embrace the deviant. make your heart beat faster. read sylvia plath. discuss sex in public. understand that not all life is golden. see the shadows and whisper to the devil. wonder if there's something better. wear bras less often. discover new music. break things. (but not hearts). speak the truth. tear apart leaves for the wind. scream, often. make passionate love. stare into a stranger's eyes.

my writing makes me want to tear the pages from my journal, scream into the sky, and collapse sobbing into the earth as dirt covers my body and suffocates me.

my hands make me want to twist nervously, to dive into myself, to feel warmth around me before I ask my hands, my tired, chapped hands, to again perform miracles, to save my soul.

my eyes make me want to cry, please, let them cry, because they are strained and swollen and begging for an excuse to be free.

my legs make me want to run, abandoned, over grass fields at sunset, to tear and rip and shred, to claw and eat until I'm broken and gone.

my journal, oh, my journal. she reminds me who I am, makes me breathe, lays me in a field of grass as the sky surrounds me in blue and cream. soft like. quiet. breathing.

I am uncomfortable writing memoir. I'd rather write thinly-veiled fiction, featuring girls who strip naked and jump off of bridges in the night, and mothers who sleep in hammocks outside. I write about what I want. I write about sex sometimes, but it's rare and often scathing. I haven't written about sex since I had sex, although I'd like to and soon will. My writing scares me. It's how I understand myself and the world, and sharing it with others is too much, too much. I never know when I've gone too far, or if I've gone anywhere at all. my writing means nothing that I want it to, because I want it to grow beyond me, to mean something bigger. even then, it will still be me, because I want to grow beyond myself too.

I don't know what writing is. I don't know if my idle thoughts are writing, or if fiction is writing, or if my memoir can be of worth (read: writing). I don't understand why writing is so important to me. is it because my mind is so confused that it only makes sense in words before me? is it because I can't keep it inside. purgatory. purging. is it because I'm meant to do this, to write until I make something I can be proud of, and with this, something that tells me who I am?

tell me, words. tell me. tell me. tell me.

(and I say the last words like teeth against skin in the middle of the night, in the middle of sex, with salt against the lips and a man's hand pulling at your hair. tell me. give me answers.)

My mother is the only person who knows me, because she is the only person I trust and love enough to see me. Through this trust, I show her my worst, and I hurt her. I am not a good person. I am unassuming at five feet tall, with a baby face and voice. I volunteer in a historic town, work with the elderly, and clean nature preserves. I've never smoked, drank, or done drugs...but these are not things that define me as good. Felons volunteer every day, and smoking does not make one a villain. The concept of good and bad is difficult for me, and I think, for everyone. Reading Plato and Aristotle's words have not been able to save me, and each day, I fall deeper into badness. I judge people, especially my friends. I am biased. I value myself and my own worth above the worth of others, especially when it comes to knowing what is right and wrong. I dislike freely, with no thought for redemption. I am a bad person.

My mother, however, is good. She is patient, and she always has a kind word, even for those who speak against her. She survived mental illness, her brother's death, and an abusive relationship with my father without resentment and with her hope intact. She believes in the goodness of things, and she thinks that people can do anything. I treat her badly because despite her goodness, I don't think she lives an interesting life. The thought of inheriting her existence frightens me. This is, first and foremost, why I am a bad person. A good person would want to become my mother, because she is the epitome of purity, hope, and goodness. Instead, I strive for the devil in me--for the fast life, with too many stories and friends and desires. I don't think my life can be good if it's different than my mother's, because how does purity survive alongside desire? Aristotle writes that pleasure is acceptable, even good, but he also writes that owning slaves is acceptable. Aristotle, you give me no answers.

My mother told me last night about her day--she went to a movie with her uncle, just as she does every weekend. "Lunch was great, and the movie was great too, but both Sam and I are tired of Houlihan's potato soup!" I experienced vertigo, reliving conversations of the nights before. "Work is slow, but I'm really enjoying it. I hope it picks up soon." I murmured reassurances. "Well...I don't have much else to say." Our conversation ended just as always. I could scarcely bring myself to reply, and my answers were monosyllabic and forced. A deafening silence stretched after she asked me what was wrong.

I don't want my mother's life, so I angrily said goodbye and burst into tears. I cried steadily harder as I thought over our conversation. I had no reason to go from anger to depression, and I wondered if I was growing into my mother's illness, if I would soon be struck with inescapable mood swings and the inability to control my own mind--my mind, the part of me I held most dear. I cried harder. I thought again of my harsh words, looked at the tears on my baby face, and hated the girl I was becoming. I wasn't becoming my mother. I wasn't good enough.

I was all wrong.

