Author: admin

I moved my desk.

Do you love someone or are you in love with someone? Which is it? He doesn’t know. He’s never used that particular word to describe that particular emotion, an emotion he has never understood. He rationalizes that it’s not because he’s incapable of understanding it, it’s because he does

Where have you been all this?

I don’t know. Somewhere, I guess.

I want to thank my parents, but I’m never going to say it to them. I’m at that awkward age.

He is a little drunk and she is letting him get away with small touches an

Life is such a mess sometimes. He’s tangled up in her sheets, her limbs, her hair. He is such a mess sometimes.

He’s scared, a little too far gone to be called back but he’s holding the door open just a crack for someone to reach a hand through and wedge it open. He wants to be saved. That is his only truth and he knows it. He runs from it because it terrifies him that he needs to saved, wants to be saved and might never be. A sliver of light slips in from the outside, leaking into his abyss, a needle penetrating the skin of his nightmare.

She recognizes the sound instantly and instinctively as if she’s heard it a thousand times before. She is cradled in his trembling arms and hugged tightly to his heaving chest. He says something, an apology maybe, but all she hears as she slowly regains consciousness is the overwhelming sound of his heartbeat, the burning of a violent flame.

Time before they knew each other, time neither wants or needs to remember, like fading colors on a palette of broken memories: the estranged child of a brilliant but obsessive alchemist and the foster child adopted into a makeshift family.

When he was young, the first time he put on his uniform as an officer, the first time he buttoned up the jacket all the way, he thought that this blue -the blue of his uniform- was the most perfect shade of blue. It was a blue that matched the color of the sky, a blue on which he would build his dreams.

The little girl’s father had left her on the steps of the First Branch of the Central Library, disappearing into the labyrinthine bookshelves to research his sacred alchemy, things too difficult and too complicated for her to understand. The little boy was running an errand for his mother, the soles of his loafers pounding against cobblestone streets as he raced through the city, hands clutching a grocery list and pocket jingling with money.

This was before their beginning, a time in the distant past when nothing truly mattered and they were still young, childish even, unformed shapes waiting to be filled. And, a girl caught the attention of a boy with a charmingly disarming smile.

He tricked her, she realizes later, plain and simple. Back then, he had tricked her.

Perfect blue.

The first time he puts on his uniform as an officer, the first time he buttons up his jacket all the way, the first time he blouses his trousers over his black combat boots, he thinks to himself that this blue – the blue of his uniform – must be the most perfect shade of blue. The shade of blue that fishermen see in the ocean, the shade of blue that astronauts see in the sky, the shade of blue on which he would to build his dreams and the shade of blue that only an idealist and optimist would see in this country.

Then, he goes to war. And on the Ishvallan battlefield, the carcass of a land laid to waste by his very hands, he mourns. His uniform is covered in ash, sand and blood, it reeks of smoke and death and no matter how he tries after the war, he cannot walk away from the nightmare and he cannot see, every time he puts on his uniform, every time he buttons up his jacket all the way, every time he blouses his trousers over his black combat boots, the same shade of perfect blue.

A World for Two People.

She is already done with her work for the day, so she sorts through tomorrow’s pile of papers. He is rushing to catch up with yesterday’s work, frustrated and tired of the relentless amount of banal bureaucracy that is his daily existence. Occasionally he sneaks glances at his adjutant, but his eyes do not dare linger a moment too long; her senses and her eyes are much sharper than his.

“My God! It’s already dark out, Lieutenant.” He attempts to start a conversation, try to fish his way out of work. He swivels around in his chair to face the city nightscape and stretches, letting out a yawn.

“Focus on your work, sir. Or, we’ll be here even later.”

Trying to make his unhappiness as visible as possible, he sulkily refocuses his attention on first battalion’s planned night exercises at 0100 tomorrow. He begins to draw a small dog in the corner of the page. First, he draws the face and snout, punctuated by a small round nose and two eyes. Then, adding the characteristic arch of black fur over the eyes, he moves on to the body, the paws and finally the tail. For a few minutes, he is wholly absorbed in his doodle. He struggles, for several long hours and through several more dog doodles, before he is finished with even a half of his work and she finally relents.

“Yes!” He makes a noise that is half groan and half yawn, collapsing on top of his desk.

She lingers by the door, her black coat folded neatly over one arm, waiting for him to finish packing up for the night. The hallways are dark save for squares of moonlight cut by window panes. He throws on his own coat with a flourish and literally bounces out of the office. At first, she wants to remind him that there is still more work left to be done but she can only respond to the childish joy on his face with a beleaguered grin of her own.

Fetching keys from her uniform pocket, she locks the office door. As she turns to leave, suddenly, she feels his arms wrap around her waist, his arms coming to rest in the curve of her back. The moonlight casts a mysterious glow over her face, reflecting deliciously off her lips and amber eyes wide with surprise. In a smooth, almost trained, motion, he releases her hair clip, letting her hair fall to her shoulders and into his hand. He presses his forehead to hers, never breaking their steady gaze. She understands the look in his eyes, a look that too easily betrays what he really wants to say. So, she responds, reaffirming his unspoken feelings.

Finally, she closes her eyes, a gesture of submission and acceptance and mostly, of need and of want. He draws her close, her hair tickling his face and kisses her, gently, passionately, quietly, the sort of kiss that speaks volumes and nothing at the same time, the sort of kiss that lovers exchange when both are consumed by the entirety of the each other’s being, the sort of kiss that leaves no room for anyone else but them.

Quietly, he slips his ungloved hand into hers and as they leave headquarters for the evening, as the building dwindles to silence save for the sound of their receding footsteps, it feels as if this night, this world exists only for the two of them.

Look Over Here

He doesn’t remember what made him do it. He doesn’t believe in fate or destiny, or anything of that sort, but at that moment he felt the pull of something much greater than himself, a divine and magnetic attraction toward her.

“Hey,” he says, “look over here.”

As she turns to look, he gives her a light peck on the lips, catching her completely off guard. Her face is red and her lips gently parted. “What—”

And then, he does it again.

Summer Fading

I’m going to erect a cathedral in my name and place a giant statue of a penis in the middle of it and see how many people buy into my bullshit. The church is going to be called ‘Zi Penis’ and the only correct pronunciations of it are with a fake French accent.

Saturday morning, he wakes up too early and the apartment is quiet. He listens, ears straining to hear sound but there is none.

(This can either go two ways: 1) he wakes up, hears nothing because the rest of humanity vaporized overnight; or 2) something else entirely. I’m not too sure but the idea of humanity vaporizing kinda gives me the chills and I probably need to probe deeper and research more to write something worthy of that idea, so I’m going to leave it alone. He’s going to go out and get coffee now.)

She was giving him head on the roof when, suddenly, she hears the whisper of distances voices. Her mouth leaves his dick briefly as she scans their surroundings for the source of the sudden intrusion and her heart skips a beat when she spots two shadowy figures on a neighboring roof holding beers, one of them looking right back at her. She bursts out in laughter, as if laughing will save them from this embarrassing, compromising situation in which they now find themselves, as if laughing will make their voyeurs go away, as if laughing, somehow, makes all of this perfectly normally.

Other embarrassing moments in my life: bumping into your other guy friends when you’re on a date and dressed up and then remembering that you need to book a limo with them for prom, so you stop to have a conversation, and all of this reminds you that you lost your prom ticket and that school is ending in less than a week, finals and projects and all, it’s all going to be over, the good and the bad and everything in between, four years and the book is finally over. You’re walking in the last chapter and you’re about to turn the last page.

Something to Look Forward To

Fenton spent a lot of time, in his younger years, looking forward to things, things like his seventh birthday party. He had invited all of his friends and his concept of a friend, at least when he was seven, had been anyone he had ever spoken to. He had even invited his school bus driver.

