I finally quit my job. there are few things more satisfying than untying your apron on your last day of work, and tossing it into the dumpster. the sky was lit beautifully on my walk home, the sun was furtive, ducking behind clouds. there was an edge to the afternoon, making me worry for the dry tinder forest on the other side of the sunburnt high hills.

august reminds me of a flaming lips concert which reminds me that I've made three mixed cds for in my life, all three were goodbye gifts. all three began with the song "Do You Realize." which inherently betrays the first line of the song.  

*** 

when I get home, my mate alex was playing call of duty, and gale was crying in her bedroom. they both do these activities a lot. gale cries almost every day, usually at the foot of her bed listening to bon iver (she usually prefers the song wash.) and in response alex grips the nearest xbox controller and turns up the volume of his artillery. 

this all used to make me very sad. I felt like my house was a weird dysfunctional dollhouse but when you put a handful of depressives in the same living space, you begin to understand. I've seen gale in her ebullience, diving beneath foamy ocean waves and emerge with a sharky grin. I've heard alex meow to stray cats on rooftops and make oragami turtles for his nieces.

***    

we had no food in the kitchen sans half a bag of flour. luckily all you need is flour, water, cooking oil and a source of heat to make naan bread. add a handful of rosemary, basil and garlic and you've got the house smelling like fucking grandma's. I left a plate outside gale's door. "j'eat?"

I miss lexie and that makes me feel like writing, though I don't have much to write about. my bedroom window is streaked with black like a girl's smokey eyes and I have a itch to climb out of it and into the dregs of the afternoon. 

we were sitting across from eachother in a booth at arby's at 9pm on a thursday and I realize too late I should have paid for your chicken strips. you're licking honey mustard off your fingers and trying to think of something to say. dandilion pollen has gathered in your hair and I'm completely distracted because you're eyes are watercolors and I'm tripping. 

(this was all your idea. look, I just wanted you to like me.)

you ask me how I old I was when I lost my virginity and when I tell you, you're so surprised you laugh. I hate that my ears begin to burn. 

I go outside and hit my vape for nicotine and suddenly you're there again stepping out of the shadows placing your hand on my shoulder. I mumble something like I just don't want any more regrets today 

on a shrouded mountain in Bolivia

he fucks up the takeoff execution and lands heavily on his knees further down the slope. the sound of his kneecaps hitting the ice makes a sickening, splitting sound and everyone looks away, grimaces in every other direction. 

a healing ritual, smoke and bones. a man with withered face and lantern jaws. 

Home 
A voice from within 
You're not alone

it just feels like an endless day, it's endless and I just want to fuck off and die. it comes over me at the most random of times. ordering cold coffee and the barista wants me to flirt back. her mouth is stained with orange juice. I want to tell her I'm good as dead. I manage to shake it off but it happens again, not even an hour later when I'm sitting in the stairwell, my nose running, feeling my heart pulse in my teeth and I know I need to talk to someone but there's so much risk assessment. I'm missing some sort of vital clotting mechanism normal people were born with to equip them to handle their emotions.

I wanted to text my friend "do you ever feel as good as dead?" but then I realized she's currently in the class I'm skipping. I realize that before I realize that you're not really supposed to say things like that without any foreplay. 

when we were twelve, my friend used to tell me about a black mamba snake he would see around his house while he was still in Africa. he said it was so deadly, there were scarcely any descriptions of it. he told me it might spit venom or bolts of electicity. or ichor. and it hid in the grasses. I ended up adopting it, made it some sort of mascot for my anxiety. I imagined it as being inky black with inch long fangs - " no actually only the inside of its mouth is black,” my friend corrected. “casket shaped head. thick as a child's thigh" it became the shape of any fear I couldn't quite get a handle on.

right now you're my black mamba, my fucking death serpent. I know, I know. "cliched" you'd say, "you're too starry eyed about life's extended metaphors" you once said. "you just metaphorized” I retorted, happily.

except now I have a pathological aversion to extended metaphors, especially the black mamba which is ever slithering in and out of my peripherals - the flash of face on public transit, a voice leaking down the hall, teeth marks on my neck. it was 1:45, spring of 2015 and my cell phone is dead and my car is from the year 1984. and I stalled behind the wheel with the heels of my hands digging into my eye sockets trying not to howl.  it should be clear that I have a clouded head. it should be clear that since last spring, my self esteem has been like coagulated turkey gravy.

