25.txt

yesterday, i turned twenty-five. when i say twenty-five, i mean a quarter century. when i say a quarter century, i mean the quantity of time by which a person discovers how they intend to live their life, except that i am still figuring out what it means to live at all. i am not graceful. which is to say, i try too hard to be at ease. i once learned a word - kalokagathia - it means beauty and nobility of the soul, but my tongue feels clumsy when i try to say it and my soul feels clumsy when i try to be it. i like small places but large crowds make me claustrophobic. when i say claustrophobic, i mean sometimes i desperately want to be left alone, but once i am alone i am bombarded by the kind of thoughts that make being alone scary. do you feel like the world has robbed you? sometimes i feel trivial, which is to say, i thought my life would be more extraordinary by now. what i mean is, if i were a plant i would be a vine that stretches its neck out as far as it can but is never able to start over. when i was in ninth grade we dissected a sheep heart and i was awed by the intricacy of the cardiovascular system. i wish i was still in ninth grade because then i could tell miss thomas i don't care where the aorta and the superior vena cava are. which atrium feels heartbreak? which ventricle heals loss? maybe then i would not now be twenty-five with the heart of a sheep. one time i went to a ballet and i fell in love. when i say i fell in love, i mean i cried but no one saw me. when i say i cried, i mean i wanted to be the tiny dancer that you held close. beautiful and strong and effortless. i once had a friend who paid for his gas five dollars at a time. cash. we never had a destination but we never ended up in the wrong place. when i say destination, i mean life. when i say life, i mean time revises you. i mean sometimes i get to the bottom of a bottle and it becomes a lens that i see myself through. i mean everything is uglier up close, but tomorrow i will wake up a different person than i woke up today. i mean i overheard my seventy-six year old landlord reminding her daughter that we are always becoming who we are, every moment, not all at once, and i felt bad for eavesdropping on an intimate moment, but it is probably the best advice i've never gotten

*written in response to the essay first date by Sabrina Benaim

A Poem to My Future Lover

Let’s just get this out there:

I’m no good

at being one half of a whole

I will either be consumed by you

or I will not give you any part of me at all

(and neither has worked out for me so far)

I am fairly certain there’s an organ

in the vicinity of my chest

pumping blood through an aorta or something

It beats,

but it’s all Morse code to me

I have never understood what it’s trying to say

So I am sorry in advance

if falling in love with me

just feels like falling

Don’t say I didn’t warn you

Young and wild and free

You reach for the whiskey because you long to feel that burning near your heart — to feel your rib cage go up in flames, setting you free at last. You long to toss your head, give the world the finger, and disappear in one grand gesture of rebellion. You want reckless, you want passionate. You want wild.

You wonder if your soul ran away long ago, because it feels like you’ve been chasing it for a while now.

You want to light up like a city at night, with neon signs one after the other, flashing, the sound of laughter and clinking drinks against footsteps and car horns. You want to love like a storm that electrifies the skies — and kiss like the rain, lightly, then all at once. You want to live like the stars, burning until your last breath, then say farewell to the universe with a glorious supernova. You want you want you want

But there you sit, burning like a candle — quietly, softly, melting under your own flame.

Making friends with shadows on my wall

Some days just don’t feel right. The sun streams through the blinds at an unfamiliar angle, you walk as if your legs belong to someone else, you search for some elusive feeling that seems like it could be in reach — but it drifts outwards with every breath you take, as if your own exhalation is gently pushing it away.

There is a certain breed of sadness that preys only on those in solitude. Most days, he paces in the back of your mind, letting out the occasional snarl when you shake your head, disturbing his dark home. But on those days that don’t feel right, he comes out quietly and caresses your bare heart with his bared teeth like a paralyzing sadness that would rather see you wounded than see you dead. Evil, evil creature.

You’re confused. You’re drifting. You could be happy if that is what you decided to be, but this certain breed of sadness is sometimes all you’ve got, and you just don’t have it in you to hurt him.

-B.