Smile like You Mean It

You know, not to be stereotypical or racist here, but Asian people, especially tourists or overseas family visiting for the summer, have this thing about taking pictures. They aren’t well posed or interesting pictures. They suffer from poor composition, poor lighting, unsteady hands and an obscenely scaring use of flash. Half the time, the point is to include the person and some historical, natural or just interesting object in the background and the person, depending on their level of, for a lack of better words, Asian-ness, will give the peace sign without knowing even what the gestures represents. For the typical Asian, the peace sign is almost as vital as saying “Cheese!” and hardly anyone really yells out for cheddar when the shutter snaps. Maybe it’s only a Chinese thing, but I’m hesitant to restrict this racial stereotype to only one country or nationality because it’s almost an Asian pandemic. There isn’t anything wrong with people who want to document their existence and the fact that they’ve traveled some thousands and thousands of miles to stand at the bottom, or the top, of the Empire State Building. But, something just irks me when I look back at the volumes of family photos stashed away in photo albums or those little 1 hour photo things. Is anyone really smiling in these photos? Maybe the problem isn’t so much as nagging relatives who want ten thousand pictures of a building you see nearly every day but more the pictures themselves. It’s as if the life, the energy, the spirit of a place, of a person, instead of being captures and exulted on film has been stifled and even strangled by the fake smiles and the peace signs, by how unnatural it looks, how boring, how trite it all feels. What’s the point of ruining something scenic and beautiful just to insert yourself into the picture? Does it make this historical landmark yours, or are you just making yourself look silly? And given the obesity rate in America, I hesitate to even talk about American tourists. Again, there is nothing wrong with taking pictures as a way to document your life, important moments, graduations, prom, visiting the rain forest, something along those lines. A weekend summer party does not warrant tens of millions of photographs taken in haste on point-and-shoot cameras. Who the hell, no offense, wants to see that shit? Why do you want to see that shit? The digital age revolutionized photography, making it readily available to even the most untrained and most amateur individuals. The digital age made photography easy, too easy. I’m no expert on photography, I’ve only taken one introductory course to black and white photography and already, I can see a difference in the way people used to treat and approach photography and the way we do it now. It lacks the care, the love, the skills, the patience, the genius, the elegance.

There is a silent void in my heart, in the place where you used to be. I remember your smiles, your mirth, and your love.  The smallest things that seemed so trivial back then now mean the world to me. They way you’d look at me when we walk, hand in hand, down a dark city street. The way you used to kiss me, a sloppy, innocent kiss, devoid of anything less than love. The way you’d sleep next to me, entangled in my bed sheets on a balmy, summer evening. The way your face looked, the way you smelled, the way you held me tight on my roof and danced, a dance I’ll never get to have with you.  All tenders of your affections, the lunchboxes, the weekend visits, the gifts, the patience. You put up with so much of me, so many of my flaws and indecencies. I know in my heart you’re not coming back, not the way you used to be. You’ll always be cautious, you’ll always be suspicious and weary, you’ll always be looking around the corner for something better to replace me with. You’re not excited to be with me anymore. All you talk about it guns, all you do is distract yourself. You don’t even send me puppy pictures anymore. You hardly call me any of my pet names and the only time you say what I want to hear from you is when I’m sad and you’re tying to cheer me up. I’m the only girl you’ve been close to and maybe that’s why you still put up with me, because you know if you asked and played your cards right, I’ll be here, waiting for you, wanting you, ready for you, for you to fuck or just cuddle with, for you to talk to, because you know I’ll always be here, because that’s what I said and that’s what I’m trying to do. Didn’t you used to have doubts about us? Didn’t it used to drive you crazy? People deal with things in different ways. Sometimes, I wish you’d humor my insecurities. I’m truly afraid that once you go back to college, you’ll abandon me. You said we can secretly be together on the beach, but every time I ask about it, you’d just kiss me or give a vague answer. I don’t get why. What are you thinking about? What are you conflicted about? I am so afraid I’m going to end up on the losing side. I don’t even know why I really want this anymore. There are so many signs that we’re not truly meant to be.

Cartology

A study of street food carts

CARTS

This book isn’t so much about street food as it is about food carts. Enough has been said about New York City street food

This is a book about carts. Carts that crowd city sidewalks and street corners, carts that are sheltered by colorful umbrellas, carts that are

This is a book about New York City street food carts.

This is a book about carts. Carts that crowd sidewalks and street corners, carts that sound of iron spatulas dicing meat and onions, carts that smell of hotdogs, gyros, tacos, chow mein, hot cakes, kebabs, Italian sausages, carts that draw hungry throngs at lunchtime, carts that are as common and as New York as yellow taxi cabs, carts that have become the icons of urban street food.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.  ~George Bernard Shaw

“I am not a glutton – I am an explorer of food”
Erma Bombeck quotes

There are 3,000 carts in the city, operated by people from a wide variety of ethnicities.

Hi nuunuu, I probably should have done this a long time ago, instead of letting it go on like this, instead of holding on to you and not letting you live your life. I was the one who said we should break up, even though I didn’t really mean it then, but after all of my crying and begging and seeing how determined you are leave me because it’s better this way and how much this is hurting both you and me, I know now that breaking up is for the best. You don’t have to spend time with me, hang out with me, see me, go to prom with me, any of the other things I begged and pleaded for you to do. My feelings for you, at present, remain the same. You occupy the same place in my heart as you’ve always had and secretly, I’m still wishing for a miracle to bring us back together. But, this is what needs to be done. I love you Jeffrey. You’ll always be my nuunuu, my teddy, my puppy, my everything. P.S. I still want to know how difficult the physics course is at NYU. AND, I still mi

I love you, I love you so much. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you

I’m really confused. I don’t know what to do. It’s like I’m walking on eggshells and I’m not doing the best job in the world. My heart doesn’t feel right, with Jeffrey, without Jeffrey, with Steven, with both of them. I don’t know what’s going on anymore or what I’m supposed to do. I just really want things to be normal and not so stilted and awkward. I want him to love me again and to keep loving me and for me to keep loving him. I want to always be with him and even if things are remarkably shitty like this, I want to work it out and I want to figure it out and make it okay. I really want things to be okay. I know I’m not doing a good job and I know I just keep fucking up and fucking up. But, isn’t that the only way I’m going to really learn? Isn’t that how we all learn? From our myriad of seriously devastating and humiliating mistakes? I love you, Jeffrey. Please love me, too.

I want to change and I want to be better, but I can’t just turn on a dime and be a new person. I can’t just make everything that I am change and disappear. It needs time. Don’t monitor my behavior….what does that even mean…

Please tell me what you want. Please tell me what you want me to be….and I will be that…please…give me a direction and I will follow it….give me a road leading back to you…

It really hurts that you let other people get between us…because I’ve been stubborn and adamant and damn near ignored everything. It was my mistake to talk so much, but only because you talked so little. Only because you hardly ever said a word and I didn’t know what to do…for every word you didn’t say, I’d have a dozen, a novel waiting for you…Actually, I haven’t told that many people. Less than a dozen people know on my end. I’m tempted to say that it’s your fault for having shitty friends who walk away with your secrets because Winnie never told anyone about us, about this. I didn’t know what kind of person Zach was, or is, or isn’t, but he was close to you and he was a means to you and I just wanted you back…

I really fucked up last night. I know, I wanted to let go of everything right when you wanted me back. I missed you by just a little bit. I’m not good at picking up subtle things…you have to tell me sometimes…that this is what you want…don’t hold things from me because it just confuses me more and it makes a mess of things, like this…like now…

I don’t like not knowing where to walk and how to walk. I don’t like not knowing what to be or what to feel. I know I have to decide these things for myself, and I’ve decided on you, on being with you, but there are so many other things that muddied my judgement.

Please don’t blame this on everything else, on me, on your friends. If you really wanted to talk to me…you would’ve stayed, despite what your friends did. If you really wanted me…

I know I can’t shut up. It’s hard for me to shut up because I don’t know what’s going on in my own head and I need time to think but I have to keep moving, I have to keep going to school and I have to do all these things and people tell me all these things and it gets messed up and fucked up and I just need to vent, to tell someone, to write it down, to let it go, to do something with it besides just keeping it in my head.

I keep fluctuating because I don’t know…I’m not sure…how do you expect someone who’s confused and freaking out to be stable? What do you mean….that you’ve been monitoring me? Waiting for me to strike the right chord? Why did you even do this…Why did you even have to do this…I’m just so confused…why did any of this even have to happen…you could’ve talked to me…you could’ve asked me to be better…you could’ve just said something…why did you have to make it happen like this…

I love you…I love you so much…I love you Jeffrey Liaw…I love you and that’s all I know, that’s all I know…but this isn’t going to work out….

