the earth, my butt

i hate:

• fingernails. and toenails. but especially fingernails and the way they get all long and girls are expected to have long pretty fingernails but i hate them and i grow them out because in certain situations they are terribly useful, but ultimately i gnaw on one until it bends if not breaks and then i compulsively chew the rest off and become increasingly more anxious until the moment i can properly cut them all off. fucking fingernails.
• closed doors. i'm peeing. why does the door have to be closed? because if it's closed, then i'm going to have to touch that doorknob with my just-washed hand, and really... who knows what the hell lives on that damned doorknob? what's that? i periodically wipe down every doorknob in the house with anti-bacterial wipes? AND?
• nose-pickers. nose-picking. boogers.
  
• BIG-ASS STADIUMS and auditoriums where music goes to die. leonard cohen, you brilliant, you magic, you lovely old man you WHY are you playing at the goddamned nokia theater? why in the name of all that is holy why? you're a fucking singer-songwriter not goddamned justin timberlake, i don't want to pay $150 to sit a mile and a half from where you are and watch you on a big screen because HELLO if i wanted to watch you sing on a screen i'd stay home and pop in "i'm your man." grrrrrr.
• writers who excessively and unironically use exclamation marks! like for everything! omg!
• linda, from my class, who granted is in third grade so cut the kid a break- my fucking ass. no i don't read twilight, no i don't want you to look at what i've just written because it's none of your goddamned eight-year old business, no i don't think it's cute that i'm your idol. i'm a terrible person, leave me alone.
• ariana! from my class, who embodies everything that is annoying about my grandmother while also displaying everything that is annoying about eight year old girls. don't be a fucking know-it-all, no i can't make the other kids play with you, ever think about not being a tattle-tale? because no, it's not cute and neither is the baby voice you use to speak to me and while we're at it, NO i don't want to be best friends with your damned mother because really she must be awfully annoying to be raising a kid like you.
  
• how i'm a terrible person! god.
• deeply unfriendly service people. because i'm really nice to you, cashier-person, because i've been where you are and so i always smile and say hi and wish you a nice day- but not in an excessive, annoying way- so can you pleeeease pull your head out of your ass and give me at least a wan smile? i'm not making your life suck.
• not knowing where my phone is/ when my phone malfunctions. it's the same kind of low-level but constant anxiety i get when i break and nail and don't have a file. why am i insane?
  
• my ridiculous dependency on my cell phone.
  
• my nocturnal tendencies.
• the way my eyelashes refuse to curl properly because i have my dad's eyelashes and they are like perfectly straight little eye-curtains or the eyelashes on snuffalupagus from sesame street. and yeah they're just eyelashes but dammit, i'm a girl and i want to be pretty.
• that this fucking weather can't pick a fucking theme and stick with it.

ok. ok. that's done. but goddamnit i really hate fingernails.

i love:

• haircuts! getting my hair cut instantly makes me feel attractive and lovable. the shorter my hair, the cuter i feel. it goes deeper than plain vanity, too, it's my secret little fuck-you to society.
  
• small, yappy, mutty dogs. little dog, are you ridiculously dinky? are your yipping little barks similar to the noises a broken child's toy might make? is your fur all matted and crazy and do your bottom teeth stick out a little weird and ugly? because i love you, and while i know enough to be ashamed that i love you, i would still bring you into my life in a heartbeat and love you more than any dog has ever been loved ever. i'd even let your stinky, dinky little self sleep in my bed with me. and i hate sharing a bed.
• emotional honesty. because if you're insane, i would like to know. i promise i won't get scared, i won't gossip behind your back. i'm the mayor of crazytown, dont'cha know? so let's be ourselves as much as possible.
• WHITE CHOCOLATE CRUNCH BARS. this is the love that dares not speak its name. because white chocolate? is gross. and crunch bars? unremarkable. but put them together and what you get is pure magic. i'm no longer allowed to eat this, by my own decree.
• wall-e. and mo. and burn-e. and wall-e. and the cockroach. it's almost unhealthy, how much i love this movie.
  
