prose

stone fruit

in



This was summer. This was summer in all its glory, full-throated and poignant, none of autumn’s fine cool light or springtime’s indistinct haze. This was brassy sunshine and the turn of a young girl’s ankle in the grass — beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. His hand between my frail bare shoulder blades and the sun-warmed bronze of my summer-skin, nights that came too early and left too soon. The world was coming up verdant and green, the sky wild and disordered with stars, and around us a lonely city breathed light.

I was so tired of living in a place where we condemned all that we couldn’t understand. I loved him but he did not love me: the beginnings of a dozen different songs, each sweeter and softer than the last. I had the words but not the voice, no melody with which to sing them. So I held them inside, rib cage forced full of hollow space, every inhalation a rhythm. 

I remember the way the light fell lurid and golden, the loam soft beneath my feet. This is how it always will be, he was telling me. You will never be free. You will always fall for him and he will always ruin you — you will always emerge as something less than you were before. Summer in its loveliness, so solemn and so sad, the bittersweetness of it all in the back of my throat. It ached, and it was beautiful, and I missed him terribly: brassy gold hair soft as a fawn’s throat and cropped short, green-gray eyes and a shy smile. Being without him was almost like living in a world without color: but if you’d never known it, how could you be expected to miss it?

We do not serve one another by obeying temptation — I know that better now. I see him in everyone and everyone in him; summer still steals the breath from my lungs after all this time. I was so sorry that he ended up being one of “those”, warm and promising as his infrequent smiles, but ultimately just as empty as he claimed me to be. So instead I am writing this letter, one that I will never put in the mail, never address, never seal in an envelope. I can’t say that I don’t know why we hurt the people we want the most. I know it’s because I wanted him to reach for me. 

One confession: I still don’t know what love is. I know that it’s one step below obsession and one above compassion, sideways of affection and in between want and infatuation. I hear that it’s supposed to be perfect and selfless, but the extent of my knowledge begins to fade to black when I think about all the times I could have done better. 

So I might not know what love is — but I do think I know what it’s not. 

call us liars

in

I think I saw you first in a dream. Broad face like a cat’s and vulpine cheekbones, eyebrows long as brush strokes and slender as willow leaves. You had a luminescent and open quality to your features, like an elf’s or a seraphim’s, that everyone always mistook for innocence. As a result you were an interesting creature, impatient and unlovely in nature, but still somehow magnetic. People always watched you. You drew eyes like flies to honey.

Now I imagine you reading my words, every syllable and intonation, every hidden turn of phrase that I worked so hard to conceal. You will never know that this is about you.

You were like a language I’d once known but had now forgotten, a song whose melody escapes me entirely. I used to imagine the pair of us far out to nowhere, in the poignant empty plains where I could rest my head and where you could sleep. A beat-up car with a broken radio, the sky disordered and wild with stars. I had a dozen different dreams and you were in every one of them. I remember running my hand through your dark cropped hair, soft as a fawn’s throat and shorn close, and the heartbreaking blue of your eyes. You sat outside of the motel with your gaze shaded, feet kicked up on the railing, a bottle of cheap off-brand soda in one hand and a fifth of Swedish vodka in the other. I would have burned the world down for you, I remember telling you—and you smiled then like I’d meant it. Maybe I had.

We both liked to drive just before the rain, loved how the light always held itself in just a certain way. The gleam of sunshine throwing a gleam onto the gold of your dark hair, your frail wrists—too slender for a man, too slender, but marked also with gruesome tattoos. How many tattoos do you have? I asked you once, and you said you didn’t know — you’d forgotten, just as you’d forgotten so much else.

How quickly someone you know becomes someone you knew. We kept to ourselves in the darkest ways, abusing shot glasses filled with tepid vodka and pints of sweet whiskey-rye. We’d each sworn that people belong to people and not to a place; we promised we’d never part. But I didn’t belong to you, and you didn’t belong to me, and our brief mistakes—shirts and jackets strewn across the room, you holding me up against the wall with a hand over my mouth—vanished  as soon as we each left the bed.

“Another secret,” you would always say before you left. I didn’t know if you meant the shame or the scratches down your back, and it wasn’t my place to ask. 

sober

in

I was killing myself from the start, my initial decomposition originating at the vulnerable age of 18. Death meant nothing in those years. I was obsessed with life, and light, and all the glorious strains of sun on my honey-hued shoulders. Existence was like a vibrant summer, even then; it came too early and left too soon.

