Found You There
Found you there. In a sad and scary place. Your bottom teeth had shifted and your knuckles weren’t so bloody anymore. A million and one calls of “I’m gonna do it, I swear I’m gonna do it”; a million and two “knock it off”s. Windy were the nights that we slept with the music quietly fading to the backround. There were boys with tan skin and boys with freckles under their eyes. When you left, I said goodbye because no one else would and the next thing we knew, out-of-state wasn’t so ‘in’ anymore.
Found you there. Waiting at the train station dull-eyed and mysterious to my mother. Your lips were dry like your humor and you sucked out every ounce of light blue hope I carried from my veins. I never meant a thing to you anyway. You were a stranger in the wrong place at the right time. Then again, you could have said the same for me when I wound up in your bed half naked at dusk. My arms were shaky like an old drawbridge, but you looked best under the glow of the waning April moon.
Found you there. At the bottom of the pill bottle, trying to crawl out. Your neck was at a ninety degree angle as you snored the demons away. The basement was wrecked and all I could picture was hide-and-go-seek in the crawlspace beneath the tv. Your brother looking out for me, both literally and figuratively. The same broken rooms with the same hollow walls. But it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.
And I am always finding people. The truth of it floats in transparent waves and sinks to the floor when I turn my head. When the ends of the pens are gnawed off and the skin inside my mouth is shredded, only then do I wonder why. Much like the way we long to see the insides of the homes we used to own once new families have settled their furniture. The visions in my head of what could have happened but never did keep me up all night. It’s hard to find peace in empty spaces waiting to be filled again.
To Fly Up & Onward
Birdcages. They were fake and her mother’s hands were wrinkled; white and delicate. But then again not a thing in that basement wasn’t white and delicate. There are so many pictures of my curly, blonde hair. Watermelon patterns on my white one-piece, not a stain in sight.
You sewed me a blanket, hand-stitched and filled with cotton. I like to think that everyone strived to be as kind and warm as you were. Maybe it isn’t their fault that they failed. Never speak ill of anyone.
Things moved out of the basement and into a little corner shop. Her mother’s hands were shaky and so the writing inside of the birthday cards grew harder to read each year. Customers would come in with their white teeth and shiny eyes and I would watch soap operas in the back room.
In an apartment building with long hallways that seemed boundless, you found god, or at least I like to think so. Hospitals don’t intrigue me. The birds were no longer in their cages, but inside of glass display cases instead. Cases with perfect lighting.
"One day you fall for this boy. And he touches you with his fingers. And he burns holes in your skin with his mouth. And it hurts when you look at him. And it hurts when you don’t. And it feels like someone’s cut you open with a jagged piece of glass."
-The Tracey FragmentsAll Dressed Up With No Where To Go
I’ve been talking about the days of the week like they’re people. Sunday left me with sour cliches by the dozen and Monday meant rolling over to an unempty side of the bed. Spring brings swollen eyes, gingerale, and the chords to “Safe In Your Skin”. It bears brand new bones that have been hollowed of all the mislead intentions and wrong-wayed directions.
The nights are growing younger, and the stars in the sky keep stealing the sleep from my lashes. There’s much planning to be done, but it half-rains when I think about the future. Yeah it half-rains when I think about you too, and that’s just fine with me.
I am still convinced that this set changed my life one way or another (despite how short it was in length and despite how awkward I may look in my purple t-shirt). It also just further proves the point that the Philly/South Jersey area has one of the best music scenes out there. P.S. - I still get full body chills at 17:36.
A Ballad Of Blood
It was warm in the winter and cold in the spring and your baseball cap sat still on my carpet awaiting your next arrival.
I laid eye level with the scruff on your chin as you picked at what was left of the ghosts in my brain. Every time I was next to you, the pit of my stomach swallowed the rest of me whole. Every time I was next to you, I knew I’d have words to offer about it later. You kissed the corners of my mouth and I squeezed your cheeks until they were concave. The blood running through your veins played an unfamiliar song. One in which the tempo is uneven and the lyrics can hardly be heard. Your heart was my home away from here, at least until I was caged like a bird beneath your ribs. Bits and pieces of me got left behind, and my mother taught me not to lie, but I kept on telling people that I was whole again.
And I wonder sometimes; if the doctor’s sliced you open, would your vessels still hum the same tune?
The Insides Of My Eyelids
I. Our apartment atop of the news store. Lucky was a puppy and there was a seat in the shower and I was afraid to sleep in my room so I spent every night on the air mattress by my parent’s bedside. The girl from school who shared the same uniform and the same name as me; we played hang man on my dusty, green chalkboard by the window that overlooked the sweaty workers and incomprehensible Brazilian words floated down the street toward the train tracks. Heavy cigar boxes. Heavy, heavy cigar boxes and the price tag gun. Poppers, Boost slushies, ignorance. The back office, the bills, ignorance. Til’ it all came together.
II. The second two-seater of the bus. I couldn’t see my face in the driver’s over-head mirror, but I’m sure I didn’t want to. Late afternoon in the middle of a sunny thunderstorm, thinking “where’d it all go wrong?”.
III. My sister’s bedroom floor: 3:30 a.m. His arm over my chipped shoulder. Deep breathing to a light snore. Every little bit of what we had left felt right. And I rolled over in my sleep and I opened my eyes to “I love you” and I will never forget the moon that night. Or how he wanted to be there with me. Through the sad and the sorry and the sleep. He was always just there.
IV. Green. Dark, moss green walls ready to crumble, stricken with addiction and abuse and dead cats. The sunken in chair on the far side of the room that only lit up one side of her face. Oatmeal raisin cookies and Go Fish. Porcelain dolls and taffies and singing about Jesus in my head as I pretended to know how to play the keys of the grand piano. The way the bedroom looked when the last of the bunch was gone, may she rest in peace. And the way no one would open the door to the bedroom straight across the hall, which was just okay.
V. The big, open house with lots of spaces. We pretended to like metal music and dug a huge bonfire pit out back. They used to talk about sex on the loft and I would pretend to enjoy playing Guitar Hero in the basement. The whole thing was a lost cause and a waste of time and I cried like a baby when we got home at night because everything was changing too quickly for my liking.
Laugh Lines & Sad Songs
See, I grew up learning to love the smell of Marlboro Ultra Lights, so you should understand that the first time I tasted stale Camels on your crooked teeth, everything changed. The ground beneath our feet trembled as you took interest in the color of my eyes, and I got lost in your delicately placed laugh lines. You became a safe place for me, but I burrowed my body in too deep. It was unclear and uncertain until everything, everywhere, everyone began to take the shape of you. Cafes, windshield wipers, shadows, sidewalk cracks, even the moon in the middle of the night.
And I sat around praying through the screen in my bedroom window that the happiest songs reminded you of me, and the sad ones too. We were just kids, or at least I was, and you were the first thing that was real to me. Real enough to touch and real enough to believe and real enough to trust and chase and sleep next to. That’s what I miss the most I think; sleeping next to you. Because every time we woke up, I wasn’t afraid.
