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[x]
on loving lengthwisei.
in my near-nineteen years of life i have never wanted something, someone so much.
[no, i swear, not even death itself]
ii.
waking up without you hurts.
even though you don't have one, i slept with my webcam on last night so maybe you could catch a glimpse of me sleeping.
you say i shiver in dreamland, and i tell you that's because i hardly dream --there is nothing in my mind then but grey matter and cold air,  because even with the heat blasting at seventy and four fleece blankets, i have trouble making my own warmth.
you told me that even so, i was smiling. and i said that though i don't remember, the only explanation would be that i was dreaming of you --before you were mine, you were my only dreams worth remembering. now, you're the only ones i ever have.
iii.
going out in winter seems colder than ever without you here.
it makes me think of years ago, when i found that without flesh, it is impossible to insulate bones. you would sit next to me every morning on the bus, and f
thirteen steps to falling in love1. i spend the first two years we know each other sprawled out in the back of our school bus, trying to befriend girls with cigarette ash for skin. it takes months of letting tar settle in my lungs, but finally i find myself sitting next to you. 
2. when we we're fourteen, you write out my name in an entirely new alphabet of obtuse triangles and right angles and dare me to guess who it is you like. i lie my way through the entire school year until two weeks before summer, when you give me all the clues.
3. to this day, you swear you fell in love with me the fall my mother was given her expiration date. i tell you the first morning of our sophomore year, and even though we are too scared to touch, your words would mean more than every heavy embrace up until her funeral.
4. you watch me fall down the stairs just once, and after seeing how i fold in on myself, swear never to see me hurt again. for four years you've caught me, and have amended that promise to try your b
thawingmy love,
i swear, there is a ghost beneath my bones.
she slides around the rungs of my ribs, gentle like a lover's hands but cold, so unlike yours. i lay in bed at night, days after you have gone, your jacket and seven blankets struggling to keep me warm -but her arctic touch seeps deeper, slides its way past my lips and settles in places i swore only you could touch. and i am left gasping, arching, desperate for a body one hundred and thirty eight miles away, a voice that doesn't seem nearly as warm after traveling through the airwaves, a spring that only exists in your arms.
because i miss laughter, i miss your eyes, i miss the feeling of thawing after forty days in the tundra of my own heart, and two in yours.
broken hearti.
my heart is just paper for muscle and ink for blood, but i like to think that if i tore out a few pages and bound them in leather, it might just mean something.
ii. 
and i tell you, i want to tell you, no, i am not more than that. i am not human, made up of muscle and bones that break, but words. i am books and flowers and the coffee i had this morning because, no --i cannot be me. i cannot be this.
iii.
i don't want to be here, scared these little sinews are snapping like dental floss between my hungry teeth.
i've smeared my make up over your neck and collarbones, wrinkled your shirt with my paint-chipped nails, and somewhere between the first pain and hiccup of a sob, i've forgotten how to speak. you hold me tighter each time it steals my breath and listen to make sure i remember how to after it passes, say my name softly to remind me to stay with you. 
and you've pressed your hand over my chest, as if keeping it there will hold the weathered organ together. 
winter buriali don't think i'll forget how after you died, it snowed.
the entire world went catatonic with me, as they carried your body out into the glacial night and drove you away. we were encased in ice, hushed under the weight of your ashen body [did it hurt when then burned you, or was it a relief to those frozen bones?], and i could do no more than teeter to my bed after the ambulance left and lie there until my father knocked on my door long after the sun rose the next day.
and when i walked out, there was no body in that bed. just the sheets, shifted and white like you had just rose but cold -cold as if the window had been left open that night and the arctic air drifted in and brought the storm with it. the house was silenced, my father just gone and my sister, too. the plows had towered the snow high where our front yard began as if to say, you may not leave.
the glass door in the back gave way after four tries, and i stepped out into my father's marks from his morning smoke
bonesand i've realized that no museum will ever want my bones.
i would look sad and small, among the mastodons and sauropds, my frame wired up or maybe laid down under glass. and i would hope for a circlet of roses around my skull or a book of words plastered to my breast, but the curators would leave me plain and bare, a statement.
and the little girl who went there with her brother would wander while he roared at the tyrannosaurus rex remains and look to her mother when she found me, sad and small among the giants and the living.
momma, why's that lady with the dinosaurs?
and her mother would read the plaque and look at her daughter, trying not to frown. honey, the dinosaurs died because of ice and meteors. this girl, she died of sadness. i don't know why she's here.
rock bottom, ocean floorhalf-past a different kind of broken
on sadness, she wrote:

           
           blind fool in the umbra    
           bury yourself in me
           on the other side of lonely
           and by god, i love you
                (maybe i will be a landfill)
           

