THREE AND SIX AND FIVE

I can't wear my heart on my sleeve. I carry it around like a backpack.

Wed, 23 May 2012 04:06:08 -0400

341 / PLEASE READ THIS SLOWLY, I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT...

Sun, 06 May 2012 21:15:00 -0400

341 / PLEASE READ THIS SLOWLY, I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT IT’S OKAY.

To everything that trumps and thwarts the truthness of things....

Thu, 03 May 2012 15:48:17 -0400

To everything that trumps and thwarts the truthness of things. To everything you lied about. To every morning we practiced exhaling in sync to teach our lungs a new language for breathing, one without words, one without woes, only long, drawn silences of deep stares and slow smiles. This is how you cannot be forgotten. When you breathe, you breathe me in.

(Photo by Toto Villaruel. View all thirty, breath-betraying photos here.)

340/ Diamond sea

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:01:00 -0400

340/ Diamond sea:

The boy I love is allergic to sea water and for his birthday I brought him to the beach. Where does the sea begin— and I see him by the shoreline, watching over water as if he were guarding me. You cannot cross her, you cannot cross here, and he lets me go knowing he cannot follow. He watches as I swim further and further, and there are times I feel I am strong enough to go on swimming. I could spend my life without air, I can win over the forgetfulness of distance. And yet I always turn back to face the shoreline where he stands, the edge where sea ends.

He is allergic to sea water and yet he is in love with me.

I nourish just as I destroy— the warning is never lost— and the argument of whether I am good or bad for him is never won. All I know is that he is not water, he can never be water, how can he ever hold me?

On that blue shore I see him standing like a cliff, a stronghold, a refuge, a rock, and my waves crash against him with rage relentless as his patience is unrelenting. He could not be moved and I find that moving. He is both starting line and anchor point, port and dock. He lets my waves engulf him, and after I’ve drowned him with my roughness, he spreads himself like sand. I sink into him with the calmness of mornings, and never have I been held like this, never was I so contained.

Here I am with my disquiet and rage, and here is a lover who assumes my shape. He is more like water than I know, he is more than the water that I know, he is more than water.

I am in love with these gradients.

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:58:41 -0400

I am in love with these gradients.

339/ If I lose all my words, know that they have drowned here.We...

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 15:17:17 -0400

339/ If I lose all my words, know that they have drowned here.

We had three flashlights filled with LED and firewood that lasted five rounds of conversation. There were no sockets for plugs, no electricity across the entire island, and the sunset marked the curtain drop for pitch black immensity. We waited for anything that gleamed but the dark outlasted each glimmer, and our time dwindled into the last bits of coal. We listened to waves crash into a shore whose borders we could no longer distinguish. (Where does the sea end, where does it begin, these familiar themes return.) We unrolled sleeping bags and slept underneath the slow procession of trees. And it was then that we saw hints of starlight appearing and disappearing beyond the alcove of leaves. D. and I got up and followed the sound of waves, we walked until we were certain we were at the edge of water, and we looked up and finally saw it—

the most important photograph from that trip was never taken.

What if the sky was the sea in reverse, and Orion and Dipper were communities with lights shining out of kitchen windows and secret attics. Who knew how many houses we were staring into through their chimneys like telescopes? Who knew how many children looked up from their bedrooms to stare up at us, our flashlights and bonfires their very source of starlight, our ocean their liquid moon.

Quick, a kiss, and a wish sprinted from our sky to theirs.

Reblogging this again because I got a couple more questions...

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:16:59 -0400

Reblogging this again because I got a couple more questions about how to make it. Have fun. :)

338/ the sky and wider places (advanced lessons in flight)Never...

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:17:52 -0400

338/ the sky and wider places (advanced lessons in flight)

Never have I been in a relationship that involved so much people. I got used to just us, him and me, sometimes a book, always, a blanket.

Now there are introductions, and even introductions to introductions, and I keep worrying I’ll never remember who they are (I’ll forget who I am). Why was it harder to fit inside a place that grew wider each time I entered it? I was the opposite of claustrophobic; my only home was in the tightness of a hug.

