For Ellie. You will find it. You will, you will, you will.

It has come to my attention that every young person in a certain stage of life must experience some capacity of willing displacement in order to keep themselves alive. Children join scouts and go camping; it satisfies them. My mother incessantly quotes Eat, Pray, Love while laughing at the idea of her friends on Disney Cruises. We paint our lives in such a way that they look open, whether that be to adventure or hope or beauty, or maybe all of it, and then we hold off from the act of experiencing it for as long as we can. After all, how many garishly memoir experiences can one life hold? Don’t we want to do it right? If you’re going to find your “it,” after all, wouldn’t you want a perfectly timed sunset in the distance and every word of a prewritten New Yorker Arts and Culture piece flowing from it? We practice calculated restraint until it nearly kills us.

When I first saw the city I was nineteen years old. It was May and it was muggy and thick. I took my ultimate joy from the idea that I was running away and even if somebody had half the mind to care, they couldn’t stop me. I wore a lacey top and shorts I’d altered from a pair of my father’s old jeans. I’d begun taking a liking to the way my body treated clothes like a swimming pool. Through lack of choice, my nineteenth summer had determined itself to be the sort of period in a young person’s life very suited for baselessness, and in that I wanted every part of me to match. My internship had fallen through. The reasons were well enough beyond my control that I could blame God, so I did. Prayer was never a concept I could fully grasp–the act of speaking to an enclosed space felt mocking towards the mortality I hadn’t asked for–and despite my best effort to muster up my courage and do the damn thing, I didn’t seem to have it in me to approach God face to face. A bus ticket cost six dollars, though; I had a friend who had an empty apartment and a couch. If nothing else I figured my nihilism and I might enjoy the Smithsonians.

The question of why we leave, why we must, is one I have asked rather persistently, one I’ve attempted and failed repeatedly to loosen my grapple on. Ellie was leaving, this I knew with certainty, that when I moved back into school her apartment would not be her apartment, rather one overtaken by characters foreign to me. I knew she was not coming back, never fully, but it was also never my plan to stay either, so how could I of all people be a hypocrite? I’d read Aristotle, about motion and animals. I thought maybe I could be one of the smarter girls in my class, set apart, taking a small chair at a table that seats one, lecturing to a wall painted with faces. I knew my family would love me, but I knew they didn’t know what to do with me. School would start again eventually. Ideally, Ellie would call, but I wasn’t too naive to know there was a likelihood that she wouldn’t. She left because the city got lonely. I leave because I want that. Better, I assume, to shed singularity among the masses, where there may be some sliver of hope for connection. I figure cities walk a tightrope of humanity: it’s one thing to be independent and another thing entirely different to be truly and thoroughly alone, but worse even to be alone enough in the way I was, thinking that you must be the first person in the universe to experience an emptiness quite this vast…after all, I thought, if I wasn’t, how is anyone still here? All this to say I’m writing about summer and loss in the same way that I always do. I’m also feeling rather wordy, so this is the time to dig out the cheap wine. Drown yourself. It’s chalky at the bottom.

Contextually speaking, I did not come into the summer dreaming of a grand exit. Despite personal denial surrounding my return to the hometown I swore I would, in fact, never be returning to, there were attempts made to aestheticize the experience. I took my leftover pills from school by the water at night and wrote bad poetry once they hit. I hid alcohol under my mattress only to promptly dig it out and drink it all, rapidly. There were halfassed job interviews, forty thousand step days, antique stores, whathaveyou. People talk about regression, but coming back is more of an Eden: a sudden, unprompted nudity. No matter who you are, who you may have turned into, if you were a lonely child, still you will be a lonely adult. So, as it was with most lonely children, I decided the crown jewel and singular redeemable trait of my town to be the library, and my sole task for the summer was to read the physics section in its entirety. It was one shelf. Singular.

Youth is plagued with the notion that they can be the one to save the world, each one individually. Most people can medicate themselves out of that. I could not, though I have tried rather copiously. I say this so you will know that never did I actually think I could build a time machine. I said I’d try, but I’m not even sure that was the goal. I’d like to sleep through summer, yes, but my answer to that wasn’t forward motion. I wanted to go back. I’d read enough memoirs to know that devastation, utter isolation can be aided but never cured. Why move forward, save for the fact that there was nothing else to do? Why go forth into the wreck willingly? Why not relive it again, and this time do it right?

