pink and salty.

I lick my lips and feel the split place they bled earlier (she was here, she was here!).  I shift my body and the residual moistness between my legs makes the fabric stick (she was there, too). My eyelids droop from waking up in the night and chomping as efficiently as possible on granola bars (shh, she’s here) and I think about koosh-ball trees and shallow clear cool oceans and old women wishing and little girls blowing bubbles and soft butterfly kisses on every inch of my skin (oh, oh, she’s here…).

Now I’m at my mother’s computer and my dog is snuffling for a walk and my sister is watching TV and she’s not here anymore.

where are you, arienette?

THURSDAY IS WHAT DAY IT IS.
I feel like screaming. I can’t function.
I am too twitchy and jittery to work…I just do the hand thing and grab my head and pull on my hair and hold my face. (it’s okay, I’m squaretarded.)
It’s all nerves. good nerves and bad nerves:
TOMORROW IS FRIDAY AND I AM GOING TO SEE THE PERSON WITH WHOM I AM AS SHE SO CORRECTLY STATED MADLY IN LOVE. (no room for punctuation when you’re in love, silly!) so those are good nerves.
bad nerves are that I am supposed to turn in my China/Japan paper tomorrow, but I still do not know much about China or Japan, so I will be turning that in on monday. Bad nerves are that I am going to fail chemistry because I can’t even study for it because I don’t even know where to begin. Bad nerves are that I have a French test first period.

In other news: my teeth are slimy-smooth and I am tired even though I overslept this morning. I bought shoes and two pairs of underpants, all of which make me very happy. I am going to New York tomorrow, so Fuck It. Fuck the bad nerves. I will get through it and I will get on a bus and sleep until northern New Jersey, where I invariably wake up and fidget until we get to the spiraling pre-tunnel ramp.

I am dancing to Bright Eyes like a spastic, broken, psycho cat. Angular, quick, pointless motions and bizarre faces. I can’t stop tangling my fingers in the hair at the back of my neck. Oh, what is this! Oh, brave new world, that has such people in it!

postsecret addendum

so i can’t kill myself.
(thank you)

je t’aime.

I worry that I don’t say “I love you” enough, not in a serious way, not in a way that communicates what I mean to each person when I say it. I worry about the people I love not feeling loved because I can’t get the proper words out in the proper way at the proper time. But also “I love you” doesn’t seem to be enough. How do I communicate “I really honestly think I will love you until the apocalypse, in this more-than-chocolate-milk kind of way”? How do I communicate “I love you no matter what and I’m angry because I care”? These words don’t do the feelings justice, and plain “I love you” doesn’t do it either. I don’t mind it except that I am afraid something terrible might happen and they won’t understand how I love them.

all I need to hear is that you’re not mine, you’re not mine.

Going to New York on Saturday morning. Up and back again in 48 hours. Excited and filled with dread. I have too many zits to pass for an acceptably beautiful step-grandchild. I will see many friends but not the ones I truly want to see, not the one I want to see the most. Birthday party: ice skating at Rockefeller Center. deliciously touristy, but we’re ctyers, we rock it. I think we do, anyhow. or not at rockefeller center anymore – it’s confusing. trump rink in the park? okay. whatever. I would like to see the people I love, please. is that okay? does it have to be so complicated?

all I really want to do is see them, give them hugs. play a round of silent football. then ditch them and hop a train (but you can’t just hop a train and come to visit me again!) bearing gifts and letters upon letters and a thermos-full of citybakery hot chocolate.

i’m sleepy and i can’t make sense. there is work to be done. there is spirit day at school to find clothes for. i think i am going in androgypajamas. aka a stolen men’s shirt and my unisex kids’ jeans that somehow still fit over my hips. it will be good for sleeping in, during history. unfortunately I may have p.e. life sucks, and then you die.

good morning, good morning, good! nothing to say but it’s okay.

body still achey and tense. eyes dry. want to go back to sleep.

it’s thursday! you are almost there! congratulations!

after reading The House You Pass on the Way

I have this sweet sad feeling inside me now, heavy and thick like caramel. I needed this book, I think. Or maybe I didn’t need it but it was good anyway. It reminded me to look at things from the other side, from the way mlle. mamaroneck might have felt that day in Washington. “I thought you were gay, different, special, like me…but you are with him and that makes you straight and normal and average and here I am, alone again.” I’m sure it wasn’t bad, not like that, at least. But still, it reminds me. Things sting, things aren’t fair. Some days I wonder if I’ll ever fall in love normal again, like I did with The Boy. A normal relationship, almost. Physical and emotional, albeit long-distance. Fall in love like I did with that girl, though that was strangely innocent, our back-then love. It lingers now but our kisses changed it…our flirtations aren’t so tense-yet-harmless anymore. Why can’t I accept what was and what is and move on, stop drama-mongering? I love her. I don’t feel like I love the cherry bitch, right now, which seems freeing, but I’m sure I do. It’s just that no one is reminding me of it. Next time I see her I’ll be in love again, I’m sure.
I want to fall in love. Normal. Right now. Fall out of love with everyone else and devote myself to one person, one feeling, for just a little while at least. One person in this town – is that so impossible? And yet it seems to be.
My skin is dry and I need to go to class and this would all be more tolerable if I knew how to love. “I’ve never been very good at falling in love” is what I will have to say, someday, when somebody wants all of me and I don’t know how to give it. Parts of me will always belong to a girl in New York, it seems, and to the cherry bitch. Parts of me will always sing for the dykey girl in the restaurant window, the sloppy gray-sweatered gelato boy, the lanky androgynous creature on the subway. I do not think all of me will ever be anyone’s, and I just wish that could either be okay or go away.