everyone i meet looks for a place to stay;
out of the woods, on wet roads
under wind, under rain
  -i'm so far away

no wonder it took him 1455 pages
waiting for her to come this way

tramps like us-
               in lieu of emptiness
               in absence of a poem
               wander, wander
                    (pour a little salt, we were never here)
Barrengalaxies stretch from hip to hip, a constellation suffocated beneath the bed clothes. they lie in familiar patterns, sketches you have traced and re-traced during games of little doctor girl; eternally blank, they glitter back guiltily.
shipsand so
the wind blows gently
taking this soul from here to there
fifty-two weeks fly loose from my hair
i grant my fears
to the air

dear friends
those harbours from whom i drifted
may the waves sing songs to you
whichever grains your feet fall upon
may the skies above
stretch blue

i do not need those castles
made of clouds or built of sand
i shall mould a fortress
with the skills that i command
and should my efforts falter
it takes small faith to understand
that i will find your kindness
and your hand

to those whom i have met
you have my deepest thanks
you rocked me from my loneliness
kept my days from being blank

you
Like the DesertHer name was Savannah, like the desert.

She had hair like dried yarrow, a dusty sort of wind-blown color with freckles smattered across her cheekbones like speckles on a robin's egg. She was small, tiny, petite- a string bean with a garbage disposal appetite.

But I was smaller. Sickly small, the kind of thin that turns heads and gets them whispering.

It was our first bikinis, and we were ready to face the world together. Savannah had retreated to the bathroom to change, knocking on the whitewashed door before coming back into my bedroom.

I was transfixed by this creature, this lanky girl whose knees were wider than her thighs. I stared at
things you ought to knowdear boy,
our first kiss will probably taste like cancer and carcinogens.
because, no matter how many daises i press
between my palms, it never comes out:
acid and ashes, the smoldering in my veins.
{cigarette ashes in a city
by the sea, her popcorn
ceiling and burnt bedspread-
i reach down my throat to
draw the memories out}
dear boy,
i do not know if i am in love or with the idea of being loved.
i crave nothing more than hands and touch
and warmth, thawing the winter in my lungs-
i've forgotten what to do at the sight of spring.
{winter came two
years ago, and froze
my child-soul, your
girl turned glacial,
frigid, numb}
dear boy,
meet me in the moonlight.
see me opened up and cut clean, the starlight slicing
me in twenty-eight pieces through the blinds-
i am as close to the girl you knew as i will ever be.
{efflorescent then, i bloom
from the plow lines on my hips,
roses bursting from my bones
and pressing through my skin,
yellow instead of hemic red}
lowercasei.
folded in half, fingers down my throat, i try to grasp the intangible.
it lies somewhere inside my larynx, tangled between vocal cords and embedded in my esophagus -swallowed, with grief and need and something else that goes down bitter like bile.
it takes me a while to realize, but when i am somewhere between empty and half-full, that in those minutes nothing is tangible. i am letting loose more than my dinner, i am flushing away my past present future all in one flick of my wrist and turn of my fingers.
in that moment, i am far from infinite, but rather nothing at all.
ii.
a boy fell in love with a girl four years ago, and now all he has left is me.
i have tried to tell him that her star went out -that it imploded and exploded and is nothing but a black hole now. she is dust motes and debris; a dandelion hearted girl, blown away with the wind. 
hey, i whisper, you know, you know: i'm no good. no good at all. i'm like a stain that never comes out -i
saltwater veinsi spend every summer
in the one i lost
two years ago.
where i spent too long
in the looking glass,
hours lost
to my reflection:
tumbling through
to try and find
a child with
evergreen eyes
and a voice
like the waves.
tried,
but all i found
was a girl
worn down
to her bones.
all seafoam sighs
and a chasmal chest,
she whispered:

let me die.
she was blue
only from the saltwater
her mother's ghost
left in her veins,
rusted red
at the wrists.
she stood there,
spectral, tawny
haired and pale,
parting her just-
pink lips:
please.
posion ivyi can't promise i'll always remember how to breathe.
but i've learned to keep my mouth shut unless it's leaning in to meet yours, and even though that's come at the expense of words, everyone tells me it's best if what i swallow, stays down. and even though you call me fragile, you have to hold me tight, and hope when i balk, my legs don't splinter this time instead of nearly hitting the floor. and i don't know what to tell you this is --some call it chronic depression or seasonal affective disorder, but my doctor told me just to drink more milk, and my grandmother tells me the best vitamin d comes from the sun.
but milk makes me shutter at one hundred and twenty per 2% glass, and i blister and boil under the sun until my skin is kissed with cancer. and depression, we all know i've always had, but it shrinks and grows, uncontrollably, like the ivy on my grandmother's house. she tore each vine down two summers ago and even still, it left moonlight streaked against the wooden shingles th
footprints  some days you are absent,

 and i sit waiting even if i know, that although
 your bike is parked at the usual spot,
 you'll be nowhere to be seen.

i never ask where you've been.

maybe you found a place where heartbeats sound
like autumn leaves swirling in the wind.

maybe you just couldn't face me.

  and you wear silence like a wedding gown,
  soft silk sewn together with a brutal honesty.

  there is no going back.