Theoretical physicists have for years debated the possibility of moving backwards. Particle accelerators make it so, in theory, we should be able to move forward (with recognition that we’d be stuck in whatever future we travel to) but there seems to be no scientific, logical way to move to a set past. I had a lack of dedication to the cause. I discovered the same thing that every scientist in the past hundred years has: there is a missing link. We don’t know what it is. I read the books and returned them and slept for three days, waking up to sob over the phone to Ellie. “I am grieving so much.” I couldn’t enunciate the extent at which she was a part of that. The next day, I printed the time machine equations and put them in the chest under my bed. I packed a bag of clothes and a book about space travel. It wasn’t going to be a bedroom time machine, it could be Mars or a city of similar volume. I left.

It’s a very good thing to be young and in a city, I think especially when you’re poor. I suppose everyone does it once, whether they mean to or not, but I held my consciousness of the whole grand scheme in a very high regard simply because I knew exactly what I was doing and I was doing it with a very calculated purpose. I thought of what I’d tell my father, if he ever chose to call: I figured it must be making me smarter or more interesting or prettier, because every girl here had the kind of look to her where you know that if her degree falls through, modeling may have been the more viable option anyway. I texted my friend, “everyone is so kind here,” and she called me, confused. “The men in the street call me differently than the ones at home.” I’m not stupid, but I am gentle enough to be mistaken as such. Anyway, it’s all a novel kind of lostness until you look down from the apartment balcony and watch, as your vape clears, two people fistfight in the alley below. The neighbors downstairs are fighting. Somebody’s screaming and you can’t place any odds.

I have yet to find a home. It’s been a theme and it will be one. But what I can find are places. This is to announce that I spent thirty minutes entranced on the second floor of the Air and Space museum. Yes, I cried at the planets, because everyone does, but the space suit made me numb. Thirty minutes I stared. What was it–something about the way an empty fabric body bag had seen more of the world than anyone gaping at it ever could? I couldn’t help but ogle, let my mind linger at what Neil Armstrong must have thought coming back to earth. How can you come back after seeing so much? Is there a way to come back or forever will I be stuck feeling as though I grew out of something? Can a person grow out of their world, the whole world? I went back to the apartment late and applied to a space camp on a whim, hoping they didn’t see timestamps on applications. Alabama. I’d been a camp counselor before, it wasn’t too far a cry. I’m not the kind of person who could stay in the South forever, I know this. But I’m not the kind of person who can stay anywhere. I figured I’d never left the east coast–it wasn’t going to be a bedroom time machine or a trip to mars or the sheets I’ve had since I was eight and I couldn’t couchsurf forever either–for two months, it could be Alabama. It wasn’t not a space suit. It could be Alabama.

You know how this is going to resolve itself. If you are reading this essay, you know I’m not going to get it and you want to see how that plays out, even if that may be a bit morbid. Instead I’m going to do that thing writers do–you’ll curse at me–but I’ll tell you that when I was eleven, I decided it was my destiny to be a singer. I couldn’t yet play guitar, but I figured out how to arrange my fingers so they mirrored a melody, wrote five songs and a letter to my parents and church leaders apologizing for leaving, but I really had to go. I put my dolls in a box at the top of my closet, sat on my bed, and sobbed. I took the box down. I brushed my hair. I still have the letter and it’s probably best that I never went ahead with my plan. I can’t really sing.

One summer ago, fresh into adulthood, I bullshitted my way into a ticket to Alaska with a church choir. The idea of seeing the world and saving it seems synonymous to me, likewise seeing the world and it in some way saving me. I think there is something unexplainable so intrinsically wrong with me, and if there is no God, if there is nothing, there is still the world; if I am still here I can still be saved. I thought Alaska would take that place. The vision was something along the lines of me lonely on a mountain, screaming my problems into the open air as I hiked up, coming down empty and free. I guess I should have prayed more, or not used the words bullshitted and church in the same sentence: the point is I got covid seven hours before the plane took off. I cried until I slept, and I slept three days until I woke back up to mourning. It’s a party story now until I’m drunk. If I’m drunk I’ll still swear it would have fixed me. So no, I wasn't shocked when I didn’t get space camp, if not only because summers and I seem to have a sort of track record. I did not grieve. I stole the keys and some hair dye, stained the shower and cleaned it, and then I went outside and thought about killing myself again. I called Ellie. I read myself poems and smoked and gagged down the side of the balcony. I went inside. The red around my eyes settled before my friend even woke up and I waited another day to tell her.