• speaking of unhealthy, there's babo. like, dude, i know he's a stuffed animal, ok? a stuffed imaginary creature, if we're perfectly frank, because he's not a real animal. but this changes not the fact that i can feel my heart beat a little funny when i squeeze him because he is SO DAMN CUTE and i wish he were real. he can steal my cookies any day.
• cookies? everyone loves cookies. and i don't actually eat that many cookies on like, a regular basis, but occasionally i'll have a cookie- and this happens a lot with oreos, which is why i avoid them like the plague unless i'm really happy or really sad- and then i just can't stop and i morph into the cookie monster (who is now the carrot monster or something? as if carrots are sooo delicious that people/puppets regularly become obsessed with them. pshaw.) and the moral of the story is not pretty but it is this: i love cookies because cookies are amazing.
• the one girl who works at the library and is there pretty much everytime i go? she's so cute, and she totally recognizes me now, and she's always complementing my taste in books, although i partly think she thinks i'm crazy because i'm always at the damned library. what can i say, i'm a quick read man.
• kissing. "french" kissing for hours, pecks on the cheek, kissing upside down, in the rain, in a house, near a goat, in a boat, after eating green eggs and ham (on second thought, ew, get some gum), with boys, girls, trannies, space aliens, etc. etc. what better way to get to know someone? ahhhh.
  
• bill watterson/calvin and hobbes. i think if i ever got psychoanalyzed, like really in-depth, it would turn out that deep deep down inside i am calvin.
• that i am a six year old boy. like, most of the time i think this is one of the best things about me? not when i'm in a bar with a bunch of people my age, of course, and all the girls are dressed like vegas whores and the guys look like fraternity brothers-come-yuppie scum and rihanna is blasting over the sound system... then i feel like a scruffy little boy in a bad way... but mostly, yeah, it's all good.

can i break from this love-fest? i forgot to list one of the things i hate the most:

• going clubbing/barhopping/drinking at a big douchey party, etc. do i hate the music you're playing? yes. do i hate the types of people who go to bars? yes. do i hate fruity girly drinks where you can't taste the liquor for the sugar content? yes. do i hate being hit on by guys in bars? yes. do i hate not being hit on by guys in bars? yes. i hate bars. i get dragged out to these things by people who are ostensibly my friends, people who know for a fact that i hate the whole desperate-20-something-emptiness of bars and clubs, and it's just like they say, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. i'm not going to sleep with some slick jerk i met in a bar. i'm not going to sleep with a nice guy i met in a bar, for fuck's sake. i'm not going to have a good conversation with anyone in a goddamned bar, unless it's practically empty, unless it's a hole in the wall, unless there's a jukebox playing tom waits and bob dylan in the corner, barely visible through the haze of cigarette smoke, basically unless it's a very very unusual sort of bar full of unusual sorts of folk. fuck, man.

fuck man is right. i don't know what all that was about. i suppose i am having a peevish sort of life right now.

things which escape those who dream only by night

one time, a long time ago, at a party, i began to- or would have if i hadn't been restrained- slit my wrists. granted, i was very very drunk, but still. i failed then but succeeded later, not at slitting my wrists but rather at working out our steak knives on the inside of my arm, an ugly and surreal incident where watching blood ooze from my body was the only thing grounding me in reality. i lived to regret that, as a teenage co-worker mistook me for a fellow cutter and took to following me around rhapsodizing about the beauty of pain and control. another time i almost slit my wrists again but it was out of rage and in revenge, and not at a party but in the shower. none of these incidents were as melodramatically emo as they sound, and i'm not actually a goth. what happens is that sometimes i am overcome with a certain feeling, not counting that time in the shower because that was 100% rage, the kind where you are literally seeing red and hearing a strange buzzing in your head (the kind of rage that only a mother can rouse, obviously), and that feeling is the distinct sensation of being completely and totally alone in a vast and cold universe. not lonely but alone.

i was a fairly happy kid, and i had billions of friends, so when jeff pulled me aside for a talk at 13, while we were supposed to be watching the game going on in front of us, and somewhere in that conversation insinuated that being exceptional also meant being lonely- from which i was to extrapolate one, that i was exceptional, and two, that i was or would be, down the line, lonely- well, clearly, i didn't know what to think, though pretending to be the mature little person he expected me to be i nodded sagely and agreed that being surrounded by people was the loneliest experience there was. i would, much to my chagrin, realize the truth of my words a mere five months later, upon entering that nightmarish institution also known as "high school."

but lonely and alone are not the same, and the difference is, i think, this: lonely is knowing that someone out there understands you, but you have yet to find that person or those persons. lonely is needing a hug and a sympathetic ear. alone is knowing that wherever you go, however long you live, you will never find a person to understand you, because no such person exists. does that even make sense? mon dieu.