I just really miss you….I want to see you all the time because you’re never there….please try and understand me…please try and understand why I’m so clingy…why I always need you…I don’t even see you that often…it might be enough for you to see me once every couple of months, but it kills me. Waiting for you…

I’m always waiting…for you…waiting to be with you in the summer, during your breaks…I’ll wait some more now…because I’m okay with waiting now…and I’ll wait and I’ll see what happens with Steven and I’ll see what happens with you…

I’m always impatient because my feelings are fickle…if they aren’t reaffirmed constantly, in time they will fade and I didn’t want that to happen…

If you knew things were going to resolve themselves if I wait…why didn’t you tell me all those times I pleaded for an answer? Just a simple yes would’ve made it better for me. Just knowing that there was hope, I would’ve waited. But you gave me maybe’s and no’s and vague answers that I didn’t understand. You gave your friends the priority and listened to them. That’s okay. I could’ve listened to my friends, too, but I didn’t want to. I love you so much Jeffrey.

You haven’t really changed either and I don’t truly see why I’m the only one who has to work so hard to fix this relationship. You never say anything, you always keep things bottled up and tucked away. Has it ever occurred to you that it makes it worse for me, when you aren’t here in person, when the only thing that I can see is if you’re online or not, it just makes everything worse? I really wish you’d say something. I really wish you’d tell me what’s going on sometimes. This lack of communication killed a lot of things. I don’t know why you’re playing these games all of a sudden. I play my games, but they’re short and they hurt, but they go away. I don’t know why this had to happen. I don’t know what’s going to happen in I wait and I don’t know if we’re ever going to be together anymore. But, since people’s opinions matter so much to you, and no one likes us together, this one is up to you. Listen to your friends, be saved by your intervention. There’s nothing I can do to stop you. In fact, everything I do just makes it worse. So, fine, I will wait. I will for the summer and seeing you again. I will wait for the rest of my life to play out. I will wait and wait and wait, maybe for you, maybe not…but I will wait.

Will we be together again? Stay with me.

I love him so much. It hurts so much. I’m so sad without him. I’m so sad. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen anymore. I don’t want to see anything anymore. I just want to feel him. I just want him to accept me, be with me.

somedays, I listen to people and I feel like we should just call it quits. We weren’t good for each other. We weren’t compatible with each other. Admit it, we both toy with each other. But, if I’m making a list of pros and cons, for me at least, the list is pretty even. Maybe it’s just love and it’s blinding my judgment, but I want to be with you. I want to grow old with you. I want to hug you from behind when you cook or machine guns (and hopefully not make you hurt yourself). I want a future with you, but I don’t know what it’s going to be like or how we’re going to be. Right now, I’d give up anything and everything for you. The only thing that stops me is that you might not feel the same way anymore. Maybe you like other girls, maybe other girls like you, maybe you’re just tired of me and want something different, maybe I’m wrong on all accounts but we don’t communicate and it’s hard to tell. In all truth, I don’t think I can change. So, what’s the point of waiting for me to act differently? For me to shut up and stop spamming you and stop telling people the story of our shitty relationship. There really isn’t a point. I did this before I met you and I’m still doing it. I’d type pages and pages of useless crap, directed towards people who would never read it. But, I figured since we were close, I’d tell you how I felt, all of it. I really want us to get back together, but that would disappoint so many people. My parents, your parents, Zach, Winnie, all these people split between us who don’t want us together. Maybe that’s why you’re so upset about me telling people. It’ll be a lot harder for us to be ‘together’ with all these people around. But I’d be fine with it. I know I flip flop and I switch sides and I’m bipolar in my feelings for you, but right now, at this very moment, today, after calling you and hearing your phone ring for the first time in months though without answer, I want to say…let’s just be friends. See how things work out with Steven, see how things work out with whoever you find. Maybe if we meet up in the summer and something happens, or maybe not. But, right now…it hurts too much to care anymore. I know I did this to you for the longest time to, dangle your feelings on my whim, tell you I’m going to break up with you and leave you but beg for you back. But, just from what you told me and from what I hear, girls do that. That makes me feel a little bit more normal. But, I really don’t like what you did to me for the past couple of weeks. Everything you complained to me about that night you ‘hated’ me just doesn’t sit right with me. In my mind, I’m still just wonder who the hell who do that this? Who would ‘monitor’ someone’s behavior waiting for a change, for the right time? Just because I went silent for a weekend, you thought it was okay now, that I changed? Or, did you just miss the constant attention I gave you? And about Zach and your friends and everyone knowing and how they stopped you from talking to me. I don’t know what to say about that. It hurts me that you are so easily swayed by ‘friends’. How many people do you even like in your dorm? How many people there really care for you? Who really gives a shit about you there? Zach? If he’s all he’s cracked up to be, why did he tell all of your personal shit to everyone else? Oh, because I told him, I spilled the beans, I let him know so it’s his duty now to spread the rumors, the gossip? I told numerous individuals, my friends, and so far, none of them have uttered a word about any of this. Maybe it’s weird that I, your girlfriend, approached your friend. But, the way I see it, if he’s really your friend, he wouldn’t go around telling private shit about your life to everyone in the world. Maybe you don’t really care how I feel about Zach, but I hope you still care about how I feel about you, because right now both of you just seem like serious assholes. I’m even afraid to say this to you, to be mean to you, because it might ruin my chances with you. If I yell you, get angry at you, you’ll just withdrawal, run away, tell me I’m fluctuating, I’m not ready. It’s like I’m constantly walking on eggshells. You and I are different people. You put up with me for a long time, but my temper is high and my patience is short. I don’t want to leave this relationship angry at you for all the crap you pulled this month, for how broken I feel on the inside, for all the promises you broke that I thought you were going to keep. I still love you, I still love you so much. No matter what I do, my heart still beats for you, I still dial your phone number and stalk your profile and look at pictures of you and remember all the good times we had together, all of the things that we did. I think of the way you use to look at me and I want to cry. I think of all the late nights we spent together and Columbus Day weekend and I want to cry and cry and cry. It hurts so much to think of you and how different you are now. You’re in the place of power, and I’m begging at your feet. I just can’t imagine why you’re doing all the things you are. I say I’m going to leave you, but I don’t last even for hours before I want to be with you again, because I really want to be with you. Maybe it’s a disease, maybe that’s what you hate about me. I think that’s how you used to feel about me. In your words, you’d destroy yourself for me. I wish you still felt the same way, not that I want you to destroy yourself, but I wish you’d still think that I am your world because you encompass the entirety of mine. I don’t know what I’m really feeling, but I’m in some sort of a limbo, too. I wish the pain in my heart was still there, because at least then, I’d be sure my feelings for you are still strong. I’m teetering on the edge of letting you go and being okay with it and just begging and praying for you to still be mine. I wish you’d get jealous and want me back. I want you to feel bad and regret leaving me, but I don’t think you will, or at least I won’t know. In my mind, I didn’t destroy this relationship. I was upset that day I tried to ‘leave’ you but you took it so seriously. I tell you over and over again, don’t believe, don’t let me, want me back if I try to. I’m always trying to, but I never actually do. I love you. I miss you so much. I really wish we worked out in the end. I wish I could be with you forever, be your nyanya forever and ever. Live in the happy future I have mapped out in my mind, where, after school and getting jobs, we’d finally be close and together, without parents and worries. We’d live in a nice apartment, have two kitchens, one for you to mess with and one for me to keep pretty and clean. We’d make lots of money because you’d be a dentist and I’d be, at least, a doctor if not a surgeon of some sort. Maybe, we’d get a puppy or a bunny or a hamster. We’d work in the city and meet up after work and go home together. You’d cook me a delicious dinner that we’d eat in our dining room with big, big windows and a great view of the city. Maybe we’d have dessert, watch a movie, snuggle and then we’d be poke every night and fall asleep together. In the morning, you’d probably wake up before me and maybe make me breakfast or pack me a lunch. We’d go off to work and everything would be perfect. Even when things aren’t perfect, we’d make it through it all. Like that Bon Jovi song? Living on a prayer? Hold my hand, we’re halfway there? Maybe, one day, when we feel ready, we’d poke and you’d finally get to spill your milk in me without worries and there’d be a little Jeffy growing in my tummy. We’d raise our child together, deal with all of his crap. It might get pretty hard and the going might get rough, but if we believe in each other, we’d be alright and so will our kid. Pack his stuff and send him to college, which ever one he gets into. Maybe, after that, we’ll buy a house in the countryside. Hopefully, by then we’d have a lot of money, so maybe we can keep the apartment and have the country house. We’d buy a house somewhere that lets you own firearms. Maybe, grow a garden in the backyard and, just like that time outside Mike’s, I’d be impressed by your home grown, home made lunch. We’d be like Carl and Ellie. Two happy, old Asian people in the middle of a white neighborhood, unless we move to somewhere like Bayside, in which we’d be totally normally. And even when the world moves past us, I still want to be trapped in the same bubble with you, caught up only in you, loving only you. Somewhere, in the middle of our lives, maybe we’d take a trip around the world. Go to Europe and I can do all those romantic things you did your first time there. Ride in gondolas in Venice, indulge in my need to cross the English Channel the same way the Allies did, in my need to go to boring museums and landmarks and go ape shit over things that happened nearly a hundred years ago. And, the food! We’d eat like pigs and stuff our faces with all that food. Waddle in expensive Parisian hotels and poke all the time. We’d go to Amsterdam, and do naughty things together. And then, I want us to go through all of the Asian countries, yes, even Korea. We can skip Africa, and maybe parts of the middle east, but I know you love brown food, so we’ll pick and choose countries. I definitely would’ve loved to go to China with you. See all the historical landmarks, all that romantic scenery that so many poets and writers have mused about, fallen in love with. And, still, I want to eat with you. There’s so much food in China, so much street food, different, authentic food, it drives me crazy and it makes me so happy thinking about being there with you. Holding your hand and stuffing food in your mouth and being with my Jeffy. We’d take lots of pictures and buy lots of stuff and we’d go home twenty pounds heavier than we left. And all this, is just my half of what we could’ve been. Maybe you don’t want to do any of these things and you have completely different plans. But, that would’ve been okay. If we were still together, we can work things out. Things can always work out. I really wish they had. I wish it didn’t feel like the world is against us. I want to just run away from here with you. Run away to a place just for you and me, like that Aladdin song? A world just for you and me, a place where no one can tell us no? I just want to press my head to your chest, your wide, muscled chest, listen to your heart and feel your warmth and have your big arms wrap around me and hold me even closer to you. I love the way you smell, the way your hair falls on your head, even if its thinning and you might be bald later, the way you kiss me and how soft, how soft your lips are and I love, love, love the way you look at me, the way when we walk side by side, you’d turn your head to look at me, the way you’d look at me when we were sitting in the hotel, eating chicken wings, I love you so much. I want to be pretty for you. I want to wear nice dresses and pretty make up. I want to go out and eat with you, go to the zoo, I want to do things with you. I’ll love you, maybe not the same way I did before, but I will always love you as a friend. People say things that make me think ill of you. Sometimes, I’m convinced because they’re right. But, I still want to be with you, just to have you in my life. I want to know you years and years from now. If you are still out there, the nuunuu that fell in love with me on the bus, the nuunuu that’s always been here from the start, even if he’s being made to go away, please know that your nyanya is here. Your nyanya is here loving you, always, always loving you, always, always, always…I want my love for you to be eternal because I’m still naïve and I want to believe that what we had was something special, something wonderful, something brings me joy. You’re such a warm person, such a warm, warm person, even when I feel the coldness in certain parts, the darkness, your warmth is overpowering. I think of prom sometimes and I get sad. Not because of Steven, but because I wanted to go with you. I wanted to slow dance to that last song with you, be in your arms, kiss your lips. Sometimes, I really do think we went in different directions. I’ll be the one missing you on my prom night, I’ll be the one wishing you were mine just like how you felt at yours, except, you won’t be there to kiss me in the limo, you won’t be there make corny jokes about the lack of a moon roof in the limo. I’m secretly hoping the summer will bring you back to me, but my heart is hurt and its hiding and its afraid. I still love you so much. So much. If we are meant to be, if we are meant to be, you will come back to me, we will find a way to each other. We will. You are so adorable, so precious…You’re wonderful. You’re my everything. I love you…I love you so much, my puppy…my sweet…I’m fluctuating again…my heart is like an AC current…