Music for two, music with you

Primo and secondo:
four hands, one piano.
Fingers glide across black
and white —
slide across left
and right.
A cascade of notes
echoes without bounds, floats
like suspended
sound.
Two hands play the melody,
two hands play the beat,
two hands
brush accidentally —
then the two harmonies meet.

When physics failed me

The professor is talking about forces

on the chalkboard, but I am tired of hearing the same things,

deriving the same formulas, over and over again.

Inertia is the tendency for an object to keep moving

at the same velocity unless acted upon

by an outside force, he reminds us.

I want to ask him what makes a person stay sad,

and what outside force can stop the sadness,

but I don’t raise my hand.

If you choose a specific centripetal acceleration,

you can essentially simulate gravity,

he goes on enthusiastically.

I want to ask him what kind of acceleration

can make a depressed person feel weightless,

but I don’t raise my hand.

I get angrier and angrier the more I learn,

and the more I learn the less I care,

and the less I care the more I hate the people who do.

The equations in my notes are insufferably smug.

“We can’t explain the world to you,” they seem to be saying.

But why not, you arrogant assholes? Why not?

I used to wonder what matter is made of,

but now I just wonder what’s the matter with me.

Don't trust the beautiful things

An angry swarm of butterflies swirls in the pit

of my stomach. I can feel them making their way up

into my lungs, their gentle wings making precise

paper cuts inside me—

all over—

every second.

Sometimes I get lonely and I whisper to them.

Oh little butterflies, what have I done?

But they just cling to my heart,

which beats furiously,

unable to shake them off.

Sometimes they drive me crazy and

I want to cry and drown them.

I want the salt of my tears

to dry their wings until they are crippled and broken

and dead. I want to scream so shrilly that I scare them

out of my body.

I want these stupid, beautiful things

to just get the fuck out of me, away from me, forever—

Oh you bullshit butterflies,

I’ll miss you when you’re dead.

Somewhere far along this road he lost his soul

I am a haunted house with window-lungs drawn—

the cobwebs remain but the ghosts are gone.

I tried to lure them back with pieces of my soul,

but they said they chose death over my too-empty breath.

Words are beginning to taste foreign to my lips

and I drink from old literature with desperate sips—

searching and searching between the tangled lines

to free a single thought that I didn't know was caught.

What does one believe when nothing seems real?

How does one love when she's forgotten how to feel?

Seized by sudden panic, I reach for my heart—

but just as I'd guessed, there was no organ in my chest.

All the things I could have been

The first dimension is a point,

and the second is a line.

The third is the world we live in,

and the fourth, I'm told, is time.

The fifth can see a future,

but the sixth sees more than one.

Out of the infinite possibilities,

which 'me' will I become?

The seventh is parallel universes,

and the eighth is all their tomorrows. 

I wonder if there is another me

with her own happiness and sorrows.

The ninth takes every possible path

of every universe -- but then --

all of this becomes a single point

when we get to dimension ten.

But these dimensions are worrisome

because they offer too much possibility.

What are the chances that the path I take

will be the right path for me?


*Credit to Eric Chi for showing me the video, Imagining the Tenth Dimension, many years ago. It's pretty cool, you should check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA.

Love is the color of sunsets

I like the kind of evenings when there is just enough of a breeze that even though we are wearing jeans and t-shirts, I could order hot cocoa without looking out of place and we would take turns sipping out of one cup and I wouldn't have to be embarrassed about how my hands are always cold because I could discreetly warm them up while holding my hot drink. We would meander home at a leisurely pace, enjoying the perfection of simplicity, and you would chuckle to yourself and little crinkles would crease around your eyes, and I would know that you are about to make another one of your terrible jokes, and we would both start laughing and some hot cocoa might spill out of the cup but I would just kiss it off your fingers, or you off mine, and it would be sweet in both senses of the word. Moments like these would be their own little time capsule, lasting forever, with pink clouds above us and our footsteps in sync below.

If we were all made of glass

Sometimes I wish that we lived in a world where everything was made of glass. I could run across fields of emerald crystals which would reflect the sunlight in every direction and the shards of glass grass wouldn't even hurt because I would be glass too. I would be both strong and beautiful, now wouldn't that be something?