But I was in the city. I could not grieve inside. I smoked every square corner of the wharf, waiting twenty minutes for a swing chair and proceeding to not move an inch from it all day. I caught my reflection in a boat mirror and was shocked by my brightly dyed hair, my face losing its childlike puff. Adulthood had gotten up and shaken my hand and stricken me across the face with the other arm. I looked away from the water, in fear. I looked just like anyone else. A parent pulled their child away from my secondhand smoke, a man attempted to seat himself next to me. He may have been kind but I was no longer safe, not to or from anything. Later that night on the phone I whispered to Ellie, “I’m not going to save the world.” It was the first time I’d ever told the truth on the matter and it tasted like vomit on my tongue.

Ellie cleared her throat. “I know. But I think there should be something that means more to you–for you–than that.” And I couldn’t tell you every word after even if I wanted to, but I remember how her voice got, subtly quieter and steadying. I will tell you the world cupped me in its cracked hands and the city lights were dim and flickering, car horns blared, people screamed. It was a place. Anywhere was just a place. It wasn’t going to be here, and maybe it wouldn’t be anywhere at all. The only thing acting as a savior had ever been me, constantly, unknowingly moving myself forward. A body is the only time machine, and constantly I am putting myself in drive and considering slamming the brakes. I am not a Christ. I am a nineteen year old girl who is losing the ability to play pretend.

Ellie asked me where I was. I told her I wouldn’t do anything rash. I still don’t know exactly how she meant the question–I find my travels so frequent and unsurprising that I forget to give updates. I’d been in the city for nearly a week, and time had moved so strangely it could have been a month. I remembered but an hour.

My sadness is senseless, quite honestly. I may be the only person I know who runs away with this frequency. I also know that when you’re running, things get blurry. It isn’t fair to wish the world would slow so I could see it but I’m going to wish it anyway. I’m going to wish that when I’d moved out a summer ago I packed my room in full so there was nothing to feel bad that I couldn’t go back to. I wish I could sit. I wish I’d said better goodbyes to people, right now to Ellie. She’s pensive, very thoughtful. I know she’ll be fine and likely happier. I know this wouldn’t have mattered any more or less but I wish I could have said goodbye sober, looked at her and told her to be safe. Cities can be dangerous. I know she’ll be safe. I still wanted to tell her to be safe.

In a lot of ways I grieved, I grieve, myself. There is a lot I could have been, or at least I imagined so. I spent the earlier part of my teen years feeling caged and now the latter part rebelling. I feel like somewhere there is a middle ground and if I find it, there I'd find me too, much older. I haven’t met myself in a while. I don’t look in the mirror much. I’m a size small and I don’t like what I weigh. I wonder constantly how unattractive I must look, nicotine in some form dangling off my lips like a pacifier. Nineteen is a giant toddler, so selfish, so aware.

I spent most of what I think deep down I knew were my last couple days in the city in that same spot on the wharf. Retrospectively I’d like to be the kind of person that thinks it’s sweet that even in the busyness of the area surrounding me that spot was always open, but I think it was probably just the fact that nobody else had any desire to sit in the direct sun. I walked around, realizing I’d picked up lyrics and street signs and I grow into things fast. I could get around the city with relative ease. It wasn’t shiny, it wasn’t anything. It was a city, and I wouldn’t see it for the first time again in many years. Neil Armstrong and Ellie and the city and me–every story is the same, every aftermath unspoken.

There is so much I’m going to experience, so many people I’ll meet and so much I’ll lose, and maybe that’s all life really is. Maybe that is the culmination of youth, why it hurts so bad. I am watching all of these lanes converge into one, but the loss and the gain don’t ever fully cancel each other. I’ll get back to school and meet people and miss Ellie. I will love my family but live with the inability to live with them, refuse affection from my mother but want to plead with her to give me a chance, people think I’m nice. I will not eat dinner but my friend will make two servings in case, call me and tell me she’s waiting. I’ll try not to forget my cigarette butts. I’ll try to move quickly so her food doesn’t get cold. This place and all of its tourists–slow goddamn walkers.