I don’t know where you are. You haven’t said anything to me since Wednesday night? I’m not sure. I missed you that night because my internet was fucked up and I was too tired to fix it. I wonder where you are. Are you in New York already? With the IR club? Are you traveling here? I wonder…Oh, nuunuu….

I wanted to go to prom with you…It was supposed to be our night…I’ll never have that night with you ever again…maybe it’ll be replaced with something better…

That song, Hey, Soul Sister…it’s breaking my heart…I want to be with you…I can’t let go…not until…you push me away…not until you stop loving me…

I miss him. Maybe he went away because of what I said….Please…..I hate this shit. Fuck.

As far as the summer’s concerned…just…hang out with me…be with me….let’s hold hands and kiss each other on the cheeks and cuddle….let’s go the Botanical….

Aw, what the fuck. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck. I should just try calling Steven.

Man, everything I do in life just fails in the end. Seriously. Even when I’m trying. Goddamnit. And I still won’t do math homework.

In the end, honestly, it’s my ego that’s not letting this one go. How the hell can someone I was being nice to reject ME?

Nuunuuu, I will always love you. I will always love you so much. Please, don’t be sad. Don’t be. I don’t want to make you sad anymore. If not being with me makes you the happiest, then that’s okay with your nyanya. Your nyanya only wants the best for you. So she will leave now. But, please, please, don’t forget about her, don’t forget about her and nuunuu. If nuunuu ever needs her, she will be there for him, even if its just to show him her nyanyas or to exchange mwas over the cam. Your nyanya will always, always, always love you, even if you don’t. She will be here, waiting for the day you come back to her. She’ll wait forever is she has to, but she will wait. Owner will keep her door open for her puppy, when he’s tired of wandering and ready to come home.

For how tough he is, for how big he is, for how cold he can act, he’s still just such a fragile person on the inside. His soul is so soft and warm, strong and burning with passions, yet it cracks and chips so easily, is scared and frightened so easily. There’s vulnerability in his character that draws me to him, to want to be with him, walk with him and take care of him. He brings out the maternal side of me that distracts me from the lover, yearning to be with him, to make him happy, to fill his life with as much joy as he has filled mine.

I’m still seeing Jeffrey. I’m not pregnant, or at least the Walgreens brand test says so. I feel remarkably guilty about this all of a sudden and I want to just blurt out to my parents and the world, though the latter for a different reason, that we’re still together, that I love him and that this is what I really want. Maybe I’m just young and naïve and all that noise. I have faith that my parents will still love me. But, this is who I am, this is who I want to be and these are my decisions.

It is a Tuesday when she arrives at his doorstep.

I love you. I miss you. Why is it like this? I’ll figure it out some day, one day….

My heart hurts and I can’t think. I don’t know, I don’t know anything anymore.

He’s not there anymore….I’m just grasping for air…reaching for ghosts…

Do you remember, in the beginning, those letters that you wrote to me? You were so confident in us. You believed so much in us. Where is that confidence now when we need it the most? Is that magic gone? You made all of those silly conclusions, about marrying me, about being with me no matter what, no what how many arguments, no matter the consequences. Is this what life is? Is this what love is?

You don’t want me anymore. All of those things you said are meaningless now. Words don’t have meaning unless someone believes in them. There’s no one left to believe in us. There’s no one left to tell me to hold on, to stay the course, to stay together. Even you’ve given up this false dream, the promises, everything.

I miss you….I didn’t mean this…it might be the right thing, but I don’t want this. I want you. I want you…

Okay. I am angry. I’m going to kill someone with my bare hands. I want to strangle the fucking shit out of something and kill it again and again and again and again until I don’t feel anything anymore because right now I am incredibly fucking angry and I don’t even really know why anymore. I am just really fucking angry. That’s the best bet. FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK ALL OF THIS. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK ALL OF THIS. I can’t wait. I can’t wait at all. I’ve already waited more than I’ve ever waited for him to get through this shit. If he wants time, he can have all the fucking time he ever fucking needs because I am not going to be here in a few days when he is fucking ready to come around and talk to me. Why the shit did he take it so fucking seriously. Our relationship is fucked up. Leaving each other is for the better. I am done with this shit. I hate everything. I want to kill things. I want to kill everything. If I stood at the lip of the Grand fucking Canyon right now I’d scream until I become mute because I am just incapable of dealing with this fucking shit. I tried everything. Everything requires time, time, time, THIS ISN’T EVEN HAPPY SORT OF PASSAGE OF TIME. This is like me dying slowly on the inside while time passes by quickly. This me not capable of focusing on anything. This is me worrying my ass off about shit. This is me who doesn’t fucking want to live anymore but is too damn pussy to take my own life. Unless I had a gun, in which I’d already be fucking dead. I would’ve been dead a long time ago, or deformed or injured or something. I really can’t fucking stand this place. After all of this shit, all of this shit, where the fuck am I? Square fucking one, lonely, sad, angry and suicidal all fucking over again. THANK YOU WORLD FOR NOTHING. NOTHING. Absolutely NOTHING! Nothing in my short less then two decades life has every been as disappointing as hearing those fucking words. THE BEST BET. FUCK THE BEST BET. FUCK ALL OF THIS. My patience is really thin and I don’t care if that’s how the world works, if the world needs time. FUCK THE WORLD. I don’t have time to give to ANYONE right now and if you ever plan on fucking seeing me again, THEN YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF BECAUSE I AM NOT SEEING YOU EVER AGAIN. I am so done with this shit. FUCK ALL OF THIS SHIT. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK I HATE EVERYTHING. I want everything to die. I want everything to die. Oh my motherfucking GOD DDAMNIT SONS OF BITCHES. I HATE EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. Stupid motherfucker. I can’t believe I spent all of this time, all of these emotions for something as worthless and as STUPID as this. I got nothing out of it but immense amount of pain and confusion and patheticness and all that NICE FUCKING CRAP. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.