I tried to tell someone about these cuffs of paranoia I have, and the someone told me I was being fundamentally egocentric and I had to agree. he said, “get a grip, man. you’re life is outstanding right now. have lexie fuck it out of you” he said I was being a pussy. I think I am. I’ve felt this way before, on airplanes, visiting my brother in prison, on oppressive rainy days.

I was like this on monday, baked- cookie fresh and I tried to believe in her love, but i’ve got loser dreams with crooked lines of ink flesh wrapped around my wrists.

that business on the phone yesterday felt like the black mamba. its tail coiled through the windows of my room like an eel through the skull of a cow, quivering impatiently. it came up through my core, something cold and hard, weirdness of serotonin lack, settling, curling on my tongue.“get a fucking grip.”

there you are,

exhausted from another night

of peeling apples

underneath my coffee table

although I'm not entirely sure why, I think I needed a hiatus from writing, so I decided to take an internship on an organic farm in the woods. ftr, I study lit and stuff. I'm no agroecologist and have a pathetic lack of green thumb, but for some reason whenever I try to fall asleep at night after long day on the farm, I toss and turn because I know a part of my soul stays there when I leave. there are tree orchards everywhere, soil to saturate with carbon and secrets (I've been informed it's nutritious for the plants), and no limit to free vegitables. today I sat for a fucking hour watching bees pollinate mustard seed flowers. the gal that showed me the ropes told me her name was "river" and I accidentally rolled my eyes and I sad, "like phoenix?" and then she rolled her eyes, and said "I'm just messin, it's actually kelly." Kelly is like the real life version of one of the girls from harvest moon: plaid shirts, braided crowns, chai tea in mason jars,  smells perpetually like orange blossoms, which drives me crazy, because they aren't even in season. I mean she's more than a trope, I'm sorry. everyone is more than a trope. I happen to know that she has thing goin with one of my good friends and that she gives rides to drunk strangers. as she works she sings to the kale crops and the brocoli and the cabbage. the other day, I brought out a stereo and a bunch of cds. I'm going to do this science experiment, grade school style, in which I play different genres of music for different pots of the same plant and measure their growth. currently, I've got some reggae going, some alt rock, some beethoven, some drake, and an old dashboard confessional album which I'm counting as "emo." I've got this scientist thing down pat. there's this other intern named gary, and when I met him, I knew right away what he grew. he asked me if I wanted to buy and I hesitated, because I'm trying to sober up. 

when I got home today, my housemate was pretty stoned and entranced by a live stream of the vancouver aquarium jellyfish cam. will have to try that at some point, maybe in my british canon poetry class where I sit in the back row for two hours and try to not let my thoughts race eachother to tangles.

sometimes. I don't know. sometimes I am baffled when girls at parties ask who I like to read, then proceed to interrupt with "wait, do you like bukowski?" what about me do they associate with a dirty old man? I mean I like bukowski a bit, but he also got a lot wrong with life. god, don't get me started on kerouac. I frankly don't understand how a girl can read kerouac and sincerely like him. 

last week I went to a poetry slam and this guy got up and spat about the lumbersexual aesthetic. I mean hypermasculinity is not a revolutionary topic to write a slam poem about, but what this guy was saying felt like a bear trap clamped around my heart. 

on the way home we somehow witnessed a huge car accident and had to be interviewed by the cops. in my area the police are utterly asinine and I was scared because a lot of people died, but didn't feel like I could admit this to Lexie who was kneeling on the ground, shivering. when they finally let us off, it was 2 am and I was warm with anger and my retinas were blurring. I carried Lexie home and when she curled into me like a leaf, yeah, I felt pretty manly. I tried not to have bad dreams that night., like the one about the boy I saw on the cover of Newsweek when I was in 5th grade. it was from the Bosnian war and his face had been hit by artillery fire, and it was mangled and his eyes were obliterated and his nose was gone, and his mouth was a slant. when I wake up from those dreams, my nose is always burning with that smoke that signals that you're going to cry. how many times I've extracted myself from a girl sleeping beside me and sat on the toilet in the bathroom, breathing hard.

