Some days I long for Colorado.

For unfamiliar scenery and a familiar face.

Some mornings I wonder what you eat for breakfast,

and what you taste like in the dawns first light.

I think, more days than not, about

conversations I wish we’d had, are yet to have.

Too many things I thought and never said,

I can’t help but wonder if it’s too late to say them.

My fingertips itch to have you under them again.

I miss you in a way that makes me feel incomplete.

And I some days I long for Colorado,

and hope that it longs for me.

The smell of gardenias hangs heavy in a brightly lit room. The dust motes dance silently in the beams of sunshine that fall to the floor.

A barefoot woman walks in, towards the largest window, furthest from the west wall.

She methodically removes her dress, followed by her bra and panties. Clad now only in an antique pendant, she closes her eyes, points her body West, and begins to move. Her hips sway to a silent rythm, her small feet following steps uncharted by human history. She raises her hands, moving them in elaborate gestures towards the heavens. She begins to chant, barely a decibel above inaudible, words unutterable to most, unheard for a millennia.

She dances on, the oppressive heat brings a sheen of sweat to her skin, her fluid movements unencumbered by the humidity in the air around her.

One final flick of her wrist, followed by a final word, and the West wall is gone, replaced by a gaping black hole; a gateway.

She drops to her knees, and crawls on all fours towards the cavernous sacrificial altar of the long dead god she loves. As the darkness envelopes her, she finds there is peace in sacrifice, but no love.

She looks good in blue.

The blues you leave behind when you leave her, the shape of a belt along her back, a blue reminder of who's who to her.

She looks good in blue, when she's in your shirt, navy or flannel or sky blue, pulled off your back to wrap her in your scent.

She looks good in blue, when you're gone, and she misses you, melancholy honey that drops off her tongue and on to a page, while the ocean drips on to the latest shirt she kept.

Beautiful only when she’s splayed out on the blue sheets you ruin her on, time and time again.

She looks best underneath you, blue no longer.

I'm the kind of girl that will set fire to your life, show you colors you never even dreamed existed...also, I'll set fire to your bushes, because you were too nice to the waitress and I know you want to fuck her.

I am wild, like the wind, and as free as the sky, and the sky and wind can't hold down a job either.

I'm always up for an adventure, I'll go anywhere, do anything, be your partner in crime, your other half, the half of who you wish you were...but if we ever get into actual trouble I'll cry till they let me go, and blame it all on you.

I'm magic; a magic, beautiful, sexy force of nature. I'll steal your heart right from under you, and maybe also your wallet, because magic is expensive.

Don't try to tame me, you can't possibly understand the nature of a wild woman like me. Also, don't try to figure out my real name, I'm pretty sure I'm still technically dead in Delaware, don't blow my cover.

A woman like me will love you like no one ever has, with all the passion and intensity anyone could ever muster, at least until I meet your cousin, because his car is cooler than yours.

Love forever and yours always,

(At least until I'm bored)

❤️

~me

PS If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my pretending to have my shit together.

The dreams that play inside my head,

they star only you and I.

In impossible embraces,

as unutterable words caress me.

Passion and perversion, intertwined.

Where love looks like pain,

and sex sounds like fighting.

You hurt the parts of me

you desire most,

and I only ask for more.

I fall asleep to fall into you,

to kneel down at your feet.

But silent pleas drip

onto deaf ears,

and I wake, untouched

and alone.

I hold tightly to the scent of you, until it’s completely overtaken by the sugary sweet smell of all of me.

I’m incomplete without it.

You are sunshine, smoke and salt, and without you, all my vanilla sugar cookie clouds are just fluff.

You’re my balance.

My better half, the grumble to my giggles.

You make me a better person, because how could I not strive to be as good as you deserve?

You’re my favorite, my best, and the only forever I’ll ever see.

And the world, for all its bad and baffling and bizarre, is still good and kind and warm, because you are in it.

You are all the words I’ve ever found, and all the words I cannot form. You’re every love song ever written, and the reason there is always a song in my heart.

I can’t say it enough, and I’m incapable of saying it to the full extent it lives in my soul, because there aren’t words that go that deep.

So I’ll just say I love you.

❤️

Summer makes me nostalgic, but for a life I never had. Imaginary adventures I only went on in books, in songs.

