stapled to a telephone pole in the alleyway

       When I say that I'm afraid of the future, particularly as it relates to my romantic life, I feel that it is firstly residual anxiety withheld from my relationship with [S.S]; but more importantly, a lack of understanding love and the fear that arises from that lack of understanding. After being depressed at the farm, I no longer feel a tightness in my chest closely associated with anxiety -- a tightness in my chest that I however associate with my first feelings of love for any other person, for [M.M]. When I know I'm in love, however I could, I don't feel that tightness in my chest -- and that makes me nervous, or possibly sad; that contrast, that lack of clarity towards its absence, makes me chase the question, as unhealthy as it may be to dwindle so. I feel like I don't need to understand love, but even just saying that upsets me because carnally I seek to know. That and the language used to make that statement is still reminiscent of the language I used ...

 Dear Josh, I wanted to take the time just to tell you that I'm really glad I got to meet you. I remember very strongly, for whatever reason, sitting and talking about that stupid sunroom story. For your dignity's sake, I won't get into detail [LOL]. I just miss you man. I don't know where you went, and that little worry as to how you've been doing is what I'd like to say is the reason I come back to the thought, but what I really think keeps that thought there in my mind is the idea that I don't know why you left. It was rather ceremonious, when you left, and for that I feel although you deserve some arrangement of ornation in my memory. I know you're alive, but the way you left felt like a funeral. The idea that you're right there -- but gone, for whatever reason, a reason that I cannot know -- kind of feels like chasing the stretching shadow of your own visage down a street at night. It just expands outwards, and you can't ever really grasp ...

       I feel like the longing cannot be effectively captured in a single sentence; but if something was to come close, it would be a single question: why do I miss so strongly things that I've never had? Or, in another; how can I miss a world I was never a part of? I feel like a ghost of someone else's passion. There was this girl. In my head, I say, because at least I could know for sure that she was there: in that I felt, so vividly and strongly, as if it wasn't only in my mind that I could hear her heels clicking off of the pavement, in an alley in Ladd's Addition. Her name might have been Ruby -- and as I write, oh the nagging and remorse that I felt so deep down as I forgot to capitalize that name the first time I wrote it, as if I was commanded to put some respect behind such a lovely name -- but I never met her, at least it is to say, my body never met her. Never met her in this allotted time that I have, living this life.      I remember the...

       Life is a game of chance and love, and not much of anything more. You live to play the game, whether you live to win or simply to play. Personally, I play for a love of the game. Chance is the only truth when truth does not exist. Things happen only because of a dice roll, on a pair of dice made only on the day which they were, only in the place that they were, made only by they whom they where made and rolled only by whom they where rolled by. Everything that has ever occurred has lead up to this moment, only because they played out exactly the way they did. It is pure chance. You can make calculations and predictions and manipulate chance all you may, but at that point, you are forced to recognize that despite however much chance manipulation you practice, you remain in the hands of the very chance you seek to manipulate in first place. Not only this, but if you would continue to zoom out in that way of recognizing how things are, you see now that your ver...

       When you grow up, you can usually only ever find places -- and in particular, rooms -- that you may return to over a vast swath of time to have seemingly gotten smaller. It makes a lot of sense, seeing as to the fact that you have quite literally grown larger, and your perception of the room has changed in relation to the no longer meekness of your figure. I open with this because, curiously, throughout my years as of yet, there is one room that has only managed to get larger as I have grown: Mr. B's AP US History classroom. At once I may have viewed it as a room I was trapped in -- in the sense that I had found it so drowsily boring that my mind was restrained to my figure's presence in the room. I didn't know then that I would return almost exactly for that reason in following years. APUSH and Mr. B taught me so much, and catalyzed my political involvement to such a degree that I revere the experience nearly as much so in importance as shadowing my mother to...

       Sometimes, when I'm greatly alone in the presence of only the moon, I like to collect all of my past loves up and put them in a great ballroom in my head and imagine how they'd interact with the party. It functions in mood almost like a funeral, it's this awkward dance of remembrance that is celebrating or resenting the affection that once was the interaction I had with that specific person. They're all always dressed up, like I promised I'd make them do, if I had ever had the chance to be taken to a ball by any of them. I don't think any of them knew how to dance -- as if I do myself -- but at least I know some of the footwork (I don't mean that in a rude way, I'm just teasing). The ballroom is always this moderately claustrophobic, rectangular room with red and gold carpet stretching across the whole way. On one short end is a stage, a great polished light wooden stage, draped in red and gold curtains. Light reflects from some ambiguous source o...

       Do you ever wonder what a meteor might see when it flies past planets, just close enough to spot some life? Assuming, that is, that a meteor could see anything in the first place. I imagine it's some sort of collage of splendid life and grandeur, the life of a meteor, blazing through space. Passing galaxy after galaxy, star after star. I've been somewhat obsessed with meteors as of late, perhaps as a greater representation of a fascination with outer space. I hope that when I die, that someone has read all of my "of moss and wet sand" diaries (if you could call them diaries) and say, "She dreamt of the stars. She always was a dreamer of some kind, be that to the detriment of her academic, professional, or romantic life; she was nonetheless a dreamer." Or something like that. If a meteor touched down in your backyard, you'd probably die. But while we assume you wouldn't die -- just for the sake of what I'm trying to portray/ask -- let...

     I believe it to have been the summer of two-thousand and twenty three that I look upon so fondly, so fondly perhaps it would find itself in usurpation in my memory of one of the most pleasant periods of my life. A period of muggy summer air, where the sweat that trickles down your brow was sweet and the worries that brew now upon your conscious were seemingly impossible to reach — a period of eternal nostalgia, of rakish reveling, of excitatory romping-abouts, a period wherein all dialogue you may recall is as poetic in retrospect as the speeches of time’s greatest orators. I recall the neon light of the concrete jungle’s night reflecting off of the lenses perched upon my nose, the feeling of my hair pressed against my sweaty forehead by my newsboy cap. I can bring to my tongue the echoes of every which meal I ate, to my hand every which scrape of the pavement in the metro, to my lungs every which breath fluttered upon the anticipation of the summer’s next revel...

     I find my character divided discernibly of two aspects; a body of knowledge and a body of feeling — I like to call them Left (the body of knowledge) and Right (the body of feeling). Left seeks to know, expanding and progressing, a meteor burning faster and brighter through space. Left only gets bigger, faster, quicker, stronger, and it pushes me to feed it to the point of real consequence both upon my lifestyle and Right herself. Left is beyond gender, Left is beyond humanity, Left is progress, and the unyielding pursuit of all knowledge possibly to be known. Right feels, she is a contracting and expanding amorphous child of passion and the mother of all that is cruel and magnificent and powerful and inconspicuous in the human experience. Right shows me the beauty of everything, she takes my hand as the wind pushes me down the avenues and alleys of nostalgia and exploration, she cradles me as both the origin and protector of all despair, the only survivor of h...