Arms and legs are for small spaces, you said, and this is why you have wings. Take it all in like this, your arms outstretched to your sides like you could hold the sky and wider places. First, a familiar flutter, and then I learned that flight was nothing but an embrace that began in release.

337/ for the record, I am frightened

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:16:32 -0400

There was a boy who once told me: there is a boy in all your stories.

Suppose he’s right, and I borrow the way his mouth moves when he says “oh.” I remember myself by remembering how I am remembered. In a garden of names, I was water lily. Always floating away, he might have said, ungraspable, how do I hold you, elusive, stay, don’t go. He told me stories of people lost in the ocean while I clung to wartime love. The endings were not different— we knew we were both made for ruin. When I think of my hands, I think of how I buried his letters in sand.

(When I think of my hips, I remember you.)

This is that one fragile and frightening and all at once fantastic flaw in my memory. I rely so much on what others see, have seen, once saw in me. Always at the mercy of a lover’s eyes, how do I love me? Without your bed, I have no body. Look at me, love. Please look at me.

336/ compliments

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:39:34 -0400

336/ compliments

Hello! I recently joined GONE POSTAL, a writing project between...

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 12:52:00 -0400

Hello! I recently joined GONE POSTAL, a writing project between good friends, and this is my first entry.

Word of the month: Oh

It was a small room with a bed pushed against a corner where a lamp shyly lit the walls: white or yellow, you couldn’t tell, you didn’t care. The sheets smelled of strong detergent, nothing floral. You don’t remember if he held your hand when he asked the counter for the budget room. (Continue reading.)

335/ March (the verb this time), 3If earth in all its vastness...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:27:01 -0500

335/ March (the verb this time), 3

If earth in all its vastness survived the splitting of its islands, so can we. We are the contintental drift of an embrace erasing itself. The sea must divide us for others to learn to swim and build their lives in the comfort of new arms— ours. Don’t you see? The world broke itself to make more homes.

334/ March (just the month), 2

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:26:25 -0500

Each time I write about you I have to explain that I am not writing about you— I am writing about myself in a memory in your shape. When I remember your room, I only remember myself, your bed wider than both my arms extended. I used to pretend your ceiling was a screen, a mirror, metaphors for the sky (mine). I hear the clinking of a teaspoon against a coffee cup and my tongue looks for a word that describes the feeling of time passing with a brusque briskness, a brisk brusqueness, days unnoticed yet remarkably marked.

It’s been a year. Some people don’t believe it. I wonder if you are one of them: ears pressed against the door, still listening in for conversations long punctuated, breathing borrowed but never returned. There are days I do forget your name.

This is a shameful secret we all like to keep. We like being brokenhearted. We like celebrating pain but we’re too cowardly to admit it (sometimes). So admit it: you adore ache. Without it, you are nothing but brittle bone and jittery joint, body parts that start existing only after they hurt and break.

333/ March (the month and the verb), 1

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:25:18 -0500

“It could not be helped,” you liked to say in times of disaster: a lost book, a flat tire, that night I piled my things onto your bed before I packed them all away. All those times I agreed with you. It could not have been helped, how could it have been?, when there was no other way out but out.

Farsickness, the German word fernweh. When you hold me, I am in...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:32:57 -0500

Farsickness, the German word fernweh. When you hold me, I am in a hundred places at once.

332/ February 13, 2012 - “Trust time this...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:57:15 -0500

332/ February 13, 2012 - “Trust time this time.”

There are things about me you are now starting to understand. As a child, I was fascinated by calendars— there were numbers for each day, and each of those days belonged to a week, a word. The last day of the month was always a celebration, the tearing off or the turning to a new page the sign of something gone, something good, and that there was more of it coming. I had a collection, time maps I liked to call them, for the walls and the wallet. I carried with me the comfort of knowing that the familiar can always be new, that each week had a Monday, and each year had our birthdays and all the holidays, and we were all just shuffling along: men and months, moments and memories.

