lines
How long does it take to love someone?
How long does it take for it to hurt when they leave?
How long should I wait before I dream?
How long should I wait before my expectations bleed?
You cared so quick, you cared so much.
I threw up walls, I couldn't trust.
But I still hoped every text was you.
I gave my all.
I let you through.
But now I'm waiting by the phone.
My text, last sent, and yours: unknown.
Is there a difference between this and friends?
Where one line begins and the other ends?
time.
I don't think that I have ever gone through time as quickly as I have in the last eight months. They tell you that "time flies when you're having fun." I was never told that time also flies when you are just desperate for time to slow down. I have the exact same amount of days, hours, minutes, and seconds that I have had in every other year. Yet, somehow they still feel shorter.
I have turned into an hourglass, my sand falling in a countdown towards the end. Who am I to try and ask for more time?
I wither away my seconds, sacrifice them to my stress, to my goals, to my future. I lecture others on work-life balance in a world where I have lost mine.
I know my time is money, my time is valuable, my time is a gift.
But my life gives me deadlines.
My body is a capitalist. It tells me that if I invest my time now, it will return tenfold.
Maybe this was true when I was a child, wishing to be older. But I think the value of time has gone through inflation. Only, my exchange rate is still the same as it was when I was seven years old.
I ask again: Who am I to try and ask for more time?
There is no more time for the world to give me.
So I sit and I type and I try. And the world keeps tick, tick, ticking by.
Change
I used to walk the streets of New York City holding your hand. My memories were focused on the feel of your hand on mine, the jacket I stole from your closet sitting on my shoulders, and the sixteen minutes of conversation that existed between my front door and yours.
We were freshmen in college, unencumbered by the world. Everything was beautiful. We fell in love alongside the falling leaves, our lives changing alongside the seasons. But fall only lasted so long, and as winter approached, so too did the end of our relationship.
A year later, I walk alone. The streets of New York City are different now, the autumn colors and leaves mean different things. My memories are of the sidewalk crack at the corner, which almost looks like it could be a bird. They are of the park bench with the chipped green paint, where a couple sits every Saturday afternoon, falling in love like I used to. They are of my own hands, in a pair of gray woolen gloves, because while I still remember the feel of your hands, I think I know mine better now.
Some things have stayed the same. The seasons still change, the leaves still fall, and the wind still blows. But you and I walk separately, and the leaves no longer fall for us- but for you, and me, and change.
I have changed, and I think the leaves will celebrate that too.
Gone.
"Show us, then."
I can feel the pressure of his hand on my wrist disappear as my vision goes white. My immediate thought was that I was having a seizure, that my brain had finally decided to send me back to the void that my childhood had plagued me with. Yet, my consciousness remained and I realized that this was something new, something different. I was standing on a similar promenade as to the one that I had been on before, but beyond the five feet where I stood, there was just a white expanse in every direction.
Was I on drugs? It didn't feel like any trip I'd been on before, just an endless sea of nothing.
I peered into my surroundings desperate for a glimpse of something, anything. Minutes, seconds, and hours passed as I stared into the expanse. I was desperate for something to track the time that I had passed, and as the thoughts of my wish crossed through my mind- a speck appeared in my white surroundings. It was a dull recreation of a stopwatch as if I pulled from my faded memories of gym class and wondered how much longer we would have to run around the track at school.
Had I done this? Had my wish for a way to figure out how long I had been in this odd vision created what I wanted?
I wished for more things now. A place to sit, the perfect meal, the mansions that I had dreamed of as a child. The more I wished and thought and imagined, the more items appeared. A bench akin to the ones I would pass by in the park. The taco I had been craving since the week before. A tall building, with a moat and spires, as if pulled from my childhood dreams.
But as I sat on the bench, it collapsed under me. I took a bite of the taco, and it felt like sawdust. I crossed the bridge towards the castle-like building before me, and as I opened the door, the inside was nothing but endless gleaming white. It was nothing but a 2D recreation of childhood drawings.
I didn't know how to create a world. I wished desperately for a way back to mine. I wanted a ladder, a trapdoor, a portal, something, anything, that would get me out of this nightmare.
A door appeared nearby, wooden and glowing with purple light. I rushed for it, wrenching it open. But inside was just another white expanse. My mind not built for the creative ability to make a passage back to the world that I remembered. Could I recreate it? I thought about my friends and my family, pulling on my memories, desperate for them to join me. Shapes started to appear beside me. My mom, my best friends Marie and Douglas, and my coworker Grace. They looked almost correct. But as I stared closer, I started to doubt myself. Were Marie's eyes really that shade of blue or were they darker? Hadn't Grace gotten a haircut recently? Was her hair really that long?