I feel like I can’t breathe or talk or feel. I feel like throwing up. I wish I didn’t eat. I wish I wasn’t alive. Why are you like this all of a sudden? It just drains me, whenever things get like this. Because I don’t know where you’re going to go and whether you’re staying with me or not…I just can’t. I’m so hurt on the inside. It feels like I’m going to die. I wish I could just die because I can’t stand this anymore.

How are you capable of just hating me, so instantly and so fiercely? Just like that, snap, and there’s someone new in your place, hating me, hating me, everything I say, everything I do, just hate because of what I said about your guns. Guns, guns, guns, you’d never get like this if it was something about me. If someone disrespected me, you’d never feel so much anger as you do right now about blueprints of a gun. Do you really love me or do you just love these guns that you never shut up about, that you go on and on about.

Please, please, please, please, please don’t leave me again. Please. Please, just a couple weeks and I’m already addicted again, please. Don’t take this away from, right as I am about to walk right back into that same old dream, please, let it stay with me, longer, longer than it did the last, better than it was the last time, a drug stronger than I’ve ever taken before, let your love stay with me, resonate with the rest of me, kill me if it needs be. Please, just be with me again, don’t leave, don’t leave. I’m begging you, please.

I love you so much.

I found out today that my parents smuggled people in and out of China. It’s sort of strange because it puts them, both of them, in a totally different light. Everything is illuminated now feels like an apt description for my state of being. Everything, or at least bits and pieces of something that I had never known to exist, is now illuminated.

Dear Jeffrey,

I’m going to write a letter to you everyday from now on, letters about my life, letters that you might not want to and might not ever read. I reread the two letters you wrote me back in your freshman year, way back when we first started, that first year that you were gone. I didn’t believe in us back then, but you did. You talked about how we were going to get married and be with each other forever, regardless of consequences, of anything. I haven’t looked at them since today, when I was packing away anything in my room that reminded me of you into my closet. They made me cry, like everything did. You sounded so sure of what you were saying, so sure that we were meant to be. You stayed with me through all of those late night arguments, through all of my fickle mood swings and I fell in love with you in the end. You heard me say this more than a few times now, but I wish things were like back then, when I first fell in love with you, when I could feel how much I loved you and how much it warmed my heart to know that you loved me too. I guess things change, people change. Maybe this is what life is like, a cycle of broken promises, of falling in love and falling out of it. We’ve been apart for so long and I’ve waited for so long. I just couldn’t wait a little bit more, just a little more. If I just stayed with it for another month, you would’ve come back and things would’ve been okay. I should stop thinking this way, all the maybes in the world can’t save us now. I feel bad, I stuffed Jeffy Teddy into a bag and tucked him away in my closet. He’s crammed in there with the stuffed seal and sting ray from the aquarium, charmy puppy, mamegoma, chibi yoko, Mr. whale and takoyaki-chan. Just thinking about them makes me want to cry. You were so nice to me, so kind to me. You were the first person to love me. You were my first anything, my first love, my first heartbreak. If you made it this far, you probably think I’m more full of shit than ever. I write these not really for you but, in a way, to console myself. I think that’s why I do this. You have reason to hate me. I’m wishy-washy and unreliable. You made me so sad today when you yelled at me about the hat. It made me feel so bad. There was just a ball of sadness that kept growing and growing and it just broke when you had to leave. Since you lost your webcam, since my cam stopped (and started) working again, things have been pretty bad. There were good nights when you talked to me and kissed me over chat and those made me feel so happy because we used to do that all the time. We used to stay up late and talk and chat and do stupid, cheesy lovey-dovey things over Skype. I miss all the attention you use to give me. I think it spoiled me now that you have friends and a lot more work. I can’t even picture your face in my mind anymore. I have a hard time feeling your love. Long distance relationships suck. I want to be with you all the time and you’re probably pretty annoyed by it. Like you said, I’m probably the easiest girl you would’ve ever hoped to meet. I let you fuck me when we barely even knew each other. I was so desperate for a guy, any guy, to tell me he loved me, to follow me around and buy things for me and there you were. Didn’t I say if I ever let you I’d regret it? Every time I throw a tantrum and try, I always regret it, I never mean to leave you, but I guess this time I pushed it too far and you aren’t going to come back to me. I ruin all the good things in my life. I’m still waiting, without or without you, but now, there’s no one waiting to see me when May rolls around. I bought all that make up and all those dresses and lingerie for nothing. At times, I really wanted to be pretty for you. I wanted you to love how I looked and think I’m pretty. I guess I can’t convince you to come back to me anymore. Who would? After all this bullshit, even I’d probably leave myself. I don’t really want to live anymore after you’re gone. You gave me, for a brief instant, a very compelling reason to live. You made me want to be around. You gave me a reason to wake up in the morning, to get through the day so I can talk to you at night, to see you, maybe, over video chat. Sometimes, though, you wouldn’t be there and that broke my heart. I lived for you. But, I guess that’s not the right attitude to have in a relationship. I shouldn’t rely on you so much. I should give you more space, or something like that. Am I really an obsessive lover? Do I just block out all of the bad things about our relationship and pretend it’s wonderful until this happens? I won’t call you obsessively anymore. I won’t spam you, except maybe with these long ass letters, like I did last time. Sometimes, when I broke up with you, or pretended to, I wanted you to chase after me like I did you. I wanted you to call incessantly, to wait for me, to ask for us to be together again. But, I’m the only one pathetic enough to do it. I’m always the one begging and pleading, even now, even this time. You’re always on higher ground, looking down at me, this stupid, fat, easy to get girl that no one but you wanted and that even you didn’t really want and couldn’t really stand in the end. This is me. I’ll always be at the bottom of your hill, your mountain, trying to climb back up to be there with you. I’ll probably give up eventually, maybe. Maybe I’ll even forget about you in due time. I hope you find a nicer girl, a prettier one, another Jennifer. Someone who’s pretty and cute, with glasses, and kissable cheeks and soft, round breasts, someone who’s everything you like and love in a girl. Someone who’s everything I’m not, everything I couldn’t be for you. Someone who would let you sleep and study and not pester you, someone understanding, someone close to you so you can see her all the time, someone willing to sacrifice things for you instead of the other way around, someone better than me. You deserve better than me. I’m going to miss so many things. I’m going to have a hard time eating anywhere in the city without seeing your face. I’m going to have a hard time even taking a photo without thinking of you. I’m never going to buy a build a bear in my life again after this. I’m never playing a DS game. I’m never wearing my future boyfriends’ clothes. I’m never getting so attached to another guy unless I know for sure for sure for sure that he is the one I’m meant to be with. You were one I was meant to be with, but that’s all in the past now. I don’t expect you to forgive me. I played and toyed with your heart for almost two years and I expect you to still love me. I’m so stupid and silly. I don’t think I’ll ever find someone quite like you again, someone who’s so willing to accept me for everything that I am. I just want to see you again. I just want to try everything over again. Start it all from the beginning, rewind my life like a videotape and go all the way back, all the way back to that karaoke trip. Maybe it’d be better if we never met, maybe I’ll sit that trip out this time, maybe that’ll be better for us in the long run. Deep down, I know I still want to be with you. I still want to see you, I still want you in my life. I know I do. I remember the first time you came back from college. I remember that terrible Thanksgiving. I remember fucking on my roof. I have so many memories of you. I wish time would pass faster and maybe you’ll wake up and love me and forgive me and we’d be okay. I’m still thinking about it like this. I wanted to do some many things with you. I guess you probably got sick of me pulling you this way and that way. I can’t blame you, that’s normal. How can anyone stand my indecisiveness? I just want to kiss you again. Hold hands you with you and walk to Chinatown. Eat somewhere and get cake and ice cream and walk back to my house and poke. Maybe one day you’ll get drunk and hook up with me again. Maybe, maybe. Maybe you’ll hear a song and you’ll think of me, that girl you used to know, used to date, used to annoy the shit out of you, you know, that one. What’s that song you always used to sing? This is the end for you my friend? Something like that. You even took off the relationship status. You’ve never done that before. Just looking at it without your name, it just hurts. I wish I didn’t put Jeffy Teddy away, I wish you were still here, I wish you still here, I wish you were still with me, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish. I use to wish for someone to love and you came to me. Someone, something out there gave you to me, found a way for us to meet and I ruined it, I ruined something that was so nice. I think I’ve written too much. I guess this is the end, the end of this letter, the end of you and me. I hope we can still be friends. I hope we can still hang out. I hope, I hope, I hope. I didn’t believe in hope until I met you. I love you, Jeffrey Liaw. I’ll always love you, I will always always love you.