I don't know if I even feel like posting this anymore. I was okay when I started writing and now I'm in a shit mood. like, woe is fucking me. here is your Tinder date, sipping craft beer at an underground bar with sad eyes, a hyperpermasculinety complex and an unrealised dream of living in an isolated woodland shack. congratulations. you're dating the reincarnate of henry david thoroeu.

I'm catching up with some of the journals here and I'm reading about a lot of sadness and feeling sort of weird and guilty for the unreasonable giddiness I've had as of late. I know. it's completely uncharacteristic of me.

coming back to the ocean was like a mouthful of saltwater taffy. I think that love must be saltwater taffy. pretty much everybody has had some. somebody offers it on a day when you have nothing to do, and most likely you'll take it and put it in your mouth.

I found my way back to my aparment for winter term pretty late, around 2am on a tuesday. my housemate was asleep on the couch by our makeshift christmas tree. her face was bisected by the green and red neon and I felt an enormous surge of affection for her. a housemate that likes to sleep near the christmas tree in the first breathes of january. I'm going to try to make her life as easy as possible this term. I know what seasonal depression feels like, and january has the fiercest of bites.

lexie is in one of my classes. I think I saw her first, and I was floored, again, by how unphased she is, by everything and everyone. some would call it a mask, but I suspect she's just very unhurried. she greets everyone in peace. I wonder who else knows what happened to her a few years back. when I finally caught her eye, they were blue and clear and she smiled very very slowly. I swear she is the coolest person in the room. every room.

I thought about the way she looks when she eats spaghetti. I thought of the way she looked when she slid off her pants and she was wearing batgirl undies.

this afternoon, I took a shortcut through the woods and saw james and june sitting on the roof of the science & engineering building. I didn't actually see them, but heard their voices laughing, and their silhouettes gilded by the sunlight. I'm floored by how happy I am to see my friends again and how much I missed trees.

I've been thinking a lot about that mary oliver quote: tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

a lot of things happened and I’m in an airport terminal trying to shake the rubble from my head and my ears and replace it with alt-j. but oh fuck let’s just journal about it.

finally finished finals and was planning on going comatose for awhile to recover, but there’s always some lame party to be seen at. I mean this one was different, it was for my friend Leila, and there was a facebook invite and everything.  things in America are getting a little weird so Leila is deciding to dip and take the next semester off in Ireland. and I like Leila, even if she has a lot of opinions. I made her a playlist... in retrospect think I went a little heavy on the pub songs but c’est la vie. the thing is, Leila was the first person I met here, and since then we’ve split. although our circles still brush up against each other occasionally, I didn’t know a single person at her going away party.

luckily for me, this isn’t usually a problem. often I feel as if my social interactions are all simulations, and the real me goes vacant for awhile while my autopilot takes over my tongue. and I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but my autopilot is very good at what he does. he spins versions of myself people want to see.

I spent most of the time talking to this guy who is one of many ghostwriters for a very famous, very douch-y contemporary novelist. my autopilot wanted to know if ghostwriting felt like selling your soul. shocker, apparently it does. I asked him if he was working on anything of his own, and the expression that flashed across his face was of such deep despondence that I gave him my beer. and decided to..yknow. leave. I was beginning to feel like an asshole and the air was beginning to feel thick with the creased dreams of people I didn’t even know, like some sentient bummer fog.

