breathing saltwater.

She said she was lonely without me so I should write. So here I am, waiting to take a shower, lying on a squishy bed in a salty bikini with beach-curl hair. If I crave salt, all I have to do is suck on a tendril of hair.

Yesterday a huge jellyfish washed up on the shore. Elena was scared to go in the water, after he washed back in. We went later, though, and today. Today we discovered that her boobs float, and also got sunburns – her arm, the right side of my cleavage and a spot on my stomach. We bought overpriced ice cream from a man in a motorboat. His name was Joe and he goes up and down the island selling overpriced snacks, which seems like a good way to make a living to me. It is an expensive island so he knows the people on the beach can pay.

I have been collecting shells. The thin, plastic, translucent ones are my favorite. They shimmer and are fingernail-thin and bendy. Elena found a big spiral one and gave it to me, but mostly they are the clam-and-mussel kind. I like the ones with barnacles. When we were in the water, I pretended to be a barnacle on Elena and made her drag me around. It was fun, and she was warm.

I like being here because it really is a vacation. My family isn’t here so there is nothing to hide. I can wear bikinis and lie in the sun and not think about anything. I don’t even read. I eavesdrop, mostly, and listen to the tiny waves hit the sand and shells, and breathe. I hear conversations about candy bars and also about digging holes. Today I learned the names of all the children in a group of people about fifteen feet in front of us. Bella was the oldest, the leader. Her little brother (I think) was Charlie, who was barely past toddling. There was Wyatt, an older boy, and then Alyssa and Todd, younger and sister and brother. They had big shovels and an unknown motivation for digging a large hole. Alyssa liked to sing the dreidel song.
To the right of us there was a young blond man wearing blue and white swim trunks and reading a book in German. He wore glasses, and he kept looking over at us. He never spoke, that I heard.

Besides sitting and listening and burning under the sun, I wade and swim towards the sun, dog-paddling. The sun is a good destination because the path is clear and bright and sparkling, and you never get there, so there’s always somewhere to go.

It’s beautiful here. Postcard to you:
“[Sun and sand and sparkling sea] Wish you were here!”

merry christmas, i could care less

I made a cake. I wrapped presents. I watched A Christmas Story. I am excited for pancakes and presents.
But I’m not feeling anything at all.
I should feel nostalgic or warm-and-fuzzy or hateful or something, but I don’t. I look back on the year, now, just to see what I can see, just because I feel like I should.
It looks sort of like oatmeal. Kind of lumpy and messy and boring but not so boring as to be unpleasant or uninteresting. Maybe dinosaur eggs oatmeal, then (my favorite kind).
I fell in love a lot. Big whoop. I learned a lot. Whooo boy. I had sex. Fun times. I got on meds to fix me up and make me feel normal. Pretty sweet. I got some detentions. Not so sweet. I bought a bikini. Life changer, that.

None of this seems to matter very much. I have very little that feels important to say on the topic of the year that’s winding down. I lived. I loved. I did all the stuff I had to do. I am still living, loving, doing. The numbers on the calendar don’t mean anything at all.

remixed (and currently untitled)

I am the innocent victim
of a rabid animal,
all claws, all teeth,
all rough, all bold,
full of madness and determined
to take control.

I am the lover, the beloved
of anybody’s body,
all lips, all skin,
all bold, all sweet,
full of madness and determined
to give release.

I am a lemon peel
or a sour-sugar sucker,
all bumps, all flavor,
all sweet, all harsh,
full of madness and determined
to be no sum, just parts.

I am a trespasser
on heavenly lands,
all whispers, all tiptoes,
all harsh, all hush,
full of madness and determined
to live in the lush.

I am a prisoner,
by my own request,
all ropes, all chains,
all hush, all loud,
full of madness and determined
to find the way out.

I am the high priestess
of every dark sin,
all senses, all chemicals,
all loud, all mean,
full of madness and determined
to make my own peace.