Sometimes, I’m still scared that you might leave me, that I don’t know what’s going on in your head anymore, that I don’t know for sure if what you tell me is true or if you’re just saying it to keep me from being upset. Just bouts of deep uncertainty that, I think, have always been there but they have never been as painful and as bothersome as they are now. I’m wishing desperately that your feelings for me are true. I want to love you so badly, to be constantly in love with you, to be constantly loved by you, to selfishly horde all of your attention, to bury my face in the fabric of your shirt…

She still cries for you, she makes herself sad thinking about all the wonderful feelings you used to have for her and that she made them all go away. And, she doesn’t get why she’s this way, but if she had to do it all over again, she probably wouldn’t do it any differently. This is just who she is. She can pretend and she can try, but at the very end of the day, this is who she is and she’ll always be this way. She just wants you to love her again, just like you did before, just the same, without all of this repressed pain, without all of this emotional baggage. She doesn’t want to start over with someone new because all she really wants is just you. She wants to try it again with you, to feel the same joy she felt before when she was with you and just you, when she was your mochi and you were her puppy. She knows that things are practically the same now as they were before, but it can’t ever be truly the same. She wants it to be that way so badly.

It feels like you’re holding back, always, always just a little out of reach because you still don’t completely trust me. You’re always just a safe distance from me, from heartbreak while I teeter on the very edge of a fall, welcoming it, asking for it. Sometimes, when there’s no one to push me, I make the move and I dive off. Risking emotional sanity just to prove I’m human, just to feel something, just to rationalize that if the fall hurt this much, standing on that cliff must’ve meant something. You’ll never have enough time for me anymore, not like how it was before. Is that all I’m really looking for?

I wish you’d still cry for me. I want to feel like I mean something to you and maybe no gesture is grand enough to ever fulfill that requirement, but the smallest of actions are reassuring. They remind me that you still care, that you still think about me. Like, talking to me over the web cam or making hotpot for me on the roof. I don’t want you to cry because I’m trying to leave you, but because that’s how much you care about me and that’s how much I mean to you. I’m always looking for evidence, proof, of how much you love me, if you love me.

I want to love you always, be with you always.

It’s all just hormones, all of my mood swings, my tears, my indifference, everything. Just a bunch of chemicals fucking around with me, my body fucking around with me, making me feel shit I could do without feeling. But, at the center of it all, I feel love, just love for you. I don’t know how to love people, not very well at least. I’m trying, trying, trying to love you with all my heart and soul and mind. And, sometimes, when you tease me the way you do (about other girls, about not crying because you don’t really care anymore, about not being that one song in your life, about not really needing me, about how you don’t really seem to care or value my place in your life, about a lot of things) it just really hurts. This is a karmic experience to say the least, but it’s something I asked for, prayed for, so I’m going to accept it and try my hardest. I want a life with you, I want it and now that I have it, I don’t know why I’m still feeling sad, why I’m still hung up on the small things, on the small things from the past. I have to move, move, move, walk and forget it all and I wish it’d be easier, wish you’d help. But then, would it be too easy? Asking for your complete and undivided and uninhibited love after I’ve hurt you this way? Should I be giving myself away so completely after you hurt me? Questions, questions and doubts that plague my mind constantly, my mind free from the true burden of work and stress, free to wander in and out of paranoia and anxiety, free to think and ponder and over analyze my every conversation, your every action, sensitive to the many creeping tendrils of boredom, making things out of nothing, a destructive behavior against the very laws of nature.

And, next summer, I will get to see you even less. Before I even make it to next summer, there’s the next school year, my first year in college, your third. You will not be there for me like you were before. You won’t really have time or the privacy to talk to me all the time. The more and more I think about it, I wonder how I will be able to deal with the lack of communication, the lack of attention. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll be too busy to really notice. There’s still a little part of me looking to break free, looking for something new, to truly move on and to truly leave you. But, now that you are here, that you actually came back to me, I don’t see why I need to leave. I’m unsatisfied with the amount of attention you pay me, the way you want to have more friends. Am I not sufficient? Am I not enough company? Fun?

Sometimes, I think too much. This is what I mean. I wish my hormones would stop fucking with me. Some days, I just want to fucking live.

I wished on 11:11 for someone to love me, anyone. And, God, or whoever, some mystical force, some power, gave me him. I didn’t appreciate this gift and now it’s gone. Maybe, if I wish on 11:11 again, he’ll come back to me.

I’m so close to just giving up, giving up on all my wishes, my prayers, my secret little hopes, my fantasy. Giving it all up because I know they’re just lies, they’re just there to cushion my fall when it turns out to be just hot air in the end. I’m not sure of myself anymore.

Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now. Somebody take me back to the days when things didn’t matter so much, when all the wrong turns brought me back to the right place, when all my wrongs could be forgiven easily, when the stakes were so much lower, when I wasn’t so involved, when I wasn’t so emotional, when I didn’t feel so old, when it was okay to feel like just leaving. I still want to just leave, just lift off this earth, tap the ground, hop a little and leave this planet, see it from space, see it from somewhere far away and nothing is relevant anymore and nothing is clear and its just a dot in a sea of brilliant, glowing dots, glittering embellishment of a far away dream, a far away day dream that didn’t mean anything. I want to be a speck, a speck of sand in something bigger than myself, I want to drown in anonymity but at the same time, I want the recognition, I want to be a diamond in a sea of sand, I want to be the best, the want to try but I’m not motivated enough anymore. I don’t have the drive or the need to try to reach the top of any hill because the hills turn into mountains and it never ends, the rat race never ends, a sea of identical, unassuming rats squirming towards the same finish line just ever so slightly out of reach.

My inner mind is blank, wiped clean like a dry erase board after a thorough cleaning. All the remains are stray marks, remnants of poor decisions and cheap markers that damaged the surface of the board. Faint reminders of old mistakes, always present, ceaseless in their silent and unforgiving presence. No matter how hard I try to get rid of them, to wipe them from my mind, they persist, they survive, like scars, they mar the surface of my consciousness, like notches tallying the mistakes in my life, a constant force pushing me forward, forward, forward into the unknown, momentarily drawing over the past with new strokes, dark, full, wet as they trace their way across the expanse of my mind, momentary distractions: the present.

Where are my shooting stars? Where are my shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now. I could really use one right now. Where are my shooting stars? What do I see when I turn my head towards the heavens at night? A faint orange glow, looming structures, rigid in their architectural precision, towering over the tiny island, bridges spanning the dark river, sprinkled with lights of cars moving up and down the FDR drive, coasting down the East side.

I want him back. I want to try again. Just to try again.

This song is everywhere and it kills me that it’s so damn popular. And, I like it. And, it’s catchy but sometimes I feel like dying every time I hear it. I feel like crying. I can see his face, smiling at me, I can feel his arms around me, I can feel him…

I think I’m just jealous that all these people get to be with him and I don’t anymore. I don’t know what he’s feeling. I have to wait and if…

I’m so scared, I’m so scared no one will love me again. I’m so scared that no one will ever look at me with such love. I miss you. I miss you so much.