I turned to find my jacket, and instead found a pair of eyes watching me from the door. they belonged to a girl and my usual reaction when a girl is looking at me is to simultaneously freeze and heat up, especially around the ears. her name was (is) Lex. there were globs of people passing between us, but her gaze was seemingly uninterrupted and honestly, it was one of those kairotic moments that make you dizzy for no reason. I don’t know how to describe the relief I felt, of having someone’s eyes on me – the real me - and not my autopilot, that bastard. I know this because Lex and I went through physical therapy together and those eyes saw me at my most helpless. we never talked in PT, out of some weird unspoken rule of mutual humiliation, but recently, very recently we rewired in an elective class we had together. too recent to be so excited to see her and I was wondering if it was the alcohol frazzling my nerves. but the thing is, I trusted her, her chemistry, her transparency. most especially, I trusted her don’t ask, don’t tell systematic approach to friendship.

anyway, she walked over and I stood with my paws jammed into my pockets and my molars sunk into the inside of my cheek. Lexie is pretty. for sure. but idk, the type of pretty that is unconventional, and not the unconventional that is actually a euphemism for ugly. but there was a real jarring look to her that night, mostly in her eyes. but maybe I just have a real thing for eyes. anyway, she said “howdy” and I said “hi” and then after a beat, “you have no idea how glad I am to see you.” she smiled politely and my autopilot told me to cool it, but I decided to give him the rest of the night off. is it really that bad if someone sees who you are? why is it that humans have a problem with letting someone else see that they are human? I don’t know. I felt like it was a lucky sort of night to be human.

she took over and asked nimble small talk questions and my auto pilot took notes from the backseat. she told me she knew Leila from plenary and that she always admired Lelia’s ability to piss off people for the greater good. I rolled that around my tongue a few times. another thing about Lex is that she’s a bit of a spaz, but a graceful spaz, as in the things she says doesn’t sound exactly right to you at first. but after the words bounce around in your ears for a moment, you realize she’s actually sort of crafty. paradoxically crafty.

finally, (finally!) she asked if I wanted to bail and I practically wagged my tail. we walked the riverbed back to my apartment and talked and talked. it was like a fucking indie movie, except it wasn’t raining or snowing. 20 min later she was in my kitchen eating a frozen burrito and reading me the first page of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. she liked Joan Didion and I thought that was pretty hot. I was fumbling for my ipod and also watching her in my peripherals, wondering what the red herring was. I played Talk is Cheap and she said that Chet Faker’s voice felt like a firm hand between her legs. I was sort of thinking, who says stuff like that? you have to stop saying stuff like that. do you possibly want to fuck? I was also thinking that Joan Didion was the author who made me fall in love with the harsh, unglamourized corners of CA and that her writing made my head spin. Lexie was looking at me again and I still wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted. under her rapid fire surface, I wondered if she was as sickly sentimental as I was, if she felt a mysterious ache on metro busses, if she had an autopilot of her own and if she ever had a hard time fighting it off.

I want to say these were the only things I was wondering. I was trying to ignore the flashing neon on her forehead, the word REBOUND branded onto her earnest, inquisitive cheeks. I squeezed my eyes shut tight, and opened them and the lights were gone. just her face, her flashing eyes. they were green. they were blue. they were gray. and all the colors of sad british singers who don’t make any sense.  

I didn’t know what she wanted so I asked if she wanted to smoke. she shook her head, so I asked if she wanted to binge watch Marco Polo. and like that, so easily, she was curled next to me on my couch watching Netflix and I was feeling pretty decent, pretty warm, pretty buzzed. I was buzzing. she was buzzing. but because these things are never perfect, my phone rings. my phone rings before the polos even reach the Silk Road, and my blood turned to ice, where it once warmed like coffee.

working on it. doing some final revisions. I was scrolling through documents on my laptop and I get tripped up one titled "for adelle" ... filibustered again. damn you adelle, I wrote that poem for you in spring. Tiny Vessels begins to play sweetly through my brand new earbuds through the scar tissue that were formally known as my auditory nerves and it's so cliche that I just can't. can't delete it.

my housemate emerged from her room today with two white bandages wrapped around her skinny white wrists. she took a few hits and then made some tea. we all pretended not to notice. I left her a few leaves of my aloe vera plant and an avacado/cheese sandwich.