But what does that even mean—a beginning? The pain only comes when you remember. I have blurred vision from those days, my eyesight slightly skewed, the memories drawing only further and further away. Sweet honey whiskey and the poorest vodka, the forest evergreen of gin. How many mornings did I wake in someone else's bed, head heavy and tongue filmed with alcohol, the evening before nothing but a dizzying blur? 

I remember one solitary July night, redolent with silence and the spice of summer blooms, the nocturnal heat seeping into my skin. I was watching your garden die, sunflowers swooning and tulips gracefully bowing their heads, you observing me from across the loam. It wasn’t long before wandering hands caught up with wandering eyes — the blaze of touch trailing white hot along your fingertips. Soft sighs. Reclusion. Isolation blurring the lines of want. You mapped me out with your hands, gentler than I deserved and gentler than I’d come to expect. I would have burned the world for you, you know. I burned myself instead.

Whoever said time heals all wounds had never seen ours, and I was unsure which pain was worse: the shock of what happened or the ache that we never would. I’d opened my heart so that I could breathe and instead only choked on the gusty air, the emptiness of all that space between us. I wanted so badly to transform, to reassemble the structure of the bones within me. To become someone – anyone – else. I was not so lucky.

“Fall for him, but don’t let him ruin you.”

But it was too late for that – I’d stumbled headfirst into your world, spent days at a time drinking on your moth-eaten couch, you running your fingertips along my slender forearm. One taste of whiskey and I could not go without it: then followed the pills, the painkillers, the stimulants which stirred me into a manic frenzy. There’s always a deeper wound, if you know just where to look. And mine had always been you.

It ended between us in silence, in the solitary glow of a kitchen light at midnight, us both strangers to the other. I measure love by how it ends; you always missed me more than you loved me. And when you left, so did I – two diverging paths in the midwest, open plains and aching blue sky, both of us washed in a beautiful loneliness. This was love, I came to believe: the leaving. And I could think of nothing worse than that. 

manic

in , ,

hypomania:

when it feels good: The swing seems to begin with disrupted sleep — or is it the other way around? When I was 21 I stayed up long nights after long nights, and spent days enmeshed in grand ideas while scorning the idea of rest.

I feel a pleasurable amount of energy or sense of wired irritability, the sense that someone has taped my eyes open and given me an injection to keep me awake—a ridiculous display of hyperactivity. My body simply can’t stop. Things seem clear, profound, dramatic.

Restless but focused, capable, clearheaded and smiling, despite having slept less than 10 hours the last four days combined. When I wake up I feel briefly miserable but it passes in moments. I snap at my mom when she asks if I’m “having an episode”. No, I say, I am not. Coffee makes me euphoric. I am not out of control. To the contrary, I am perfectly in control: a beautifully-functioning human being, much more talkative than most but not engaging in anything overtly dangerous.

I find myself hilarious. I form witty dialogues in my head and use them aloud, making everyone me laugh; their appreciation washes me in a beautiful sense of well-being.

I always feel witty, more attractive than I actually am. Aches and pains vanish. There is so much going on around me and the world seems profoundly beautiful, much mores than it ever has before. My body feels as if it’s buzzing with pleasure. I have the perfect amount of energy; I am awake, present, and euphoric. Everything makes me laugh and I have to comment on it all. I seek out customers at work almost as if I’m being pressured to do so. I have so many ideas; I am constantly planning things out in my head and carry them around with me, desperately, all day until I can tell a parent or a friend, because the concept seems vitally important for some strange intangible reason. I do not need to eat, or to sleep; hunger is an afterthought or disappears altogether. and I keep thinking about Alaska. Alaska, Alaska, Alaska. Life is full of an unseen beauty.

when it feels bad: I am irritable, uncomfortable in my own skin, wide awake and fully aware of everything that is going on around me. within me there is a certain thread of distress, although I don’t know where it’s coming from. I am impressed that i’ve been awake for the extent of time that I have and/or I try and fall asleep and wake up after less than a half hour, my body coursing with energy or my heart pounding. When I’m not irritable I make plans, particularly volunteering ones. I cry over videos of abused animals. I have ridiculous ideas, like that I’m going to go to Alaska, and am searching for tickets because it seems like a GREAT idea. I have a restless energy but no pleasurable sense of elation. I do talk—a LOT. and I talk over people. my thoughts come hard and fast and they feel more important than everyone else’s. I decide to change my major to biology (what the hell was I thinking?). When I lay down and close my eyes after hours upon hours of consciousness I know that there is no point. my insomnia is past insomnia: something has plunged my whole self into wakefulness. I jump back up, go back onto the computer and search for plane tickets. I feel good but also worry that my brain may go out of control. when I go out with my friends I drink a good deal of vodka because I know it will make me pass out, but instead it just makes my thoughts more poignant, pressed and elusive. two, three hours of sleep and I am awake again, searching for something that i’ll never find. I do not surround myself with people—I know that my talking will drive them up the wall. I ensconce myself in a castle of my own mind. After a few days of my sleep having vanished entirely, I feel vaguely like a prisoner.

true mania:

What was before a sense of pleasure, sureness and occasional euphoria has morphed into utter rapture.