I have so much to say to you but I don’t think you want to hear it and I don’t think my words will really make a difference anymore. I don’t think you’ll come back to me, even if I wait for you, no matter how long I wait for you. I love you so much and I know you love me, too. I don’t know why it’s so important for me to be with you because we’re still together as friends right now. I know you’re going to think I’m just being insecure, but, things are different now. It’s different from when we were a couple. I hardly see you or hear you and it feels like you love me, not less, but in a shallower way. I don’t understand anymore, Jeffrey. I wish this never happened. I wish I didn’t have feelings. I wish I was just numb to everything. This is such a bad time. I’m ever so slightly angry with myself, with you, with who ever decided that all of this had to happen right now when I’m sitting on the precipice of a sharp, steep cliff. It feels like I’ve been pushed out of an airplane without a reserve and you, my parachute, just failed me. I want to crawl away from everything. I want to erase everything and start over from scratch. I wish you would let me try again, let me reset my life, our relationship. I just want another chance to make things right because it was so good, what I had with you, and it could be better.

I had a really nice dream. We talked on Skype, over web cam. And, we held hands and yours are still so much bigger.

I’m still waiting…waiting till the day it’s no longer a hypothetical…

I miss you, poo. So much and all the time. Maybe, someday…

I still want to be with him. We were so close to being okay again. Just a little bit more. Just a little bit more and everything would’ve been okay. Just a little bit more, but I fucked up again. Jeffrey, please. Don’t do this again. I’m sorry. Please. Don’t say you can’t. Don’t say you can’t. Please. Please.

Poo, I miss you already. I fucked up again. I love him so much. I miss him already and it’s been only a day. I need him in my life but I can’t have him anymore. I miss him. I miss being with him. I miss his lunches, his big hands. He was so cute yesterday, on the roof, the way he squealed when he came. I miss you, Jeffrey.

Somewhere Only We Know

The Scientist

I’m still pretty upset. I think I’m just ignoring it now. Or, at least I’m feeling sort of normal and content. I still don’t want to hate him, or even see him in a bad light. It’s hard to do that because he seemed so wonderful and nice to me, but I guess this is the only way to really get rid of it, whatever I’m feeling on the inside. Some things I just don’t understand. Like, why people change even though I’m still changing myself. Some things, like that picture of Ted Reno, the guy who looks like Mr. Kennedy, when I see it, it still makes me sad. It still tears me up on the inside thinking about all the things that we could’ve been, completely disregarding all the bad shit that might’ve happened.

Goddamn, I wish you were around, just so you can be with me. It might also be that I have nothing to do, so I constantly obsess about this shit to avoid doing actual work. It’s not the epitome of brilliant, but I do what I have to. I’m not exactly responsible either.

I do have a really hard time fathoming most of what just happened to me, this week, last month.

Okay, yeah, fuck you life. Fuck youuuuu. I wasn’t supposed to talk to himmmmmm….FUCK YOUUUUUU

Godmotherfuckingdamn.

I will be okay. In fact, I am okay now. So, I will be okay after this. Word. Yeah. Fuck you. I don’t give a fuck.

I fucking hate this shit.

It’s been a while…

He waits for her on the bridge, listening to the wet slosh of cars pviagrasing on the highway below, watching the hooded traffic guard in their gaudy neon raincoats direct the flow of traffic and children leaving the neighborhood preschool. He has packed her lunch in a round, plastic container, the kind that restaurants send take-out in. Wrapped twice in aluminum foil, it sits at the bottom of his black, fabric messenger bag.  

The wall, the bridge: they refer to these things as if there’s only one of each in existence and it’s their bridge straddling the highway snaking down the west side of Manhattan and it’s their painted and faded mural wall outside BMCC and only theirs, a certain mentality that grows from the school’s stifling prestige that allows for this sense of ownership. Their wall, their bridge, as if no one else ever crossed the Tribeca bridge, as if no one else ever sat on the wall and ate lunch, as if the occasional morning runner, dog walker or lone Wall Street banker making their way across the aging wood panels were just anomalies, visitors, trespassers, as if the college students that join the steady outpouring of high schoolers from the 1,2,3 station and that eventually diverge at the community college were lesser beings. But, it’s just a bridge, a wall, a school, a collective being petty and insignificant, like ants hurdling against tidal waves of rain, not quite knowing that there’s something bigger out there but fearing that there is. Four years and they walk away knowing that they survived one wave, one day, one flippant act of nature, one flippant summer thunderstorm. Four years of not quite knowing but knowing it all along, four years and Four years and they can say they lived it, they owned it.

What is it like to lose yourself in something so much bigger? When your senior year dwindles down to nothing, to goodbyes and pictures and those long afternoons playing pointless card games in Chinatown, the inside jokes and harmless insults, all that wasted time but to you, it means so much more. Is it fear or nostalgia, or both, that makes you wish this year would never end, that maybe it would loop and rewind and tape over itself. Stepping on the thin line between when life starts to matter and when it used to be good, wishing you never needed to cross it. The pasty insides of this school, as if someone will poor color coordination threw up on everything, you’ll eventually miss that too. Long for voices the echo in the corridors, the faces that fade in and out of rooms, wishing you can take a piece of it with you but knowing there aren’t many pieces left to take.

God, I hate being so damn sentimental. Why is it going by so fast when all I want is for it to last, last just a little bit longer so I can sink my teeth into this feeling, into this moment and hold on to it and remember it, remember them. God, I wish I spent more time on the more important things.

Crap: My Life

Weird Al Yankovich, in his 2006 hit song “White & Nerdy”, a parody of “Ridin’” by Charmillionare and Krayzie Bone, raps “Look at me I’m white n’ nerdy!/I wanna roll with-/The gangsters/But so far they all think/I’m too white n’ nerdy/Think I’m just too white n’ nerdy/Think I’m just too white n’ nerdy/I’m just too white n’ nerdy/Really, really white n’ nerdy”

If I had one word to describe the life of Oscar Wao, it would not be ‘brief’ and it would not be ‘wondrous’, it would just be ‘pathetic’. Granted, that word might be a little too harsh for dear ol’ Oscar, but think about it for a second: he is an obese, sexually frustrated, Dominican virgin, who spends most of his adolescent and adult life swimming in science fiction and table top role playing games, all the while failing, consistently, to get laid. He fails at pretty much everything; he fails so much he makes Ralph Nader look like a winner.

Being the fat kid sucks. It really does. If you’ve never been fat, you wouldn’t understand. Please don’t pretend and try placing yourself in a fat kid’s shoes. You’re lying to yourself. If your belly fat doesn’t jiggle when you walk,

I have cavities. It bothers me so much that I do. So much. Damnit.

Silence really takes its toll. It feels like someone drove a stake through the base of my skull and it’s stuck there and it won’t move.

The little fantasies are the best ones, the ones where we’re holding hands, walking down a dimly lit street lined with trees, against a calm, lukewarm summer breeze with the slightest hint of autumn. The ones where I’m lying in your lap on a picnic blanket, with the sun fading below the horizon, leaving a streak of bright, clear orange across the sky.

All I want to do is just be with you. I don’t care where I am, just as long as I can be with you.

Chances are someone out there, somewhere, is feeling the same thing you are. It feels like you’re about to dive off the edge of a cliff, like you’re about to scream, like you’re going to be heard for the first time, like you’re that tree, falling, in am empty forest, like you’re actually going to live this time, like you’ve finally found the tiniest shard of what you’ve been looking for this entire time. What’s the word I’m looking for here? Inspiration? Epiphany?

The City is quiet at night, amber tinted and still. The occasional swish of a taxi, the cackle of a drunkard stumbling out of a bar, the silence that follows consumes the city whole, like a snake biting its own tail.

You’re all that I think about, the perfume that lingers in the fabric of my clothes, the sound that echoes in the cavern of my memories. I want to be near you, to be filled with you past the point of breaking, to be pregnant with your warmth on a cold winter’s night.

She first encounters him in a supermarket, in the produce section by the potatoes and yams. He is hesitantly picking through a pile of green peppers, occasionally dropping one into a plastic bag. He does not appear to understand the distinction between one pepper and the next, but goes through the motions of mimicking produce selection regardless. He seizes another one from the pile and, with mute intensity befitting that of a snake encroaching upon its prey, he bites into the vegetable. She is alarmed by his actions, but says nothing and only glides past him to examine the tomatoes and celery. Her mind denies her the opportunity to escape and she finds herself watching him, perhaps out of curiosity, or perhaps some lonesome attraction that only the middle-aged feel towards others of their own kind.

Today is one of those days where she feels like having some peanut butter. Though she’s no great fan of the sticky paste, occasionally she craves a dollop or two on a slice of bread, or maybe some to dip a cracker or two in.