ode to keats

"Make love to me as if you're breathing poetry."
He was a boy who had read Keats for school, but she was a girl who breathed Keats to butterflies. Her smell was of a leaf freshly thorn, and her skin, so soft and white, like the sound of the word lily. He whispered "lily" to himself late at night, and shook with the need to take her. When she was anxious, her breath came in short gasps; it made her breasts shiver, and he'd multiply his words to comfort her, because he didn't want to quiet the quiver of her breasts too soon. Her eyes scared him. They were too soft, too soft, and she cried tears so beautiful they made him want to hurt her. He pressed his thumbs against her skin, forever finding new places to remember as his favorite. Her skin bruised easily, but he scarcely ever left thumbprints. He wanted to tear her apart. She didn't leave the first night they met, but slept curled beside him, not touching him. Her dreams slipped into his, so that he awoke in a haze of pink dusk and powdered faces. He couldn't shake off the haze for days, and when she slept beside him a second time, the haze never fully left. The first night they made love, she took him to the woods and told him to listen to the trees as she stared into the moon. She took his hands in hers, whispering about the trees, the trees, as she guided his hands to slip her out of her clothes. Then she was naked in the moonlight, but she stripped him of his skin, slid atop him, and froze him in time, although all he wanted was to take her. He broke flower petals in his hands on sunny days, ripping with dead eyes, but the smell of freshly broken petals always stopped him, froze his breath, made him remember her lips whispering Keats to the butterflies. Once he shouted Keats over the mountains, threw a book of Sappho into the sea, and read Poe as he'd read a eulogy. But she always chose those days to tuck her head under his chin and breathe poetry into his skin.
He wanted to take her, to see tears stain her cheeks. But her tears were the milky way, and they froze on her face, stopping time and space as he lost himself in the heavens spread like rain across her skin. Soft like the sound of lily. He pressed his thumbs against her breasts, trailed to trace her hips, thumbs fluttering soft like butterflies. And she broke, crying, her face wet with tears, so he lost himself in her, drowning in the depths of space. Questions without words filled his skin. He pressed his arms against her breasts, elbows in her waist, stretched her arms above her head, held her, watching as the light slid down her skin. His breath left pools of heat puddled on her skin. She burned, and he was lost, remembering rose dusk, Keats whispered to butterflies, and tears of the milky way.
"You're beautiful," he whispered in her ear. And his words spoke the truth.

love with your heart and your tears

I hope you have something, reader, that makes your heart swell in a way to be soothed only by tears. I don't know if it's lack of sleep or love, but I'm crying over my essay about Mansfield Park, simply because it moves me so deeply and makes me love so many things.

There will never be anything as beautiful as literature, save maybe the earth. Save maybe God. And to me, they're all the same.

“This is the seashore. Neither land nor sea. It’s a place that does not exist.”

Kara read the words in a hushed tone. We sat on the seashore, huddled close to a bonfire that wavered in the night. The sea was far enough away that we couldn’t see the waves, but we could hear them. We smelled them too, thick and salty in the air and pressing close against our skin.

“Anything we do here will be forgotten,” she said.

She looked at me with wide honey eyes, her face flickering. The fire shot up sparks, and they floated past her unwavering gaze, her curled dark hair, and into the night. I couldn’t tell if she looked devilish or angelic, but her cheekbones drew fiercely upwards from under her eyes, and she seemed to be proposing something beyond understanding.

I returned to the seashore many years later, long after Kara had died. I had forgotten the look of her face and the feel of her skin, but the sea breeze reminded me of her eyes. The salt air had pulled heavily at our lashes, and we had sat close together, eyes half-closed, staring, unsure, wanting. We were both thirteen, deep into summer by then, our skins tough and dark like wood left too long in the elements. Kara’s grandmother had been black, and I would brush against her skin sometimes, jealous that she kept summer skin with her even after the season had passed. I’d stroke her arm, questioning with my touch why she was so beautiful. I was nothing compared to her, and I always felt a sense of abandonment when she touched my matted blonde hair or frail skin.

We showered once a week that summer, but if it rained, we’d dance in it and leave bathing for another time. We went barefoot, laughing at storekeepers who scolded and shooed us from their shops with brooms and white paper clerk hats. Kara stole salt-water taffy constantly. Once, when visiting the boardwalk, I stole fried oreos, my bare feet slapping as I ran away into the summer crowd. Kara’s face lit when she saw the gift, and she pulled me down the steps to the sand. We feel heavily, our skin scraping on the sand, half atop each other. She laughed, her face tilted to the blue sky, whispering quickly, “This is the seashore. Neither land nor sea. It’s a place that does not exist.”

And I ate the stolen treasure without shame, laughing as the sugar melted in my mouth and the fried dough burned my cheeks. Kara kissed me sloppily on the forehead and then pulled me into the sea.

“All is forgotten,” she screamed as the waves licked against our skin. “And now we exist again.”

Kara died the winter she turned twenty-two, in a car crash far away from the ocean. The accident was a mundane way to go, not just for Kara but for anyone. By the time of her death, I hadn’t seen Kara in two years, although I wrote her letters every day. I saw a letter from her every month, no matter how busy she was or how far away she was living. I saved each one in a locked box under my bed, never re-reading them. I knew she changed too often to ever resemble her last letter, and I never wanted a ghost of Kara. After she died, I broke open the chest's lock, too furious to find the key, spilling the letters over my broken hardwood floor. There were thirty-two letters, including the ones from our childhood, each with her curling handwriting on hand-made paper. Kara never bought cards, finding instead paper with flowers pressed into the pages. She found the stationary at a shop by the sea where we spent our childhood. I had never returned there, but Kara told me often that the seashore was as beautiful as ever. She missed me. Wouldn’t I visit the seashore with her again? There was always silence after she asked, as both of us remembered that night by the bonfire. Everything we do here will be forgotten.

I haven't written anything in what feels like a very long time. It's rained all day to-day, a beautiful spring rain with puddles to jump in and stain my jeans. The light streams through the windows in a warm grey, and I have my book and some tea and new episodes of Dr. Who.

I hated my teeth in middleschool, felt they were fangs with an overbite. I sat for my school photo with my lower jaw thrust to rival the upper, creating an underbite that had my best friend in hysterics and my mother asking why my teeth were clenched. "Honey, why do you look so pained?" Valuable lessons for next year, when I learned to smile with my lips closed tight. The year after that, I didn't smile at all.

Five years later I remembered that mouths opened for a reason. I kissed my first boy, and he spent the night teaching me the importance of open lips. Europe taught me confidence and scolded that only flashing teeth do justice to ancient cathedrals and Roman walls.

But then I was covering my mouth when at dinner with friends, or throwing my hand before my lips when laughing too hard, or shielding my large smiles in conversation.Why did I feel such a need to protect such a part of my body? The mouth is sensual, expressive, and gorgeous--exactly why it needed to be hidden.