Every city is a small city if you’re expecting something to stay vast, and the anticipatory nervousness surrounding it is not a friend that lingers. You will get lonely. You will want humanity again. Likewise, every man is just a man and I am just a girl without a frontal lobe. The city didn’t bore me but as July approached with its vapidity, I began to experience the nostalgia that comes with comfortability in a place: I missed the smell of cheap detergent. I applied for positions in the town where my parents lived. It was time. There was a desire to see the space suit again once more before I left, but I never got to it. Knowing how novel emotion is, though, that may be for the better. I never said I was going home. The whole point is that there is none. But in the way that I can catch a cheap train and sell all my clothes, the ways in which I am young and summers will stay long and dire, if it kills me, I will find it. I will, I will, I will.

So in this, there isn’t a conclusion, no definitive answer so long as I’m alive. This isn’t another essay about killing myself, but it isn’t exactly not. I’ll keep on going if I can, for as long as I can, growing as old as I can bear to. Maybe someday I’ll sit somewhere and realize I’ve grown up from nineteen: my “photos” and “baby photos” folders all convoluted and all the things I’ve seen will have montaged themselves into a sort of unreadable humid mist, every kitchen the same unreflecting stainless steel. I might not remember it, but I hope I see a lot. I hope the beauty, the knowledge of it, doesn’t fade too quickly. That will be enough. Now it’s enough. Maybe it’s all that ever has been enough.

----footnotes---

Um. Hi. It's been a minute.

I don't really come here anymore, at this point I feel like I'm a bit old and it's all a bygone from an era that I've successfully lived, loved, and love still, but don't feel the need to re-enter. Something I've found about writing is that there is no poet like a sixteen year old girl and I've mourned that fact heavily. Every so often though, I'll write a piece (like this one) and remember how at sixteen or seventeen I would have anticipated comments and critiques for it. So please comment. Critique.

I turn twenty this year (crazy.) I'm getting a degree. After that I'll probably get another one. I'm trying to be a professor, for whatever that life update's worth, and I focus most of my time on mathematical philosophy. If I knew you, I love you. If I have yet to know you, hi. I'll probably take this down in a few days. I don't know if anyone will see it, I don't know if anyone's still here but I'll use my old tags and be curious. Maybe there'll be something else posted like this someday, maybe not, but everything else will stay here. A relic. It's a pleasure to be young.

petals pressed in enveloped sleeves, know, please

hearts need more than undug, rooted holes. don't

plant promises you can't uphold, try to send

hope in forms of light on fragmented souls; me--

i like how they sparkle like stained glass. flowers

grow then die at your fingers, just as men. please,

borrow and barter memories--don't

pluck delicacies, it wilts them to tragedy. send

bottled words tightened by actions; know me

as the lover who craves time. not, flowers.

I immerse myself in the sun

swallowing gold

within tattered lungs

gravity no more than a delicate red string

in a child's

soft chubby hands ,

my body lifts and pivots in a boundless spell

swirling somersaults

on the edge of the light

cutting air between oxygen and lost time .

I am something yet unsaid

lifetimes

of dying stars

fireworks waiting to be lit

I immerse myself in the sun

I swallow myself up

starting creation at day one .

reinventing structural walls

the blueprints

to my soul

Your hands are often too rough. The skin at the edges of your nail beds is peeled back and hardened and has, on occasion, been known to bleed without warning. If I run my thumb along the inside of your palm, I know exactly where it will catch on raised callouses. And even when I’m alone, I can feel the spot where your fingers would rest in the webbing of my own. My skin is electric shocks at the thought of the places where your fingertips most often linger. Nerve endings, attention-wrought. Breath, hitched in tightrope suspension. And I can count your freckles without you in the room. I could draw a map of your skeleton from memory. Place each rib in its exact location. Carve the precise depth of your clavicle. I know the pattern your teeth leave on each of my hips and how your tongue feels restless against my own. My neck can recall each spot where your lips chap and how often your front teeth push past them. I am violently aware of the spots where your hair refuses to lie against your scalp and instead reaches skyward. The sighs and stutters that litter your speech patterns. I can feel the sharp intake of your breath when my teeth close just a bit too hard on your frame. And that slight leak of CO2 in nighttime stillness. I sleep, dizzy in your exhales as they fill up my inhales. I would swear I have been constructed from the realization of the space that you fill in relation to all of the emptiness I leave behind. And you forgot the color of my eyes.

