Fragments of a Year

I. February

Two girls in red sweatpants sway their hips to jazz
records, our toes tapping inside our white
high heels, and we attempt to photograph
the moment the street-lamp light tangles

itself in our hair. We grip each other out of laughter
and necessity - if we let go, we will fall
into the oblivion hovering
at our ankles.

In the morning we will wear shy
smiles and be frail in the wind. But right now,
this moment, in the almost-light, we seem
to be tangible. The almost-light covers
our insecurities and we recite poetry to our passion.


II. March

March comes rough like gods of war:
a tempest of snow and the wind gets caught
inside the house. The chill – bitter
after the February thaw – settles
into the space between us
and even my bones can feel the change.


III. April

I twist into the undertow of streetlamps
outside your window; it drowns me and the moon and April.
April is blooming lilies into the wind.

If there were a time to be homeless, it would be April,
and I would sit on your windowsill, swinging
my legs through watery morningshine.

Your incense ashes tumble from the ember, shifting
into a pattern of words. We never need
to speak: lilting and ripe, full of silence.

The steel-sky in April will be our conciliation:
this monochrome expanse will unite us
like streetlights never could.


IV. July

My toes slip
through the water, one pace behind
you. We could pretend that we are circus performers
with our balancing

acts. The air is heavy when the sky
pulls the rain, dragging through treetops. It rests
under our silence, and this
quiet is comfort

instead of fear. Our smiles hover
in anticipation of the coming storm. The mist
nestles itself in between the mountains while our fingers tangle
themselves together in the space
between our seats.


V. August

If I were to write for you, we would be barefoot
on a hazy late-August afternoon as the day slowly
rolled into night. I would write of a boy with curls

spinning away from his face, and a girl
beside him who bought the color of her crimson
hair on aisle three. They would be forever caught
in early autumn and love
because they are who we would be
if we weren’t us.


VI. September

If the streetlamp’s glow could warm itself,
we could find more meaning in the drizzling rain. If the rain
did not take and take, stealing from the light
and leaves, we could find our balance.

The melodrama of September: tumbled leaves,
crunchy and still full of life, become soaked
from mist-rain, then down-trodden by the moon.


VII. October

The bitter taste of October-night combines
burnt pumpkin seeds with those last sips
of lemon tea, brewed
too strong. It clashes
on our tongues and then sticks
to the roofs of our mouths, choking our words.


VII. November

I trace his veins; they are highway
maps, and I trek across the terrain

that is his body. No matter where I start
I am led to his heart. He wants

to make that journey into mine.
My body doesn’t betray me –
and his fingers are doomed to wander.



Please: pick 3 and let me know. Tell me why if you want.
Any other thoughts/comments/criticisms are highly encouraged.
Thank you.

i am a wreck.
none of those boys matter, none of them. the only one who does is that wondrous mountain-city boy who has left me once and for all. he says he still loves me but i am in so much pain right now. my heart is bursting and i cannot eat or sleep or string sentences together. even pretending to function...i can't do it at this point.
everything makes me cry. and i am not a crier. i have never been a crier. i don't cry over things, especially not lost lovers. i have had too many for that to be worth the effort. but this one, he was worth it. we had such a twisted time of things but it was wonderful the whole time. i never stopped loving him.


now i cannot escape him. i want so much to drop my life and join him. for him, i would do it. i know that now.

but he won't let me.




i love him, and for that, i hate myself.

there are too many of them. these boys, reaching out to me and i cannot reach out back to them. some sort of synopsis, not because i expect you, faceless reader, to care. but more so that i can sort this all out for myself. so i can begin to understand when everything stopped making sense to me.

- the mountain-city boy, he still loves me. he is so sweet, scratching out illegible letters that i receive in the mail from his adventures. my mailbox, every so often, is stuffed full of wrinkled envelopes from new york and africa. soon, he will be in alaska. he is in many ways wonderful, but with the presence of everyone else, all i am left with is the guilt of having what i do not deserve. i hate that. it turns me into some self-pitying pathetic drone. i do not want to be that. we're meeting up in the windy city next week. i am always amazed at the lengths that this boy will go to in order to see me. it hurts a little to realize i won't do the same for him.

- the boy from here frightened me, too full of love. he stretched out across thousands of miles during break, trying so hard to keep me close, but my heart wandered. he called me more frequently than i thought of him. when we returned, i realized, there was nothing left. i no longer found him intriguing; i got under his skin too quickly, i understood too much. he was not a mystery, because he cracked the moment he met me. he wanted to find me the way that i found him; he wanted to meet my friends, to sleep in my bed, as if that would draw us closer, maybe it would even the playing field. but my bed is mine and it's too small even for me. i left him a little broken because i was selfish. i had known this would happen, i had warned him. but none of that matters. he still loves me, so he says. i question his understanding of word.