Words can’t describe it: boundlessness, expansiveness, fullness. I am sublime. I realize I feel differently as I walk from the break room back to work—everything around me is so bright that it’s painful and I feel like the world is light as air. I feel as if I have wings; I am propelled, thrumming with energy and a euphoria beyond euphoria. It is at last ten times the sense of elation I had when I was given Dilaudid in the hospital. it is beyond that and more.

I instantly feel pity for those who have to shoot up amphetamines to feel like this—and at one point I almost feeling like crying, as if I’m touching dimensions that were previously hidden from me. Around me the world unfolds with a painless precision. I find that my previously shortened attention rate is almost gone; I flicker from thing to thing, aimless, but unable to stop the compulsion.

I have an uncomfortable amount of energy within me now. It causes me physical pain to stand still for longer than a few seconds. When a coworker comes to talk to me, I get the impression that she believes I’m on cocaine. I begin to talk too fast, to laugh too much—I can only realize this looking back. People begin to look at me strangely and ask me to repeat things. They can’t keep up with the perfect stream of my mind.

Self-confidence is through the roof—actually, I am beyond self-confidence, as I am beyond everything else. people are miniscule, unimportant. I’m sure they are perfectly nice people, but they don’t matter right now. who cares what they think? I smile so fully at them because I have a secret that they don’t. I am touching something they will never get to touch. I try to explain these feelings to people that do matter, but they just give me looks of alarm. I probably sound crazy.

The world is cartwheeling, carouseling around me. The walls breathe. My senses are heightened to utter exactness. I can hear everything—a whisper off in a corner, a laugh to my right. I am one with nature, with everything. I feel everything, see everything, hear everything.

I drift, I waltz, I float... who knows? All I know is that I’m touching something previously untouchable, reached some unforeseen height. My thoughts are slippery, here one moment and gone the next, mere fragments. my life has a greater purpose than I thought. I can do anything; absolutely anything. I realize that if someone told me to jump off of a building because I could fly, I would do it.

I am driven towards others and it is almost painful. I must speak; and I DO speak, over them, interrupting them, stopping them. I must be in contact with people—I must! but they are too slow for me, and they frustrate me. When I speak they give me strange looks. But what I’m saying is making perfect sense.

Energy boundless, overflowing, in excess—words come perfectly to me at first but soon they are muddled, hurried, rushed. Thoughts are like stars. Everything makes sense; everything is connected. My brain is a perfect machine but it is getting out of control. Cannot stop moving. And yet I don’t care; I don’t acknowledge it. This is the most beautiful thing I have ever felt and will ever feel. it makes the joy of mere happiness feel muted and grey and drab. it is ecstasy, wild and pure and endless. I think that even true love pales before this feeling—this “feeling”, whatever it is. All I know is that I hold the world in my hand, and I don’t want to let go.

asleep at the wheel

in ,



You’re no one from a past life, not a stranger who I know. I’ve never seen you on the street, crossed the lines to avoid your gaze - you’re entirely unfamiliar, the hard-set bones of your face amorphous in the settling light. I try to score these words with rhythms, a pattern to make sense of the disarray. But you’re no one to me, and as close as I draw you will only grow further away.

The wrong consonants skip off my tongue. Sentiment. Fondness. Preoccupation. You’re what never quite fits. I’ve written and erased these lines a dozen times and yet it doesn’t grow easier, explaining in words what can only be understood without them. 

In my head you take up more space than you should be allowed. Of course I’ve thought of you somewhere far out to nowhere, head bowed against the receding honey-colored light, reticent and quiet and without words; sometimes our souls take photographs of things they have wanted but never seen. Just don’t idealize me, you said - there’s nothing in me worth idealizing. But it’s so easy to see the goodness in anyone but yourself.