King, and Simmons, McCammon, Gaiman, Lumley; they drugged me, carried me out into a world that was dangerously safe. It was a hell of a lot better to fight monsters that lived on a page instead of the ones that lived across the hall and in my head.

I died, on the final pages, only to be reborn on Chapter One, of whatever book was next.

And when it was too hot to read, when I needed to let go, when I couldn’t use my brain, I drowned in music. Eclectic at best, some days it was Kershaw and Williams, some days Sinatra and Martin, and when I needed reminders that anger was beautiful too, I delved deep into Slayer, Pantera, and Lamb of God. I went on manic dance parties with rancid and the ramones, and I found heavy melancholy with Cohen.

Summer now...it has no definition, no markers to separate it from winter or spring or the abyss. It’s all just the same now, the magic is gone. We pretend like that’s normal.

”Let's talk about anything. Anything in this world, but politics, religion and her.”

I tore off little pieces of my soul,

and wrote them on napkins, gum wrappers, and shitty hotel stationary.

I gave them to you, little bits at a time, for safe keeping,

because I wanted you to have them, I thought you needed them.

I gave them away, all of them.

I don't know if you kept them.

You never asked for them, and you never gave me any words back.

I thought if I gave you enough, if you had the only parts of me worth having,

that I would be enough. That the little papers, tattered though they were, had words that were pretty enough to make your heart sing. That you would sing for me.

It's so silent here, and I've run out of paper,

there's no ink, and I cannot write.

So my soul has withered, and I've forgotten all my words.

I find words in the moonlight, that escape me while the sun shines.

Clothed only in desire, I drip longing from my fingertips,

onto the parts of me that daylight never sees.

Bathed in the iridescent luminescence that makes the tides ebb and flow,

while summer heat pulses against flesh,

unencumbered by the demands of decency,

I find myself, touched only by you, the moon, and June.

Summers on the farm were never easy. Long days, and heat that stifled sleep, followed by longer days, and harder work. Everyone was expected to pull their weight, no matter how little.

Jeanie and Louise, being older, always had the harder jobs, stringing barbed wire, tagging the cattle, mucking stalls. Little Jane, she was empty headed, besides being little, and couldn't be trusted to do anything hard, or complex. The garden was all she was good at, the only thing she was given as a responsibility.
Her garden was a little over an acre, and everyone in three towns knew her tomatoes and cucumbers were the best. Always tasted just right, always picked on just the right day. Jane had a green thumb, that's for sure, even if she had a hard time talking, and thinking. Her daddy was always real clear with her, about what she was to plant. That garden, and the canning she'd do, had to be enough to get them through till next summer, so there wasn't time for her to plant nonsense, like berries, or flowers.
All her attention had to be given to the vegetables, so they wouldn't be hungry. She set aside a little corner once, to try to grow sunflowers, but when her daddy found them, he tore them all to pieces, and then did the same to her. The scar on her shoulder reminded her she shouldn't ought to think, or try do anything but what she was told, ever again.
The summer after their momma died, Jane took to wandering off at night. Her sisters questioned her every time she came back, warned her not to do it again. It was too dangerous, and she might not ever find her way back. When it happened every night for a month, and she always came home safe, they let her be, and figured she'd either come home, or more likely, they'd just find her in the morning.
That was the summer daddy started drinking, and got freer with his hands. Most mornings the girls went to work with handprints on their arms, or back, or bruises on their faces. But since it was just them on the farm, nobody ever saw. Jane bore the brunt of it, the girls always said it was because she looked like their mama, but didn’t have the sense of child, and she made their daddy madder than his sensible girls did.
One afternoon, after his drinking started at first light, he found Jane playing with a kitten that had wandered into her garden, instead of weeding. He broke that sweet little kittens neck, and beat Jane so bad she lost her right eye. Her sisters warned her, after that, that she wasn’t to go wandering at night, like she had been.
She did anyway though. Every night.
It was almost September when their daddy went missing. The sisters woke one morning, to Jane, singing softly in the kitchen, and fresh strawberries in bowls on the table. Sherriff took the dogs out, searching for their daddy, but then never found him.
Never found Jane’s carefully tended strawberry patch either.