- and now there is this new boy. that's a lie. this boy is not new. i have known him since my first few days here; he invited me to join in a game with them when i stepped outside of jeremy's bedroom in some attempt to escape from his curly hair (it was when i first fell in love with that curly haired wonder, and i could not stay in such close proximity). but enough of jeremy; his time will come. this boy. this boy. i started crashing on half of his bed a few nights a week. at first, it was innocent; nothing happened, just a more comfortable place to sleep than the couch of the common room. it has evolved to something more than that, though i don't really know what it is. i'm trying not to worry about it because i don't have the time to find some definition for what is between us. it simply is.

- jeremy. there is so much. he is the only thing i find truly beautiful right now, in the desolation of winter in the prairie. he was smoking a cigarette earlier this week, shuffling along the path between our buildings, his smoke and his breath indistinguishable from each other. i fell in love with him again, just like i always will. of course, then he came inside, stomped the snow from his shoes and had some snippy retort to my 'hey jeremy.' he smokes eight cigarettes a day; a year ago, he was expressing severe concern for my lungs, based on the fact that i was smoking a few times a week.


none of this means anything. my interactions with the world around me are limited at best. i am constantly around people, but eternally alone.

the play i am directing is going well. it is the one positive thing.

that wonderful boy is not longer quite so wondeful. he is frightening me because he does not want to share me with my other friends. my male friends. in particular, this new one i have made that i stumbled across one hazy night.

i knew him before that moment, but i didn't like the sadness in his eyes so i offered a hug. two weeks ago. since then, we've exchanged music and books. he loves words like me, like the other one can't. i'm reading this book he lent me and it is so good. if on a winter's night a traveler, italo calvino. we do homework in each other's company, sipping tea and chai in the local coffeeshop. i tell him things without even meaning to. last night, we went on an adventure with some other friends, to a local lake at one in the morning.

i think there's something there, some shock of interest. or maybe i just want there to be because he makes me think of the world from this brand new perspective, and i want something new and different, and so i just imagine all of this, superimposing my own emotions onto him. that's probably the case. isn't it always?

he's beautiful and never realizes it. i love people like that. but i'm leaving in a week and i won't see him for six weeks. that is ridiculous. there is no point in worrying about this any further until winter breaks and we're back here, in the prairie again.

for something completely unrelated: poetry stumbled back into my life, ever so briefly.

The stars are strung together. I map out
the Pleiades, seven sisters. Six. You insist.
Seven. Merope is there, but dimmer for loving
mortal men. And over, further, there. Cassiopea
is forever turned upside-down by her vanity. I whisper
these stories to distract your anger.

The taste of October-night sticks
to the roofs of our mouths, choking our words
with bitterness. He was a prophet,
you know. Pause, then you forge ahead:
we are more jaded, and like he swore, we dance
around the silence that will always lay between us.

I have no words to use in response, so I switch
back to all I know, myths and if we were a constellation
we would be a bench. I don't add
that it's the one tangible thing we share. Our one
connection, now.

I fumble with my shoes, slipping them on while groping
for some way to excuse my flight. When I turn back, I see you smile
for the first time.

----

help with your critique and all that would be useful. to be submitted to the college's literary magazine, when i feel it's ready. i'm trying to write more, but i feel like i've been sapped dry.
your words will help.


i sat outside last night. with that curly-headed boy, who i am perpetually in love with, as we watched our friends be forced into taking apart, piece by piece, a fort. the college security is cracking down this year. it was trouble in two ways: too many people, it should have been a registered event; apparently, you need a permit to erect anything in this goddamn town. even a box-fort made out of  us postal service boxes. he spoke of transferring, if things like this keep happening. two weeks ago, security broke up a birthday party. a birthday party, complete with a pinata and cake, and no open alcohol. but if we were to transfer...i don't know what it would be like, to not have him around. i am not in love with him. i am not in love with him. i refuse to be in love with him.

----

new york was here, and then he left. my college-sized bed was huge without him there. he offered to come back here. to stay.

there are no words for the tumultuous spectrum of emotions that knotted themselves in my stomach at that moment.

there aren' really words.
i drive myself crazy a lot of the time, because i'm not writing enough and i am too emotionally unstable. i know why i'm like that, but i don't know how to fix it.

i miss new york. i miss who i was in new york. and i know i could be happy there, like that. i wouldn't get to many of the things i want if i removed myself entirely from illinois and planted myself into the concrete of new york. but i would be with him, and i would find a way to write, and i would be near theatre. i would get over the fact that i haven't learned nearly all of what i want to. i would eventually forgive myself for not studying abroad. i would stop missing the people here.

at least i think i would.


but right now there is a constant struggle because i know, for certain, that i am not good at relationships. i never have been that way. i am too independent, i am trying to hard to exist without anyone else, because i know it's just too easy to latch to someone else. (this all seem so contradictory when i try to work out a time line of my love life, and i realize that very rarely does it happen where i'm at least not sleeping with someone.)