i'm a generally cheerful person. i love to laugh, and to make people laugh, and feel that i have a well-developed sense of humor and the absurd. i have many close friends, most of whom i love dearly and would not trade for the world and with all of whom i am honest and forthcoming and strange. and for all this, i can't think of one person i could point to and say: this person understands me, or this person is very much like me in a pleasing and reassuring way.

there are stories we tell about ourselves that depict us as the people we want to be. but if you, wishing to be known as courageous but knowing yourself to be a yella-bellied cowahd, pretend at courage when facing down whatever (a mugger, your boss, a dragon, etc.)- are you brave, or just a good actor? or are those one and the same, in the end? IN THE END. what big words.

i don't know about soulmates or any such bullshit, and i don't know about 'the one' and 'true love' and all that kinda old-fashioned jazz, but the concept that's always caught my imagination is the idea that there is someone in the world who is 'made for you.' as if life's this paper cut-out storybook where everything is manufactured for some predetermined purpose and all things and people fit together like in a puzzle? as if you can date as many chaps as you please, and even work on building strong relationships with some of them, but IN THE END it will all be for naught because one day, someday, you will be on your way to the post office or the grocery store, and while your attention is diverted from in front of you you crash into someone, let's say his name is hermann and he's from germany, which is like, so random, but anyway you and hermann crash and your papers go everywhere and as you bend down to pick them up your eyes instead fall upon the book he dropped, which is, let's say, a well-thumbed copy of the principia by isaac newton, and your heart skips a beat because, omg lightning and junebugs, that's your favorite book of all time. so then you and hermann say fuck the post office and you get coffee together, because luckily he speaks english, whereupon you find that though you have lived all your life in bumfuck, ca and he's from nowhere, germany, you guys are like, exactly the same person: you love opera, picking your nose, and anal sex and he just like, loves opera, girls who pick their noses, and anal sex. so then it's goodbye david or whatever poor chap you were dating at the time, and you and hermann move in together and live happily ever after because IN THE END, he was made specifically for you, like you ordered him from a catalogue and you just can't believe you ever lived without him. there was a point to this story, somewhere back in the beginning.

point: ummm this girl and hermann are like, total sickos, right? another point: that would be like, totally awesome and radical, if you were you and someone who exactly complemented and could understand you was developing, as in growing, as in existing, along some parallel line, possibly in the next city over or maybe even in germany or something. which is to say that i don't buy it, this 'made for me' thing, this convergence or congruence thing. i think, and i think i've had a small taste of it already, perhaps as much as i'm ever going to have, that for someone to be made for you, you've got to make him yourself. all of which is besides my original point anyway.

the original point is that i feel that i am strange in a novel way, which is not the same as being a dick and saying i'm 'special' or exceptional, except it is but without the overtones of superiority. like i'm different, but not above you, instead next to you, in some weird parallel zone that doesn't ever intersect but only appears to. like if stephen dedalus weren't a snotty prick but instead slightly insecure and more amiable. i'll be damned if this isn't all rambling bullshit. more tomorrow on How I Am Not Like My Age Group And Why It Makes Me Crazy But I Don't Relate To Old People Either Because Like, What The Fuck I Know Stuff, Bitches.

nobody say love

life is strange because: just when you think you have it in hand, it loop-de-loops around you with a pat on the ass and those are your own wide eyes staring back at you, bewildered but only superficially, really, because by now you know it's best to fail to make plans and what you want has but the slightest effect on what you will get, ain't it funny?

so this is the new year and i've learned; she hates me, and i am willing to do exactly nothing about that because ultimately, truly shockingly, i came to the realization that there is nothing wrong with me, nothing i am willing to change, not for her anyway. this is the new year and the one thing i want is left behind in the old year, never to return, never to be mine, and it's a real tragedy that i was born without a sense of time, or that time exists at all, or is reported to anyway because who but a nutcase would make a case for linear time, the time that i'm aware of is like silly putty or those 25 cent stretchy hands you get at the supermarket and it shoots forward quickly only to snap back and slap you in the nose before diving down to gather lint from your shirt and when you pluck at it to shoot it out again it just sags like runny like boogers like what the fuck you cost a whole quarter and i only got one use out of you you fucking thing and in frustration and grossed out because now it's just dirty and no longer translucent you fling it at the window and it sticks and doesn't slide. that's what time is.