I can see you like this: curled into yourself like a question mark, a cigarette hanging from your mouth, smoke dizzying the air around you. You, bent over at the waist with a bottle of cheap whiskey in your hand, sweet captured sunlight and the face you make when you swallow; your hair, the profusion of it made darker by the cast of light. I see you this way, then; lonely, and proud, and proud of that loneliness. This is what you do to keep the fear at bay: surround yourself with those whose hurts mirror yours, the deepest cuts of the dullest blades. Quiet eyes, your wrist flicking a lit cigarette out of the car window so that it sparks on the oily streets. Yes, I want to tell you - I think that I understand. But I don’t have the courage.

I want to dream myself into a place that I’ve never known. “Another world is possible,” I’ve read - broken hearts and broken bones, the widening of streets and of water. God help you, the priest told me the last time I entered a church - but it wasn’t what he really meant. May you help yourself. I see beers overflowing the icebox, shot glasses lined up like bullets, wine in tiny cups. I see this, and I see you, and I see the path we’ve left behind: my vices have always interested you more than my virtues. I don’t blame you for that. I don’t blame you for anything, this world that cut us astray, and I don’t blame all of my sins for looking just like you.

"you remind me of everyone"

in

I think so often now about all the places we saw together. I can’t imagine New York without you in it, the velvet darkness as it fell over the city and how the buildings came alive under its spell. I remember the tilt of light in late Boston afternoons, half-full glasses of whiskey that looked like they drank up the sun and that lonely smell of the sea. Then Oregon, always Oregon, how the mountains dropped abruptly into the wild air and how we were all so breathless with the thrill, looking endlessly down. I remember sitting on the pull-out bed in our hotel room and writing about I thought these days of adventure might be the happiest times of my life. I’ve been wrong about so much, but I wasn’t wrong about that.

It’s too late now and I know this. But sometimes I still dream I’m in the mountains -- and you’re there, you as how I remember you, with your black hair and bright eyes, the wonderful surprise of your laugh. You’re never any older in my dreams; and then I realize with a sinking heart that you’ll never be any older when I wake up.

The world goes on even if the people within it don’t. I know they say you shouldn’t regret anything, that you’ll regret the things you haven’t done more than the ones that you have. But I also know that the people who say that haven’t made my mistakes.

It’s harder than it used to be to look both forward and back. I remember being very young, the glossy sheen of western sunshine on my legs and the earth underneath my back, the weight of the sky as I peered upward. In those days my skin was almost as dark as yours. I remember telling you that I’d heard someone say before that because this wasn’t heaven we didn’t have to be perfect. It was just earth. You told me that no one ever has to be perfect, because no one ever is.

I was never warned how a place can be marked so deeply by a life. When I go up north now, sit on the porch in the still evenings and look out on the water, I try to see it as clearly as you once did. I count the gray-white birds as they skim across the glass surface of the lake, and I try to memorize everything about it that you ever loved.

homeland

in

I wrote the most beautiful things when I was in love with you. Existence was a perpetual autumn even in winter, dizzy and windswept, the colors of life somehow louder than sound. Everything a memory waiting to turn to anguish. Everything an echo of something else.


I was only ever a dreamer in those days, and maybe that’s the kindest thing I can say of anyone: that beside the ache of loneliness, the serpentine curl of dread, there was that unmistakable sense of returning somewhere I’d been before yet had never wanted to leave. And maybe, selfishly, that’s why I loved you: because you’d always felt like home.


And I realized that it would always feel like something had been taken from me, every single time. Because I would always be the one left standing, and they would always be the ones to depart; because in the prism of my memories they would remain the way they were as I loved them first. And how to tell anyone that I stumbled into fondness so easily, to please be merciful if they couldn’t be kind, that once I sensed they were alive in the same way I was that they would never die?


Sometimes I feel people’s kindnesses curling under the edges of my vulnerability like fingertips. It makes me wary, and it’s impossible to explain what I’m positive most others wouldn’t understand. And anyhow, I’m half-certain that words would diminish it regardless, that words are for those who don’t know a thing as innately as I do: like how when we describe love, or passion, or fear, we describe everything around it but the emotion itself. Faulkner explained it best: how once you felt it, you wouldn’t need words any longer. You’d know. 


Looking up at the starry emptiness felt like an ending and I knew it was. To some any kind of death is a beginning and to others a cessation and to others a rebirth; to me it’s a stillness. 


