tomorrow. tomorrow you will tell him some version of the words ‘i love you’ and you will say them quietly because that’s just like you, and you will say them kindly so as not to frighten anyone (so as not to frighten you) so you refrain from growing sick with the thought of what you are daring. it’s all right. it’s all good. confess your love; i promise you are not forfeiting yourself.

girl. you are still a girl. i am asking you to be one, just be one. just be a girl. you are a girl because you try to be a woman and you try to avoid the mistakes of girlhood and therefore you are still only just a girl. that’s the way it is. i am asking you to be one and for once not to be your mother. tell him the version of it you believe it to be. tell him you love him. tell him he makes you sick and that you want it to stop. do it in that way of yours where you stutter and stop and make sure you make him sit with it, make sure he knows how bad this is going to be.

he is just some boy in college. honest. in thirteen years, i said — in thirteen years to be exact (no clue), your hands won’t shake. maybe he will be yours. i doubt he will be yours. but it can change everything for you if you just open your heart and tell him. ruin this image you have that any decision you make is serious and consequential. who cares? he is just a boy. he is of no consequence. tomorrow night throw yourself to the bottom of the barrel and make him watch you grovel for a moment that stretches. do the dumb thing. these are the sacred times god has reserved for our stupidity. you will use them. i am giving you permission.

2/19/25
i don’t know why i feel this way, that love should end in doom

quite seriously though, a few years ago when i was still in undergrad i was a sophomore believing in other things. you, you probably dated while i ran from all prospect of it. who even cares about any of this i’m just saying. i’m just saying i’m trying to stall

2/20/25
what if one day god came to you and said: “the wretched thing is over. you’ve done the dark deed: loved a creature of mine. you will feel the consequence of that forever, reverberate back and forth between its many walls. but in the meantime, here are some good friends who would die for you” […]

you will find writers and their occupations useless until one day you watch her fall in love and witness the process of the artist picking herself apart, in her merriment and in her downfall, dazed and batting away the new world she encounters. it is awful, this. you watch her put her emotions into words so good and so on the nose that it will do something to the way your skin fits around your bones. you will watch her words plant something uneasy in you that you never needed to contend with before. now the dreaming is a part of you. artists are always doing that to their lovers: planting unprecedented, un-required seeds of thought. you’ll think: don’t do that to me, you don’t have any right. but it’s already done. the granting of new pieces of life into your bloodstream. a passing on of something unholy, the knowledge that this is all more painful than you realized

god has shifted me to a new pathway. where love and excitement once resided now wither in one sharp, precise moment. the bite of urgency that love could be yours withers away and out reveals a newer path, a colder vision you’ve spent less time with. the way love twisted out of your grasp in one familiar move. the way love twists out of your grasp but each time in a different maneuver. it is all so unfair but you cannot fight it. and you can’t go to your mother.

i do not get the special privilege of a knife and carving this experience (once it has happened) out of me. did i really not consider that confessing my love would render me unable to attend to my regular life activities? my regular thought activities? i was obsessed with the idea that it would tear the fantasy i had of him in half, but instead i am actually very sad and can’t seem to think of anything else this week

in this lifetime what could be wrong with me? what other stuffing did the universe fill me with, why? to feel tortured at times, and to record it, but record what? there is not extra meaning i add, no extra poem that nudges the world. what could a sad brain do to help? i know nothing; i have proven that today. either i am an artist and i am only just learning how pointless we are, or i am not an artist and i am, am something else. something that only wishes and yearns to be given away and no one wants it and neither do i and neither did god, and that is why he put all of it in me, to cast it from his heaven.

i have given what i am the wrong name all this time. i’m not an artist, i’m just a hater. a hater of all this

oh your heart is searing and there is only yourself; you return home alone always, no one ever comes with you. but it is still a home.

didn’t you know? couldn’t you have predicted? you and your reasoning for things, i almost, almost curse them. and yet i feel too much pain to treat you that way. you are still such a fragmented girl, not yet what the world calls woman. and you want to be her. you thought moving through the world differently, abruptly, would shift the tectonic plates of your spiritual body. the act has only proven the cowardice in your lifeline. now you are terrified, stranded in a foreign state.

i really believed myself so tough i did not picture my heart fracturing. and now i will never venture from the apartment again, now i know the consequences. 

now the big hand has shifted my path and told me my lesson is to learn softness, but how? it’s like telling a child that there exist in the world other languages. how could there be anything outside what i have known? how am i to ever step into the world of softness and its soft people? how awful it is that they can be so foreign to me, their bodies and energies so unfamiliar? all my life i was accustomed to the poisoned arrow whizzing past my ear. and now, world, you want me to learn love? you want me to learn how to bare my soul to a world that from the beginning despised both my weakness and me?

what are you doing to me? what else will you let happen to me, what else will you allow to be carved from my mind with a scalpel and have it made new by interacting with this world that doesn’t want me? this could not have come from a loving place, could not have been very loving of you to do this.

i have finally nudged a foot into the real world and it is awful. i didn’t know anything.

2/23/25
life is not serious enough to give a shit about any of this tbh