I am more than this.

Too often I find myself huddled in an overly hushed basement, garage, backyard, caught up in a mess of vodka shots, second hand smoke, and a few puffs of something quality that everyone will hit but me. I make up for the lack of a high with a few more pulls from the handle. And soon I grab onto that oh so familiar landing. The one where I can rest my feet comfortably, although a bit wobbly. My mind is gone, so I feel safe. It's not me that's moving, speaking, thinking, so I can relax. There's no way any of you could judge me in this state. So I continue.

It usually hits me about an hour in. I need someone. I need to feel someone's presence close to my body even if it's just a messy fumbling around behind the blackened end of a bathroom door. I need someone here with me. Because I am not. Because I left myself somewhere between the liquor run and the seventh game of flip cup. So I need someone to reassure me. 

Touch me, say my name. That's all I ask of you. Remind me of who I am, who I forced myself not to be and tell me that I'm beautiful and I'm all you want. I'll eat it up with every slur of your syllables. I will take you in and drown who I think I am inside of you.

And then I wake up and feel nothing again. I am back to myself. Just a little headache that a few hours of sleep can fix. I forget my alter ego, the exuberant. I take a deep breath and realize that I wasn't myself. It was her last night, she let her guard down, she gave up her morals. Not me. I would never do that. 

But how long will it take for me to use up the last of her, and have nothing left but myself...

You were meant for me

I lay on the bathroom floor until all the midnights for a month after you left me. Pushing my forehead into the cold, dingy white tile, I wondered why you'd gone, where the redeeming quality was, where the sun was hiding. I'd finger my pink baby blanket mom had wrapped me in as a child but took no comfort for it. There was no consolation prize for this and I didn't really understand what God was trying to teach me when he closed the door behind you and locked all the windows. The only thing that worked when it was supposed to was the plumbing in that clammy bathroom. After I hugged the lid with frail fingers, the toilet, though it did so reluctantly, flushed. Though it came through rusted pipes, the water always found its way to my tired body. Those things worked, why couldn't I?

It would be so much easier if there had been a "why" to go with a "what" but I suppose there are some questions that don't have their answers. For every marvel there is a mystery. It was a small but brutal mystery that left me alone on that bathroom floor every night, pulling up my shirt and looking down at exposed ribs, following them down to a scarred stomach. The worst part was there were scars but no you. My body had proof you'd been there, proof you'd existed. Somewhere inside I knew it. But the world showed no record of you. You weren't there in my apartment,waking me up in the middle of the night wailing like some sort of siren to break my tranquility. You weren't there. Instead I just had this scary, unaffected, silence in your place. I knew you were there somewhere, had been there somewhere. My body knew it. My scars proved it. But as far as the world was concerned you were just a pocket of silence, a blank silence that had never really been there.

I lay on that bathroom floor every night until midnight for a month, just trying to remember the golden locks that I'd never comb, the first words that would never be spoken, the kindergarten graduation I'd never attend, the milk that would never be spilled. Then I realized. Hearts are broken every day and mine isn't the only one chained to the bathroom floor, swaddled in a pink baby blanket where perhaps somebody else ought to be. So that thirty-first night, I got up and went into the bedroom and turned on Letterman. You had been in there somewhere once, tucked securely beneath my heart. I had the scars to prove it. Maybe the world forgets the lost too easily in its eagerness to pick up latenight talkshows and turn the channel to afternoon sitcoms. But all the same you can only swim against the stream for so long before your body fails and it sweeps you along with it. Wherever you'd gone I couldn't follow and you can't hold on to a hand that isn't there. It wasn't time to let you go. There is never a time or place for that sort of thing. But either way, at some point I had to do it. At some point I had to get lost in the television and let somebody else do the talking.

If You Need Some Cheering Up.

Looking in the mirror

never hurt

so much.

I think about

shaving my head with

a straight-bladed razor

and

pulling out

all of

my teeth,

one

by

one

with

a pair

of

needle-nosed pliers.

I think about how it

would feel;

looking down into

that sink;

blood, teeth, and

hair

against the white porcelain of 

the sink,

and a pair

of rusty

needle-nosed pliers

on the counter.

and I think about

breaking bridges,

burning pencils,

and

the way people look in 

convertibles

with the top

down.

they are ambiguous

at

best.

~I've got this feelin'. grab some synthetic hair.

Love,

Digress.

Watson Did The Work.

focused on the wrong

turns

and babies fall backwards

from 

staring at cases

of books.

industrial areas

with rent

higher than

the cost of living

will allow.

we paid for

that,

we'll pay for this

.

i fork over the cash

and

they spoon over the

protection;

it's never enough

it's actually

too much

and

never effective.

i pass the

doughnuts around

the room

they take

slow

bites

and feel

out of

place in their

desks.

it isn't a cafeteria,

it won't

ever be

.

i mostly annoy the

people whom

sit next

to me

.

they ask me

to be

quiet;

i only discuss the proper

answers

and get

laughed at quite often

for wanting

it all

to be corrected, or

debated

.

they'll hopefully

never

understand.

but, maybe

someday,

you will

~Wrong the second time.

Love,

Digress.