reckless abandon.

Jazz floating, tinkering
I have to strain to hear.

Am I ready to set up a whole new set of memories? When is it okay? When will I be able to open myself up again? I feel raw. There is no other word. Just broken and in pieces and in need of a new layer to protect myself. The cynicism and the photographs are piling up against me. I don't want to be this way. I am so sick of hurting the people who care about me. So why can't I just say, "Let me not be this person anymore" to whoever will listen, to myself.

Olive oil, quiet lights
Dark night, footsteps
Art art art
And writing

I have never known someone so collaborative. It is fresh and new and beautiful and I feel like a part of something in the philosophical perception of time. I want to reach outside of the span of one human life and enter the long dure. Where is the line between me and humanity? It is slowly opening up to me.

Strange, so strange it is to make decisions like this. Decisions that you feel, that you can't think about because they hurt too much. If you think about it, you know you'll say no. So you enter the second person and talk about yourself like you're not really there, to make it easier, to remove the situation, to make it part of someone else's problem. It can't possibly be your own. The consequences can't possibly have any affect on you and everyone you are involved with.

Ideas flowing down the rainy streets
Dance music and dirty theaters and confused smiles
Words
There is nothing sexier than words.

And it's so strange to feel something touching me from so far way. It is so odd to feel my hands shaking and to know that it has nothing to do with what I thought it did. I never wanted to let go, never wanted to face the day when those feelings faded.

I read somewhere, somewhere near me, that falling out of love must be one of the saddest things that humans experience. Falling into it is hard enough. So how do you even know if you fall out of it if you're never never absolutely sure what it even is.

You're so small you say
as I twist on the hardwood floors and
feel my heart twist back and forth
Yes and no and yes and no

And I can't think anymore. It's like I'm outside myself, watching myself do things I never imagined. I cried for the girl I was seven years ago last night. I cried for her. Because I know that she never would have wanted this for me. She was so naive. She never could have possibly known how hard it is. In her mind, everything was right and wrong and love and hate and clear clear clear as the water that floats down the Appalachians during all of those summers in Tennessee. But, just as I thought, love is a growing up. I just didn't really know what growing up was. Growing up is realizing that you must make decisions that will never make sense. Growing up is realizing that you can't have that perfect life with a cat and three kids and a healthy sex life and be skinny and perfect and smart and rich and know, at all times, that this is all there is, that this is all you will ever need. I will never know those things. Maybe if I stayed in the South, maybe if I never went to college, maybe if I never read a single book, then I'd know.

Cold winter night
Smell of chlorine and cannabis
Lost
I veered off the path
And now my perfect little life
with a perfect little map
and a tiny pristine plan
with a boy who'd die for me
is gone.

So now I must take the long way.