In this moment
I am everything,
full of madness and determined
to be free.

hold me tight

I woke up a while ago but I’ve been lying in bed ever since. I am a little bit paralyzed, by some combination of fear and inertia and anger and exhaustion.
I dreamed about the two girls that I love. I dreamed about being on a cruise ship with cherry, and she was wearing sunglasses and sitting by the side of the pool. I tried to sit with her but she wouldn’t let me. She pushed me, I think, and I almost fell in the water. Then I went back down into the ship and found the new york girl, but it wasn’t a cruise ship anymore, it was a ferry. She was coming here to see me, on a ferry. I was asleep-that is, the character of myself in the dream was asleep- but I was watching her too. She was very tired. She looked sad.
Somehow I met her when she got to the harbor and my father drove us home. She went to bed and I did nothing. Then I crawled into bed with her and in her half-awake state I explained to her that I love her and please can that be okay? and it was, then. She held me hand and I wove my limbs around hers, the way I do when I am cold, or loving, or both. I tried to kiss her but she spoke through my lips and told me not now, not here. So we slept instead.
We woke up and it was the future. She was at Columbia and I was at NYU and I had visited her and fallen asleep with her in her bed. The stars, as she said, had aligned. But I realized as soon as I “woke up” that they hadn’t, not quite. That I could never love her the way she wants me to love her and we could never give each other what we want, or need. I need freedom and the ability to exist in gray areas and to love and love and be a little bit irrational. She needs stability and togetherness and the ability to trust in boundaries and promises. I am the revolution (liberte fraternite egalite) and she is the Ming dynasty and neither of these things were all good or all bad, they just were different, vastly different, and entirely incompatible.

So I woke up this morning freaked out. I didn’t want to get out bed. I still haven’t really. I kept feeling like dying or sleeping for a really long time. Like I needed more medication (as if that is relevant). Like I had all these things to do and I just needed to roll over and go back to sleep. This could be “the christmas that she was so messed up that she just didn’t get anyone any gifts, and didn’t come downstairs on christmas.” I wish it could be. But I know it won’t. I know that by 2:30 I will be clean (no more obscenities on my skin) and dressed and functioning, and tomorrow I will go buy gifts, and everything will be okay.

salvation in surrender (free-written)

It’s hard to write a poem. It’s hard to try to be explicit and implicit and concise and elegant all at once. It is hard to express a sentiment in a way that appeals, that is open, that takes hold, when it is a sentiment so frequently rejected by so large a majority. How do I write a poem about how beautiful it is to let go, to be hurt and loved all at once? How do I make that appropriate for the literary magazine or entry into a contest or even for the eyes of my friends, my parents, my teachers? I love the feeling of nails in my skin. I love the feeling of teeth pressing in, deep enough to leave bitemarks that turn to bruises. I like to look at the marks, purple and blue and green and yellow and brown, and to touch them and feel. I like broken capillaries on my neck and scrapes on my stomach. But I don’t like them just for what they are… It’s about what they were. They were someone else’s body touching mine, determined to take control. They were my body fighting back then giving in, feeling freed by the adrenaline rush accompanying the pain. They are a souvenir of what was; what was me, finding peace in violence. Peace in violence, pleasure in pain, freedom in bondage…I am a study in the odd way that humans are so often built of contradictions. I am Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s upside-down house, with the chandelier on the floor like a campfire and the bottoms of staircases like slides. I am those sour-sugar coated candies, I suppose. All my senses act as if they were taste after eating those “miracle berries.” What’s bitter is sweet and what’s sweet is different. Pickles and lemons and bitter chocolate are what I crave, but in my skin these become fingernails and teeth and rope. I want to write a poem explaining this, the beauty of letting myself be harmed, because it is a release from the ordinary, but I don’t know how to explain it without so many words as this. When things hurt I fly from the ordinary to the extraordinary. The walls around my body are down and thus I am free. I am free and free is the only way to live, give me liberty or give me death. I’ll take society-scorned pain over protection and perfection any day, thank you. Good and bad are always intertwined, they need each other to exist, conjoined twins. Things that hurt HURT but the pain is the gateway to pleasure, to a place beyond pain. There is freedom and heaven to be found once you give in to your nervous system, let it take over and fill you with sensation and chemicals that save you from the world.

’cause I’m TNT, dynamite!

I am going to explode in this place if I am left here any longer.
Senior friends are getting early-decision acceptance letters, and I am burning to be one of them. I walk past the college counseling center and look inside and think about going in and applying to college Right. Now.
I can’t stand this place and this day after day of green school skirts and convocation speeches. I am sick of discussing brilliant plays and novels with girls who were “smart” in kindergarten but haven’t stayed that way. I want to talk about Ibsen with someone who feels some level of passion about Ibsen! I want to read history in the company of people who realize that understanding history itself is more than getting an A on an exam. I am so very very ready to be gone.

I know I am not, too. I know I am a fifteen-year-old baby girl-woman child-creature, who needs her momma and her poppa and her bedroom at home. I know I need my mother’s dinners still, and my father’s dumb jokes, and the ability to come home and bask in the warm glow of my family every night.
But it is hard to believe that getting out and away and onward would not be so much better than this.