And as I started, these questions ran through my head - they started to change in front of me. Marie's eyes turned just a few shades darker, Grace's hair shrinking just a few inches. My thoughts were changing them. Whoever "them" truly was.
I was terrified. I wanted it gone. I didn't want to create the world. I wanted my world back. The recreations I had made of my friends, of my family, of my favorite places - they were lifeless imitations.
Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
The word echoed through my head. I wanted it gone. All of it.
Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
The people, and the places that I had created started to fade. The expanse of white slowly returned.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
I could see shades of black creeping out the edges of my vision, overtaking the blank canvas that had been laid out in front of me.
Gone. Gone.
Maybe I hadn't been able to create my world. But I certainly was able to end this one. The black enveloped me, enveloped everything. I could feel the pressure and tension slowly leave my body.
Gone.
Would you call it luck?
I didn’t believe in luck until I was 18. A math teacher’s daughter, I lived my life based on hard work and probability. Everything was a numbers game and I calculated my life to the decimal points.
Going to college threw all of my carefully constructed numbers out the window. I still counted everything, but the numbers no longer fit into the carefully constructed box of logic I had built my life around.
17 new friends, 3 jobs, 36 classes, 4 funerals, 1 roommate, 2 boyfriends, 2 break-ups, and a million memories.
I couldn’t call it anything other than luck.
the prologue
I told my friends that I wasn’t depressed. I had spent the day before laying in my bed, alternating between scrolling on my phone and staring at the wall. I’d had a jar of canned peaches for breakfast, pulled straight from the cupboard. One of the ones with a pull tab lid where the fruit inside sat in a sugar-sweet syrup like concoction. I’d eaten nothing but ice cream for dinner, scraping at the sides of the paper container while sitting in my bed. My computer laid next to me, unopened. But I felt better about myself because then I could at least pretend that I was going to start doing something productive. I’d met them at a movie theatre. We were seeing the sequel of some science fiction fantasy that I’d never seen the original for. I made jokes about reading the Wikipedia page and pretending that I knew the plot line. I’ve always been good at pretending that I’m fine. They already knew the truth, of course, but we were our own little bubble of existential crises, sitting there in the parking lot. They were just nice enough not to call me out on it.
But I lived a fine line of grief and spite, and with a determination not to lose any more people. That was the part that I wasn’t very good at. I feel like the girl in a cliche movie, complaining that everyone around her dies. But I was only two years into my twenties, and I’d already lost more people than I’d had fingers, and less than half that had been older than 30. Three suicides, one overdose, one surgery gone wrong, a little girl only eight years old. Two grandparents, too many friends. I’d gotten used to planning carpools to funerals. I carried life on my shoulders like Atlas, afraid to drop the world- knowing that all their stories now were mine.
pettiness can’t fix this
To you I was a self fulfilling prophecy
you spent every moment we were together waiting for me to break your heart
that way
when it finally happened
you wouldn‘t be surprised
my competitive soul burned
I wanted to be petty
prove you wrong
prove that I wouldn’t be the one to leave
to drown the sparks that struck between us
prove that I could love you
but your words were a burden
a doomed blessing to break your heart
Maybe I wasn’t strong enough to carry them
Maybe I was smart enough to let them go
but even that we had already lived too many moments unhappily together
I still felt like I was losing
My Prose
I’ve known Prose longer than some of my best friends. Similar to friendships, Prose sneaks in and out of my life, but it serves as a constant thrum in the background, something to fall back on as needed. I first came across Prose in June of 2016, from a maudlin google search of a high school teenager who wanted to find places to write. I’m long past high school now, and my goals, aspirations, and experiences have all evolved and changed. So has my writing. But Prose still sits in my pocket, a companion for when I need to share the thoughts, the whimsy, the grief, the joy that spills from my brain. I suppose Prose is part diary, part story, part friend. I’ve always been more of a shadow here, lurking on the edges of community- dipping in and out for weeks at a time, but always coming back to read, to watch, to write. In a whimsical sort of way, I suppose it’s nostalgia that keeps me here - to continue forward on a path I struck over 7 years ago. But, I am also kept here by the underlying joy that exists in connecting, and in sharing. Every story, every poem, every piece of prose has an audience. Prose is mine.
I thought I had time
I remember scoffing at your words
a look of derision crossing my face
a tilt of my head, an eye roll
always sure that what you said was a jest
a joke, a jolly
a jumped-up exaggeration of something that could never be true
would never be true
and I would laugh
push away your words as falsities
placate your thoughts as if they were just existential humor
but no
the trouble is
in those moments
you think you have time
I thought I had time
my years stretched out in front of me
decades of time left to explore
and in those moments
I thought you had time too
I thought we had time.