and life is weird because this is the new year and so far not that different from the old year aside from the death of potential and the branching off of all sorts of new possibilities, none of which are as pregnant with promise as that deceased one but isn't that just the way it goes. you never know where it's going to take you, this thing, you and your child's sense of magic and your alexander-the-great eyes and your limitless capacity for sorrow and the very exacting-flexible standards you maintain for what will and can happen to you.

i'm like a child in so many ways that it astounds me, because i think i know how i feel about something up until that something comes to pass, and then i hope against hope and believe against the bald facts of things and what i mean is this: i look like a grown up, sometimes, and walk about and function like one as well, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, to the bare bones of the matter what i do is walk around expecting a miracle, every moment of every day, and every moment that it fails to pass, i wallow in my disappointment and gather the pieces around me and regroup them and still keep on hoping and waiting, in spite of my rational mind, in spite of what i say and do, in spite of the ineffable, ineluctable progression of mundane life.

i wish i believed in something more concrete than possibility, that i had something as simple as your judeo-christian god and devil, something well-defined and drawn out to call upon and barter with. barter! i sing the body electric, etc., which is to say i'm glad i'm alive, that i exist and can touch and be touched and that there are aspects of me that you can't touch, that you don't know, even some that i don't know come to think of it, but anyway what i mean is that while i am consciously, while i decide every day to be, glad to be alive, there are some things, there is one thing for which i would risk that so-called fact- not a thing, really, a person, i suppose, six foot one inch of proteins and chemicals and shaking hands and soul and peculiar timbre, etc. etc.. god so what the fuck!

i woke up this morning from a beautiful jungle dream, very vivid and so on, to a question posed to me by some morbid little reptile part of my brain that hates for me to be content, and the question is this: if by some alchemy, if by some supernatural trade agreement you could have been sick instead of him, knowing very well that you could die just as easily as he did, would...? and the thing is that yeah, i woulda. and it's bullshit that in this magnificently large and mysterious universe, this cornucopaeia of possibilities and potentialities, you can't just call up the devil or some other shadowy force and strike a bargain, a tough bargain, a big deal, something really scary, but if you're willing to do it then you should have the goddamned option, am i right? and that's the crux of it really, that we're given this hideous ability to know that we're alive and that we can die and to contemplate the various implications thereof, but we get no options- not to cheat death, i wouldn't presume, but to rearrange it a little or to- well, the point is, when i say miracles, i really mean options: the option to sacrifice what you're willing to, to whatever end you wish.

none of which is to say that life can't be shocking in a good way, occassionaly. new year's eve was a delicious dark fumble and proof that you can change without fucking well having to think everything to death. this year looks the same but feels different, in more than just the obvious, sad way: if i could wipe the slate clean, i would, and goodbye mother country and friends, hat off in a jolly salute, but i can't or rather, wouldn't or rather- not yet. the next best thing, which you can't see or feel or smell or hear, but which i know the same way i know when my heart skips a beat, is that inasmuch inasmany ways as i can manage, i'm not going to stay where i am. because if it weren't pathetic and cliche, i'd inscribe on my skin this saying this mantra this should-be-obvious lame-o revelation but- there's nothing wrong with me.

last night

it's like this: i'm sitting around in pajamas, eating breakfast cereal and idly chatting with friends and strangers via the internet. i read the news and update my facebook, i laugh when chau farts in his sleep. a message appears in my inbox from jake's dad. a question is asked and answered.

and then it's like this: i am shivery, weak, and ill. he has been dead for two weeks and here he has died all over again. a moment later i am composed, because i have to be, and i get on with the business of a normal day. i bake a cake. i shower. i accompany my sister to the library, and then to the tattoo parlor.

the scene is this: we are in the car, she is driving. we're just done laughing about something or another, we're eating ice cream. a moment's silence passes, and then i tell her what i've learned. i'm crying all of a sudden, shocked at how wet my tears are, at how little comfort i've gleaned from two weeks distance, from ice cream and everything. a void opens up and threatens to swallow me, just out of my line of sight, threatens to turn me permanently into one of those thousand-mile-stares weirdos. i sit in the car, too miserable-looking to go in with her. on the way home, we talk about it for a minute more, until something else comes up- and something else always comes up- and we're laughing again.

fast forward: it is three days later and i can't sleep for the need to hear his voice, so i call his voicemail over and over and commit to memory every rasp and inflection of his voice. i watch and rewind and rewatch in my mind: our first meeting, our first fight, our first kiss, our first i-love-you. i sublimate thoughts of him with tedious book reviews and essays on existentialism, both of which lead somehow back to him. i layer three comforters on myself and pretend to be warm and asleep until i am.