You and I don’t believe in how time passes. Our story has no start, and maybe that is reason enough for it not to end. We are the rising action always rising, the middle part of a story a monument to itself, refusing to move. And yet we move so swiftly. I look at the date on my phone and smile at the memory of a year ago, how we weren’t friends yet, or maybe we already were.

Maybe we already were.

331/ January 9, 2012 - Again, a disclaimer.D.—I know of...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:08:28 -0500

331/ January 9, 2012 - Again, a disclaimer.

D.—

I know of this Filipino poet who broke up with his partner by saying: “I’m much too happy with you. I can no longer write.”

I wish to borrow those words while keeping all my words and keeping you. I’m much too happy with you but “I’m much too happy” does not say it right.

Instead I borrow from the past for contrast. The fastest way to use up all my words is to turn my inkwell upside down, so I’m letting it all spill out, the shadows of secrets that I tell you when we both can’t sleep because we’ve had too much coffee or laughter and lightness and everything else suffuses, becomes white noise. I need weight to anchor me to this page, and I look at my past for pulse, and I look at you and think of how I want my children to have your eyelashes.

We’ve talked about it before, how maybe we aren’t right for each other, how I’m too hopeless when you’re hopeful, and the reverse, but I’ll take my chances and fold my worries until we prove ourselves right by proving us wrong.

I’m sorry if I could not hide my anguish but I’ve...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:07:30 -0500

I’m sorry if I could not hide my anguish but I’ve always believed that you had to be honest in order to write right. Understand that it took this long before I could write about that.

(Maybe you don’t deserve this backlash from me, and maybe you don’t deserve my kindness either. Don’t you understand how much I have to forgive and pretend to forget each time I try to start a decent conversation— but, no, no, no, you’re the hurt one, the sad one, the absolute victim and you’ll reel everyone in with the sad sorcery of your words and I’m the evil one, your tower of doom (ha!). Maybe it’s not the right time (maybe, Prufrock, there will never be time), but until then you can keep taking your half-dressed lies over the naked truth, and pray with your entire body that people believe you. “I’m a liar but I don’t lie to you,” remember? Well, good luck, mister. Let’s tip hats and part ways; it’s the final fork in the road.)

330/ January 8, 2012 - Advice, baby.

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:06:18 -0500

Tell your girlthing, the one you met at that poetry class in U.P., to avoid this entry at all costs. Or else she’ll know that the teal Vespa she gets to ride with you was partially paid for by me. Partially. Everything’s been repaid, of course, but admit that there are things you wouldn’t have if not for me. For example, the capacity to love back.

(Don’t tell her that each time she wraps her arms around your waist you’ll remember my arms and how you used to tell me to hold on, hold on tighter.)

Ride that bike and that board like I didn’t teach you balance. Ride your life like I didn’t teach you balance. You’ve asked for everything back: the typewriter, the locket, Rilke (much to my objection), and if there is one thing I wish I could take away from you it would be balance.

I want you to fall and fall hard. Treat her right this time, and maybe, she’ll take off her dress without you waiting for her to fall asleep.

329/ January 7, 2012 - We sleep on streets.

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:05:00 -0500

Everyday, I wake up to find new bruises on my body— it’s either I have a rare disease or I’ve been skating in my sleep. I try to make light of heavy things. Benadryl and books, beer and why I don’t drink it, the body and a boy I never intended to meet. I’m a walking Kleenex advertisement and people still don’t know how to ask the right questions. What happened? only really means Come on, show me the bruises.

I just had another bad dream with you in it and I want you to “leave me the fuck alone,” but those were your words. Never forget this: I tell you not to touch me and I wake up, you’ve taken off my clothes. And now you’re the one with the right, the nerve to tell me to leave you the fuck alone. Ex-boyfriend, ex-lover, Holocaust, Holocene, whatever I need to call you to convince me you are not magnificent. You’ve made me too much like you, and at some point you’ll agree, you’re almost me. I’ll leave you the fuck alone, although I know we can’t escape each other even if we never speak.

You and I will never be friends, I get it. “I love you but I don’t like you” is some hollow line you ripped off of many places, including the place you once occupied in me.