In my head, I did everything right. I was gentler and so were they. I turn my mom’s words over like stones in my mind, trying to make sense of them: “I promise you that there is no such thing as too much kindness.” I try to carry it with me. I try to soften myself against the world and I remember that inescapable feeling when I saw you first in the city, your wind-curled hair and strange dark eyes. I don’t have the words for it, but I don’t need them. I just know.

the shadows will never find you

in , ,

Sometimes I think about what it would have been like if we’d known one another as kids, bruise-kneed and bloody-knuckled, lapping at our charred fingers as we held them too close to the fire. The vigor of summer underneath our feet, slanted green light in our eyes; swinging skinny knees over the docks to vanish into the water, slick as eels. And the strangest part of all is that sometimes it does seem real; sometimes it does feel as if I’ve known you all this time, in another place, maybe, another world.

And in that world, maybe none of the bad things would have happened. Maybe I wouldn’t have done things I couldn’t take back. Maybe I wouldn’t have fallen in love with all of the wrong people. Maybe you’d be happier, maybe I’d be less anxious, less wary. Maybe we wouldn’t fly so deliriously high. Maybe we wouldn’t be addicted to the glow of a bottle, that heavy head tilt back when you know you’ve hit the sweet spot, when you know that for that single moment, you’re okay.

You’re gonna be okay.

And – here is where my heart tightens – maybe in another world, you wouldn’t have lost your dad, and I wouldn’t have lost my mom.

Maybe you understand me better than I understand myself; maybe the inverse is also true, and maybe that’s why we speak in code, all the little things we grasp about one another without the benefit of words. Maybe it’s why, to me, you have never been less than beautiful. So many miles between us and absolutely none between our hearts. And god, it’s so fucking cliche, but cliches are cliches for a reason – because at their core there’s often a ring of truth.

There are so many things I want. I want to kiss your cheek and hug you so tight you squeak and try to pull away; I want to bring you to the lakeshore, so we can dip our ankles in the water against the backdrop of the archaic mansions; I want to take you downtown with our stupid hats and our stupid t-shirts, sitting in a dive bar with three hundred pound men and play darts and drinking games until we’re kicked out onto the empty Detroit streets.

All of my greatest love stories have been with the friends I couldn’t bear to leave behind.

In some ways, you are my salvation from the mundane, from the dregs of depression, from the paranoia, from the false promises spoken on honest tongues – “You’ll be okay, I’ll never leave you, you’ll be okay, I don’t care what happens, I will always love you. Always, always, always. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. I am here.”

Because when you say it, I believe it.

I see things in you, beneath that crown of snow-white hair. Your head is bloody but unbowed; your eyes look towards the sky.

It honestly amazes me, how you’re always looking towards the sky.

I don’t ever want you to look down again.

if I can only say one thing,

in , ,

it will have to be this.

I remember the first day we met; and that’s strange, because I can’t say that about anyone but you. You, with your leg warmers and flats and anxious smile in the middle of math class, turning to slip me a note with your palm faced-down, giant green eyes flashing with mischief, like you wanted so badly to know me — or like you already did.

We aren’t defined by what we keep with us, but by what we leave behind. 

The moon is brilliant on the lake tonight, and the water is like glass, and the wind has an atmospheric chill. Everywhere around me, the world is decaying, but fall to me has always been that season of beginning, of rebirth. And purely by luck (or not), it’s also the season I began to fall in love with you.

‘Fall in love with you.’ Most people don’t understand that, and it frustrates me, because any half-decent friendship is its own kind of love story, its own romance. The initial courting, the exhilaration, the involuntary bursts of laughter, hidden jokes, hidden smiles. I told you everything I’d ever done; you told me everything you’d ever wanted. And, I think, we loved each other all the more — it was that rare kinship, like we’d met elsewhere, in this world or the one before. 

I want to describe our friendship in words, but words can only do so much; they’re the ache, the anticipation, everything around it but the promise itself. 

It’s the air after rain, the stillness after a storm; me, curled up on your bed and you on the floor, coaxing me back into gentleness, reassuring me, yes, it’s okay, you can love who you love, we all love who we love and there’s no shame in it. My heavy eyelids flickering up and my hazel gaze, light and illuminated, catching yours: your friendship purer than what I thought I felt for her, or for him, or for her. We love who we love. Do you know how many times I’ve thought back to those nights sleeping in bed with your cats, watching horror movies until we could sleep no longer?

Maybe you do.

Language is a struggle, something that can’t express all that you hope to convey. They say love is sex, love is lust, but for me — it’s always been my closest friends and me, curled up in bedsheets, shielding ourselves from the oncoming rain. Nothing will ever kill the way I care for you.

The light will rise soon, and everything is coming up green. The world might change, but I can promise you this: nothing between us ever will.