the next day: the morning is a blur of coffee and make-up and clothes, and i make it to my meeting on time, early even. i sit in the lobby and read bierce's witty letters, and mid-chuckle i get a flash of memory. i remember the blonde hair on his arms, and running my fingers over it eversolightly and i think- sifting through his ashes won't be the same. his arms and his arm hair don't exist anymore. i sit there with my breath caught in my throat, trying to conceive of the inconceivable until nancy calls me in and i'm all smiles for my picture.

later: i roll up my jeans and walk towards the water's edge. the sky is flawless, the beach is empty, i am peaceful and smiling. and then i step into the water and watch the fine brown sand slide and shift as the water recedes and i think, this sand could be you, will be you, eventually, someday, sooner than it will be me. and then a pelican dives for a fish, and raquel is laughing and telling for the thousandth time the story of my pelican guardian. i'm walking along the shore looking for seashells, i'm laughing when someone falls fully clothed in to the water, i'm face-up on the sand contemplating the vast blueness of the sky. walking along, i notice the heart & arrows & initials someone traced into the damp sand, and i trace yours and i realize they look like the symbol for pi, and i wonder if everyone knows i'm off by myself because i'm thinking of you?

now i wonder, is this how it's always going to be? i'm alive in this moment as you are not, but i'm alive in the past with you as well, and i'm alive in a future without you but always missing you, simultaneously. i look in the mirror and i wonder: is this me, all there is to me, these irises, this skin, this hair? because your arm hair is gone and that means you are gone. your mole i named jose is gone, and that means that you are gone. but my fingers that love(d) your arm-hair are still here, and my lips that kissed your mole are too, but how can they really be if you're gone?

everyone misses the ideals you represented, and i do too, but i also just miss the visible, touchable, actual fact of you, of your existence and your presence. two weeks ago, i had LA because this is where i live, and i had- was acutely aware of, plotted on my internal map- SD because that's where you were. now, i know you're everywhere, but that just means you're nowhere.

i write this down because i can't talk about it, because good, loving, supportive people just don't know what to say, and who am i to inflict such awkwardness and helplessness? they are trying to live their lives, as i am mine. what's weird is that despite myself, i am succeeding.

at any given moment the floor may open up

happily, the doctors are through reviewing my chest x-rays and are satisfied that i will not perish of tuberculosis anytime soon. on the other hand, that the skin test was positive is testament to the fact that my immune system is extremely sensitive to stress; if, let's say, the love of my life dies, it's not just my mind that falls apart, but my body also. fun stuff. the ultimate upshot is that i meet my assigned child next week, as well as with the principal, who will help develop my lesson plans. excitement amidst tragedy! for the past few months, there are three things jake and i talked about: his sickness, my job search, and how much we missed each other/what we were going to do once he was better. he would have been more excited than anyone to hear that i'm finally going to have my own personal pupil to corrupt and enrapt. i hope to do him proud.

i'd really like to get ahold of his mom and offer my condolences (whatever the hell that may mean), but my attempts to find a way to reach her have been stymied. on the one hand, she is living in a nightmare world where her oldest son died after courageously fighting- and defeating- cancer for months, and what could i possibly have to say that wouldn't fall on pain-deaf-and-numb ears? but on the other hand, if she loves him more than anyone else on earth, then i am at least a close second for the title, and i wish her to know that i understand and am there if she needs anything at all in the world, because let's face it, she made him and i love him, and one of the bigger regrets among the untold thousands that i will harbor from now until eternity is that i didn't meet her while he was alive, in his presence. he was so certain that she would love me, and he loved and admired her so much that i was sure i would love her as well, and yet we never met, thanks to the unhappy confluence of geography, insecurity, coincidence, and sillyness that were our lives for the past few years.