I could hold drops of dew like glass beads in my hands and gardens would glisten as if sprinkled with glitter. Rainbows would be made of the thinnest sheets of glass and when they shattered they would fall like confetti. I can imagine the breeze combing through my hair - I think it would sound like wind chimes laughing. And I think that if we kissed, our warm lips of liquid glass would melt together like honey. I hope that my skin will not be transparent because I don't think my heart could match the beauty of this world. But did you know that red glass gets its color from gold oxide? There may be hope for us yet. We would all have hearts of gold.

We're not broken just bent

Sometimes, when I am very still, I can feel the soft but steady beat of my heart so distinctly that if I close my eyes, my entire existence seems to become absorbed with each thud, thud, thud...until I am nothing but a heart, beating in pitch darkness.

Most people's thoughts arise from within the skull, but mine are born at the center of my rib cage. I can't help but allow myself to be controlled by feelings, seized by impulses, driven by intangible forces. It is as if my blood is the fuel for the fire that ignites in the core of my being and spreads throughout my body. Obeying is the only way to put it out.

Tonight, I am drinking wine, because it is the nectar of the gods, brought to Olympus by doves. Ambrosia is supposed to grant immortality, but I do not quite feel alive. I simply feel. I feel shame for the "51 deaths in Egypt" that are nothing but a headline to me. I feel dismay for the couples who throw their love away without even trying. I feel powerless for patients of terminal illnesses. I feel angry for the innocent man who lost his legs in the Boston marathon bombing. I feel regret for the children who were never born. But the worst feeling is knowing that I will never truly feel any of these things. I can put myself in someone else's shoes as much as I want, but in the end, it is impossible to feel what another human being feels. Empathy does not exist.

Sometimes I think that heartbreak is not so bad: it is the one feeling that is the opposite of feeling, as it destroys the very thing you feel with. But then I remember that without feelings I would be nothing, and since that is a terrifying thought, I urge you to treat these words with as little regard as there is wine left in the bottle beside me. How can I feel so much, but not feel anything at all?

A Love That Kills

he said, i fell in love
with the girl in the rusko
t-shirt with blue streaks
in her hair, like waves
of sin
that pulled me in

she said, he was the first
good boy
who wore a suit and tie
and looked me in the eye
as he talked about the economy
and his future
with me

he said, i smoked
for the first time
committed the crime
of love
because i needed an excuse
to spend time with her

but she said, i'd start
all over, throw away
one habit for every day
i spend with him

and they loved each other

and they ruined each other

until they couldn't remember
which came first.

The day I almost got a tattoo

I think we have all secretly wanted a tattoo before,

as dark as the shadow that follows you into various

questionable tattoo parlors where you suddenly

feel as brave as the red neon lights that spell out

a dare. You try imagining a pair of black, delicate wings

fluttering on the nape of your neck, beneath a wedding veil,

or a tiny figure eight tracing the veins of your wrist,

alongside the tubes of an IV bag. There are more people

in the shop than you expected, and you begin to judge them

because you suspect that they are judging you.

In the very neuron where ink first bled, you begin to doubt

why you wanted anything so permanent anyways,

and as suddenly as a drop of blood blossoms

from the quick prick of a needle, you retreat through

the very door you just entered. Sometimes I feel like my dreams

are too similar to the tattoos I never got: the same fears

have kept both my skin and my life unchanged.


*The style of this poem was inspired by a poet that I follow on tumblr: writingsforwinter.tumblr.com.

I didn't want to die, so he threw me in the sky

If I was a constellation,
I would wear a dress of black
embroidered with a trail of stars
sparkling down my back.

Will I be pretty like Cassiopeia
or have the strength of Hercules?
Will I shine as bright as Sirius
or guide lost sailors overseas?

I wonder who would put me there
and what my myth would be.
Who will tell my story?
Will they remember me?

I'll be so far from everyone,
in a corner of these lonely skies,
but if I'm seen by just one being
I will finally close my eyes.