*this piece is from my newest collection baby, sweetheart, honey coming in January and available wherever books are sold.

i've always been able to feel every crack. every fracture in me has been all encompassing and at the forefront of my occupations. i couldn't see them. no one could see any proof that i had ever been shattered.

i made them visible. i drew the cracks on my body with blood. it numbed me and relieved me to know it was all real.

the cracks are still there though. they were permanent. i don't want them anymore. i don't want these reminders of how bad things can get. i'm sick of feeling like a vase waiting to topple.

but the lovely thing about breaking is that someone might scoop up the pieces. pick you up, bit by bit, and lay you down on a table. they'll start to glue parts together, figuring out the puzzle and understanding how this was first done. they'll hold you when they finish and admire how you can still hold flowers even when you had just been a pile of shards.

you'll learn to put yourself together. you'll always need help with a few pieces, but it gets easier. sometimes you can stop yourself falling. sometimes someone might catch you. it's okay to break.

My mother always told me that there was beauty in the unknown. I never truly understood what that meant until I was staring the unknown in the face. It was breathtaking. I think sometimes we get so focused on the known and how it affects us that we take for granted the journey of the discovery. At least, that's what my mother believed. It was poetic, how much she sought adventure, right up until the adventure found her unexpectedly and she wasn't prepared. She died when I was twelve. I still don't know how. But I never forgot the look she got in her eyes whenever she found something new. It scared me sometimes. That she might just seek the next adventure and then lose herself in the dreams.

But now the unknown is staring me in the face and I have to make a choice. Do I follow in the footsteps of my late mother, whose voice I still hear guiding me forward even now, or do I choose to be content with the known, the safe, the sure?

This is the choice I face now, as the shadows loom in front of me, promising life, love, happiness. But also pain. Loss. Corruption.

I don't know what I will find on the other side. I don't know if I'll regret being fearless. I'm sure my mother did the moment she realized that she wasn't ever going to return home. But I have the same choice to face now that she did all those years ago. The end is calling me, and whether it will be the end of life or death, I suppose I won't know until it's too late. But as for me, if this rapid fire beating of my heart is any indication, then I know that I cannot just stay here and do nothing. 

With the courage of my mother as the wind in my sails, I inch slowly toward the wall of shadows in front of me. So close that I could reach out and touch them. With one final breath, I push into the darkness, and the world goes black.

--

word count: 356

happy november, writers! thus begins the journey of our protagonist (still unnamed) as she sets off to discover what exists beyond the edge of the world. please reach out if you would like regular chapter notifications! <3

When I fall back, my body falls deep.

Into a relaxing thank you for that extra hour of sleep.

When I spring forward, my body moves slow. My dream was cut off,

it had another hour to go.

If mankind could leave alone what nature put in place.

No one would wake up screaming coffee with a zombie face. LoL

i. reduced to a singularity of twitching anxiety,

i stood on those risers and projected the confidence i knew i lacked.

hands shaking, heart beating faster, faster, f a s t e r

everyone around me moving, talking, singing

too many voices in my mind that won't shut up.

ii. hidden beneath layers of individuality,

i don't stand out, a one in a sea of hundreds

maybe if they don't notice me, they won't notice when i leave.

iii. eyes, locked on mine, almost as intently as my own,

would be off-putting if it weren't so home.

without fear in your eyes, the future of uncertainty

but now all the anxiety is gone, pouf.

iv. you will never know the impact your unflinching gaze had on me.

forbidden and longing, broken wishes by which she dreams, her thoughts caressing the sky as she waits for him by the sycamore tree. he looks past her as always, asking about her day, her friend (his ex), and they briefly discuss his new girl. he doesn’t notice the look that crosses her face as the conversation twists between the weather, love, and goodbyes. she wishes that he would just take the time to see her, really see her, but as usual, he’s gone before she even has the chance to say everything that she wishes she could. he thinks he’s happy, but he’s still searching, much like her. he doesn’t deserve her and she doesn’t deserve this ignorance, this blind friendship. they both deserve more. but not each other. never each other. and yet she dares to dream. dares to talk about him, dares to think about him, dares to love him, even as she knows that her wildest dreams can never do this reality justice. even as she knows that she has never been one to stand by and watch. but this is out of her hands now. and she must come to terms with that, however cold and sharp it may be.

welcome

back

into my arms

burnt yellow

jamais vu

this heart

safe

as evanescent

home