and it feels like a betrayal to even think of this, but what about the funeral? if i have thought about him and the fact of his death every day since the day it happened, and i have, and if i have mourned it, constantly and quietly, every other minute of every day since i got the news- via text message, let it be noted, because really, how absurd can you possibly get?- and i have-- if these things are so (they are), then i wish someone would tell me why and how it doesn't feel quite real yet? i read the comments everyone is posting "to" him and about him, i look through pages and pages of pictures, i relive snatches of our times together, i call his phone just to hear his voicemail recording, and i know that he's dead. and still i think, maybe? maybe i'm dreaming a really vivid dream where all the pot i've smoked is catching up with me, maybe it's all a terrible misunderstanding, maybe i can find a wormhole and go back in time and save him, maybe the ground at my feet will open up and i'll fall through to some hideous inferno where he's being held hostage until i can with my wit and cunning and vast stores of alternately love and rage win him back to the world of the living. maybe i can push through the screen of reality and touch all the other realities that might have been, and find the one where he got better and stayed better, where i can call his phone and he'll answer, where he grows up to be a famous writer, a husband, a father, a world-reknowned activist-singer, the so-cal master of barbecue, a grouchy old man on a porch somewhere- i'll find that happy land and stay there, if i can't bring him back to this one, to undo the things that need to be undone for him to be here right now.

my favorite, the one to which i always return, is the one where i attend his funeral and walk up to the front of the room to see him pale and somber on the wooden dais, whereupon the tears start up, and i lean in to kiss him one last time, and voila! like a post-feminist snow white fairytale dream, my kiss and the love in my heart and the tears in my eyes bring him back, and everyone oohs and ahhhs and we live happily ever after, content with the destruction of death and modern science that we have wrought.

if i see it, if i see him and see that he's not himself anymore, i think i stand a better chance of believing it. at which point i will attempt suttee, or cry mutely in his mother's arms. unless she hates me. ah life.

what i talk about when i talk about love

it's strange how he died five days ago, and already i'm expected to be done talking about him, thinking about him, crying about him. it would be easier to keep it to myself if everything in the world didn't remind me of him, everything, everything, every ridiculous little thing.

who is going to finish my ice cream cones now? who is going to try every ridiculous recipe that pops into my head without complaining, with lots of teasing? who is going to shake me when i'm on the verge of tears, who is going to invent mixes for me, who is going to leer at me from behind a door or a gravestone in the middle of the night? who is gonna yell at me to shower, knowing perfectly well that i only went six days without a shower once and for very good reasons? who is gonna watch the latest animated feature with me against his will, and then deny that he enjoyed it when he totally did? who is going to gag whenever shakespeare comes up in conversation, who is going to let me win at thumb war, who is going to muss my hair whenever it gets too neat? who is going to go to the pier with me on a windy day to watch the birds fly backwards?

it's strange to think that i knew a jake that no one else knows, and that by extension, i am the only one who can miss that jake, as well as every other jake besides.

how seamless seemed love and then came trouble

it's just like him, i realize. i shouldn't have expected anything more. off he's gone to be one with all things, to push up flowers and see the really big picture from afar, and here i am, thinking about him, like i've always done, like i'll do for the rest of my life.

there's nothing stranger than the fact that life goes on, that you can't cry forever, that eventually the memories don't hurt as much, that maybe someday they'll make me smile. you spend five years getting close to someone, learning them and loving them and arguing with them, you spend five years planning the next year and the next and the next twenty years, albeit loosely, like the kids that you are, and then you wake up one morning to find that he's gone, and your plans are for naught, and that when you think about him one thousand times a day, you're thinking about someone who does not exist outside of those thoughts.

you meet someone as a child, and you doom yourself to loving that person forever by virtue of the fact that you're growing up together, and when you do that, he becomes a part of you, and aspects of your person will always be indebted to him, just as aspects of his person were due, for better or worse, to your presence in his life. and then you wake up one morning, and realize that those hard-earned pieces of your personality, those painful lessons and those glorious awakenings, are all you have left of him.

you meet someone when you're vulnerable, and your wrap him up in the gossamer threads of your emotions from the first, and eventually, he gets vulnerable with you, and the threads pull tighter, until you are one hundred miles away from him and he is still more present to you than the person standing beside you, at all times.

you love someone for so long, and so hard, that it's a given like your next breath, like the sun rising, like the world spinning around. you love him even when you hate him, when you wish you'd never met him, when you spend your days thinking about not thinking about him anymore. you love him when you shouldn't, you love him when you don't love anyone else, you love him with every surge of blood your poor ragged heart pumps through your body. and then you wake up one morning to having to wonder what exactly you're supposed to do with that love, the same love that never arose for anyone else, the love that reason forgot.

so where does it go when it's gone? if you were here, you could tell me, matter-of-factly, the way you said everything, especially when i was being fantastical and ridiculous and emotional. alas.

“I seem to spend my life missing you!”