(she threw her regrets off a mountain, memories
carving their way through the cold stone, slowly forming

a waterfall

and now she feels no thirst, only
a longing slowly drowning her.)

in the end, you had to
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jointedi remember days of holding your hands 
and swearing they felt so heavy, 
the synovial fluid that welled up 
around your joints was liquid lead
for years i wished to give you
one thousand of my white blood cells
for each day i had to leave you 
stranded on the kitchen floor
and when i finally learned the words
i wanted to tell you: 
the doctors never made you stronger
with any injection or titanium bones
but you did yourself
every morning you stood 
and opened your eyes
because today, 
a woman asked me 
if i would like to take home flowers for you
and i wanted to ask if in the coolers 
she had enough yellow roses
to fill the spaces between your 
kneecaps and every joint that ever ached
so maybe you would come back alive
if i could promise
pain wouldn't greet you 
thirteen steps to falling in love1. i spend the first two years we know each other sprawled out in the back of our school bus, trying to befriend girls with cigarette ash for skin. it takes months of letting tar settle in my lungs, but finally i find myself sitting next to you. 
2. when we we're fourteen, you write out my name in an entirely new alphabet of obtuse triangles and right angles and dare me to guess who it is you like. i lie my way through the entire school year until two weeks before summer, when you give me all the clues.
3. to this day, you swear you fell in love with me the fall my mother was given her expiration date. i tell you the first morning of our sophomore year, and even though we are too scared to touch, your words would mean more than every heavy embrace up until her funeral.
4. you watch me fall down the stairs just once, and after seeing how i fold in on myself, swear never to see me hurt again. for four years you've caught me, and have amended that promise to try your b
on growing lonelyi'm not about to mention the way your lips curl around your cigarette, because i know you no longer have a lover. 
because i'm sure you would swallow them whole if it would help, if they could ignite your heart the way her hands used to. instead, i know you'll reach for any alcohol in the house, in hopes the way it burns can erase the ways ghosts glide between your ribcage each night, tumbling out your mouth as soon as you rise. you swear you haven't dreamed a single night in the three years since she died, so you stay awake for hours past midnight, praying for delirium to cast her on the side of the bed you can hardly bring yourself to touch, since the last thirteen years you have of her in pictures are hollow compared to the woman you first kissed. 
so you go to the doctor she used to see in hopes he can tell you what fraction of the pain she felt you feel in your spine, walk on beaches once the sun goes down so maybe the bits of her in the sea will make
posion ivyi can't promise i'll always remember how to breathe.
but i've learned to keep my mouth shut unless it's leaning in to meet yours, and even though that's come at the expense of words, everyone tells me it's best if what i swallow, stays down. and even though you call me fragile, you have to hold me tight, and hope when i balk, my legs don't splinter this time instead of nearly hitting the floor. and i don't know what to tell you this is --some call it chronic depression or seasonal affective disorder, but my doctor told me just to drink more milk, and my grandmother tells me the best vitamin d comes from the sun.
but milk makes me shutter at one hundred and twenty per 2% glass, and i blister and boil under the sun until my skin is kissed with cancer. and depression, we all know i've always had, but it shrinks and grows, uncontrollably, like the ivy on my grandmother's house. she tore each vine down two summers ago and even still, it left moonlight streaked against the wooden shingles th
undressingi wish i could peel myself
out of this skin,
the way you do my body
from dresses
unzip me at the side
slowly, and let my flesh pool
around my feet like snow
drifts, pale and streaked
with purples, pinks,
and etchings aged
bloodless white
let me stay
warm beneath you,
until seasons pass
and all that's left
of these old stories
are small, snow-kissed
mountain tops
and unravel me,
so i can forget
the boundaries of this body,
so i mustn't shrink or slice
to feel sunlight on my bones
on loving lengthwisei.
in my near-nineteen years of life i have never wanted something, someone so much.
[no, i swear, not even death itself]
ii.
waking up without you hurts.
even though you don't have one, i slept with my webcam on last night so maybe you could catch a glimpse of me sleeping.
you say i shiver in dreamland, and i tell you that's because i hardly dream --there is nothing in my mind then but grey matter and cold air,  because even with the heat blasting at seventy and four fleece blankets, i have trouble making my own warmth.
you told me that even so, i was smiling. and i said that though i don't remember, the only explanation would be that i was dreaming of you --before you were mine, you were my only dreams worth remembering. now, you're the only ones i ever have.
iii.
going out in winter seems colder than ever without you here.
it makes me think of years ago, when i found that without flesh, it is impossible to insulate bones. you would sit next to me every morning on the bus, and f