but i get so frustrated with only talking on the phone. with all of these limitations placed on us. and i want, so fiercely, to avoid hurting him. because i love him. or else just the idea of him, or what he represents. but i don't know if i can keep this up for long enough. and i know if i told him that, he would move out here. in a second. but i don't want to force him to drop his life to move here.

because at least right now, i don't think i would do the same for him.

i haven't got any words. no more. no more words at all.

you see after i freed myself from between the mountains, i was trapped between the buildings of a city. i felt so lost but at the same time perhaps it's where i need to be. or just, near him.

this boy, this fabulous boy who treats me better than the many before him. he had the whole week planned, all surprises. we watched the sunrise from the top of this apartment building midtown. thirty four stories up, and a three hundred and sixty degree view of the city and the sunrise and it was more beautiful than almost anything.

he steals my words.
he is wrapped in music.

now i am in the prairie's expanse again. it is strange being back here, sometimes, and sometimes difficult.

this was what i wanted. i spent all summer wishing to be back here, where people understood me and where i thought i belonged. but after meeting him, nothing else feels quite so complete.

i am here and it's not what i really want. i can't write. i never read.

i stop breathing sometimes because it's easier than the effort breathing requires.
i would stop eating if they didn't scrutinize every bite i take, watching me carefully till i have eaten what they deem to be enough.

i wish i weren't like this.

i haven't disappeared. apologies.

i'm just lost in the mountains, and this particular space was one i created specifically for when i am in the prairie, running through corn fields and longing for the isolation of the mountains that separate me from everything.

and right now, i've been in the mountains. it has been beautiful. i've been close to a city (on mountain standards), near a river and waterfalls. i've had all sorts of adventures: sunset rafting and tubing down the waterfalls and acting a lead role in an independent film. what an opportunity that has been.

but however beautiful that is, and however wonderful the boy i have found in the mountains, and the adventures he and i will have in new york next week, and how much i may or may not be in love with him...my words are different here and they don't fit into this medium. sorry that i disappeared so quickly. but i was sick again and then there were finals and then when i got to the mountains, i realized once again.


i'm a different person when i'm here. you only know me in the prairie.

i am constantly anxious, always tied up in knots.

this weekend was all twisted around. friday night was lovely, down by the lake, with the boy and his friends and we were all dressed up. he means well, i know, even though i get frustrated with him sometimes. but friday night was good, mostly. we fought some, but i keep saying it was good because i really needed it to be okay.

friday, there was this boy i met. i met him once before, in november or so when i went to some small town in iowa with some friends. he came and visited and he remembered me and we sat next to each other at this really amazing play and he laughed at how i danced in my seat during the seat changes and he played me the harmonica at intermission. we went to the after-party of the initiation banquet for sigma chi, and we danced like crazy. everyone said i needed to stop hitting on him but i wasn't. it was just nice to hang out with a guy that looked me in the face when we were talking, but would also dance with me. he was really sweet, and everyone else was yelling, so i ended up crying in a parking lot with elyse, apologizing over and over, but she didn't need to worry, i wouldn't become my father in my attempts to avoid becoming my mother. and then i talked to him about it too, and he kept telling me i didn't deserve what this boy was doing to me. i know i know i know that he is right. but it's so easy for him to say that, when he lives two hours away when i'm at school, and much further when i'm in the mountains. it's easy to say "you deserve a good guy" when you aren't feasibly ever going to be that good guy. what good guys are there here for me? there's only the one i'm with now, who is sometimes good, and sometimes not.

i'm breaking at the seams, i think. i don't know why. none of this is coherent, none of this makes sense when it's strung together and i'm sorry.

there is much to say and none of it is poetic, so i'd rather trap it between my teeth until it really needs to be said. the heat is so oppressive, it stops my breath, it pulls against my strains of movement. there is no hope of escape.

it's falling back into place. the galaxies are still in motion and the wind still whips my hair and the boy, the boy, the boy has wandered back. i wandered to him, really. there was a play he needed to read, so i brought it to him, and his friends invited me into his room for rum and whiskey we locked eyes when blue in the face by alkaline trio was playing from his computer and like that, we were us. again.

i am afraid of losing myself. my bed still smells like him from when he left it this morning and i don't know that i'm me anymore. i am too much air, too much water, too much ether -- we've been talking about lecoq in my acting class, who determined that there are certain qualities each character has and realizing these qualities helps set out the movement of your character, the speech pattern, the way they deal with themselves phsyically -- and people who possess air or water have less direction, they flow and they take the shape of their containers, they change their shape and are essentially undefinable. i want more earth, however much i love the spontentaity of life right now. i'm not afraid of becoming grounded, but i am afraid of becoming grounded in the wrong thing.

my pillow smells like his cigarettes. abstractly, i have always loved cigarettes - smooth and smokey, wisdom tinged with poetry and loneliness. but in actuality, i can't date him when he's smoking his cigarettes. he coughs in his sleep and it wakes me up; he tastes like cigarettes and makes me want to start smoking again. but i don't, not really.

we're working through it.

chicago this weekend to see an old friend, and i'm excited.