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[x]

resolute

:iconalloendreams:

this year, my resolutions won't be stuffed into my bedside drawer. i'm not going to roll them up like a cigarette, small and deadly, and tuck them into my pocket. i won't let them rot there, and remember them only when they're small, pilly pieces on my favorite sweater when it comes out from the dryer, forgotten by the time i pull each piece off, letter by letter.

because i've never realized until now, but my resolutions are the outline for a book that's always misplaced or miswritten, so coffee stained and battered that by the time the winds of december come to turn its pages, there isn't a single word to touch. because, instead of my novel or a chapter, i write myself an anthology. i title it regrets and feed it to the fire, burn away the past year and my chance at every single thing i could have learned.

but this year, before i sliced open the spine and tore out each and every syllable, i stopped. i read.

and, for once, these aren't regrets, but things i know i need to change.

i. i swear to learn to press down on the gas pedal of a car without leaving it in park, to sit in the driver's seat without shaking, and to remember to breathe when i finally pull out of the driveway.

ii. i will read the written word, plow through my stack of fifty cent paperbacks saved from library sales and stay awake reading instead of lying in bed at night staring at my wrists or counting the cranes pinned to my ceiling each morning. 

iii. i will keep a journal, and write no less than once a week, at least five lines. and there will not be just sadness --i will write about love and exhilaration and small things, like good cups of coffee with good people i've yet to know and dusty flea market treasures. 

iv. i will not be unrealistic. i will not demand of myself never to put my fingers down my throat again, or to never place a blade to my skin. i will simply ask that i try, and forgive when trying is not enough. 

v. i will try to find closure. i will write letters and send them out to sea this may in the same waters where my sorrow grows. i will allow myself to cry until i feel i have let enough sadness out that, were i to swim then and there, i would not sink or want to.

vi. i will stop fearing life. i will stop fearing love. i will remember that if life is an ocean, it is for it's beauty, not it's depth. and that love is not an anchor, but a buoy if you let it be.

vii. i will stop trying to shrink, and learn to grow.
:iconalloendreams:
for the lovely =Sammur-amat's contest 2013 and a time machine

i feel as if i kept this a bit simple as a literal list, but i suppose i needed it done this way.

step one: keep reading
step two: pick a journal, new or old and started. write.
step three: make use of the permit you got today. don't cry again, even if it is from happiness.
step four: remember personal "starter meal plan". eat. take medicine for reflux so it won't be as terrible.
--and continue.
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:iconsuemao:
~suemao Apr 17, 2013
Darling, I haven't been able to read your work in quite some time, but now I remember just why I've fallen in love with it--with you. You are so strong, so brave, so wonderful, and such an amazing friend :heart:
Reply
:iconkj-illustration:
*KJ-Illustration Feb 2, 2013  Professional Digital Artist
Hi, congrats on winning a place in the 2013 and a Time Machine Competition :dummy:
To celebrate it even more; you've been featured here: [link]

:heart:
Reply
:iconalloendreams:
~AlloenDreams Feb 7, 2013
oh, thank you! :heart:
Reply
:iconsammur-amat:
=Sammur-amat Jan 27, 2013   General Artist
CONGRATULATIONS!! :squee:

You have placed in the 2013 AND A TIME MACHINE- A New Year's Contest :heart: :heart: :heart:

Expect your prizes from me within the next 24 hours and the prizes of our generous donors hopefully within the week. Congratulations once again! :tighthug:
Reply
:iconalloendreams:
~AlloenDreams Jan 30, 2013
ah, thank you so much! the contest was wonderful; i'll be sure to look at the other entries, too. :heart:
Reply
:iconsammur-amat:
=Sammur-amat Feb 1, 2013   General Artist
You are so very welcome! :la:
I'm glad you had fun, lovely lady! Congratulations once more! :tighthug:
Reply
:icongatahada:
~gatahada Jan 21, 2013  Student General Artist
This is a great plan. I sowld do one for myself.
Reply
:iconalloendreams:
~AlloenDreams Jan 23, 2013
i've never followed through myself, but i'm really going to try this year. sometimes it's small things you can put on there that make a big difference, so if you feel up to it, i'd give it a try. :heart:
Reply
:icongatahada:
~gatahada Jan 24, 2013  Student General Artist
to raise myself small (sometimes very small) goals has always worked for me, that gives me confidence to face the following but I've never tried to writ them before :)
Reply
:iconflummoxative:
~Flummoxative Jan 17, 2013  Hobbyist Writer
:heart:
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