She wants to taste him, like breaking the skin of an apple and sinking her teeth into its flesh. 

She had lied to him that first night they were together. She had told him that she loved him, not because she did but because she read it somewhere (a John Updike novel, maybe) that

She tells him she loves him the first night they are together. It is a lie and they both know it. Yet, somehow this one lie makes all of it real. As she bends down, slowly, the uneven fringes of her hair breaking the calm of his face, like fishing lines rippling the surface of a pond, she sinks her lips into his and is surprised, briefly, at how soft his lips are. 

I think my mother tried too hard to get me involved in science and medicine. This Intel project is probably the culmination of years of her hard work, second only to my graduating from medical school. Except, at the end of this tedious, but thankfully brief venture, I’m convinced that research is not the right field of work for me.

I’m in love. I never imagined that this is how it would turn out to be, that he is who I would end up with, but it happened anyway.

I want to kiss his lips, press my breasts gently against his firm chest and feel his warmth. His little touches, fingertips trailing along my skin, like electricity, burn, destroy, ravage my senses. I want to feel him forever. The consummation of our love, the birth of sensation as our bodies touch, connected our bodies are, entangled, snared by threads of fate.

I hate it when I have to explain myself. To anybody.

I am a kitchen spatula. I have a long, plastic handle and a

The January air is cold, my breath fogs as I exhale in to my mittens. I’m intricately packed, like a snowman, under layers of clothes.

Growing up is like stripping in the cold. A child, my breath fogs in the air, I am wearing a thousand intricately packed layers of innocent naiveties. The temperature bites exposed skin and cold seeps in between the cracks of my person. Unaware, I am a snowman melting in the sun. Molded by hands other than my own, do I ever truly loose my shape when I pick myself up from the puddles of my youth? Or, do I have to deal with the fact that I am an amorphous blob, immobile, and constantly threatened by the occasional footfalls that step too close to my boundaries?

When I was eight, I wanted to be an astronaut. Space was fascinating, unconquered, possibly misunderstood by modern physics and absolutely merciless in its beauty and austerity. This childhood dream became nothing but a dream and, occasionally, when people learn that I dared to dream this simple dream, they scoff and wonder how I ever fooled myself into thinking I possess the mental and physical discipline that are demanded of astronauts. In all honesty, I just liked looking at the pictures.

When I was eight, I also watched my first episode of Cowboy Bebop. What made me stop channel flipping, and struggling with a remote control too large for my hands, was the fact that people were smoking in a cartoon. This has never happened before. Spongebob Squarepants never smoked cigarettes, neither did Patrick, or Squidward or even stingy Mr. Krabs! But, then again, Cowboy Bebop wasn’t really just a cartoon. Cowboy Bebop was the very essence of cool. If growing up was like stripping in the cold, late night cartoons took my gloves and chipped a crack in the layers of childhood naiveties.

The whole “I just liked looking at the pictures” thing really worked out for me. I became a great watcher of pictures, an avid lover of animation. Ironically enough, what made me grow up the most was something that most people deem childish.

Falling in love is like being addicted to drugs. God, you want it so much, you want it so much that it hurts when you have and it hurts more when you don’t. You know it’s bad for you but you just can’t give it up, it’s too good, it hurts too good, it feels too good.

I think it’s time I stop talking to him, because everyone is telling me not to, and time I start talking to my old friend, Microsoft Word.

The past two days, I’m not even going to try to explain the past two days. It’s going to be engrained in my memories for a long time anyway. The way my room was, my stiff pink sheets…his hipster jacket with the feminine buckles, the way his moans sounded so pained…

I hurt him so much. I hurt him so much. I’ve never heard a sound so pained and tortured in my life. I’ve never seen him cry so much and so openly. I know why he doesn’t want to be with me anymore. I know, because I’m the one who drove him to leave me. I’m the one who pushed too hard, too cruelly. He always came back though. In the end, I guess I was the one who took him for granted. I was the one who ruined everything. I miss him. I’m going to miss him terribly. My room is like a museum of our relationship. All of his gifts, all of them, the first and possibly the last, on my shelves, on my bed, reminding me of him.

I want to hold him again. I’d do anything to take everything back and start over again. I want to his lips. His lips, his soft lips, the bottom one a little bit bigger than the top, a little bit fatter than the top, the way it hangs open slightly when he’s sad, when he’s kissing me…

I want to cry. I’ve cried so much. My face stings, my eyes are poached. I can’t even really say how I feel because I’m afraid to feel it anymore. I’m afraid to touch the fear and the pain. I’m afraid to loose him anymore than I have already.

If I ever see him again, I want to kiss him, deeply. I want to hold him, and undress him slowly if he lets me. He probably won’t. He’s not the type. He’s going to push me away, avoid my hands, pin me down and tell me no. I’m still so in love with him. Even if I wanted to push him out of my mind, my heart, he comes back. His infectiously wide smile, his sad puppy dog eyes, his cheeks returning to their previous plump state…I miss him.

Everything was alright before I said those things. Everything would’ve been alright if I weren’t such an ass. It was pizza and it was a shitty chunk of cheese-covered broccoli. He waited for me after school. He gave me coconut pie from a Chinese bakery. We had Bon Chon chicken and walked to the subway at City Hall, bought a soda and took the train to 68th street. He talked about his internship, what he learned, the patients he saw and the dentists he worked with. We bought peanuts at the bus stop and walked to Cornell. There was some sort of hold up down between the avenues, so it was fortunate that we did not wait for the bus. I worked and around six we left. We took the cross town bus to Lexington and walked down to the fifties. We stopped by the dog kennel and looked at the puppies. We stopped by the pizza place and I wish I can go back and stop myself from going in. I wish I can just stop myself. I miss him. I’m in his shirt. I’m in the shirt he gave me. I believed everything. Everything. About us, our future…

Does it only hurt this much because he’s my first? Because it’s the first time I tasted the joy and pain of love? The first time I crawled into bed to feel someone else’s warmth? The first time someone kissed me and told me he loved me? Is that why it hurts so much when he signs off Skype suddenly and doesn’t return any of my calls? Is that why everything hurts so much….

I wish I can take everything back. I wish I can just stop before I said those things, before I did any of it. I am such an idiot. I am such an idiot.

I love him. I love him. I love him. I will always love him. He’s the only one I can’t let go.

Please don’t forget that Jeffy loves you.

How am I supposed to move on? How can I take anyone else but him? Please don’t leave me. I’d do anything. Anything. Sell my soul, cut my hair, give away a limb. Anything just to be with him even for just a day, a day.

I didn’t mean it for it to be our last night together. I didn’t mean it. I wish I can go back. I wish I can go back. I wish I can go back. I want to go back. Why isn’t my life like the movies? Everyone gets back together in the movies…

I can’t stay away. I can’t. Everyone tells me to wait. To let him go. I can’t. I’m not patient. I’m not. Please.

I miss him. I miss him so much. Come back. I don’t care how bad he is. I don’t care how bad it is. This hurts too much. 

Yeah, it really hurts. Breaking up. How much he doesn’t seem to care. How he can just hang up so easily and leave me. I hate him for it. I hate for making believe he gave a shit. I tried to walk out of it. I tried, way back when. But I loved him so much, I loved him so much. Do I still love him now? I can’t tell. I can’t feel anything anymore. I’m so numb on the inside. I’m tired of feeling something. Feeling pain, or whatever.

Today, I woke up around nine to a phone call from my boyfriend who, having just flown back from college for winter break, was waiting downstairs for me to open the door for him. We baked cookies all day and went out to eat and cuddled and kissed and fell asleep together.

Of course, none of this actually happened. In fact, he missed his flight and we broke up. I ended up baking no cookies and crying all day long. I am actually still crying because every time I stop and think about what happened, it makes me sad. Seeing my Facebook status makes me sad. My dad calling me makes me sad. The fact that he’s not here with me makes sad, but that’s the least compelling reason. I’m seriously just unable to feel, to emote. I can’t find the love I use to have for him, I can’t find any feelings I use to have for him at all. It’s just all gone and I feel so empty. But, strangely, I still feel sad. It’s as if I woke up from the wrong dream into this startlingly unhappy reality that is called my life. I wished for most of my teenage life for a boy to love me. And when one came along, I guess I wished too hard for reality to turn into fantasy. It’s like Icarus flying too close to the sun. I got burned, I guess? I pushed him too hard and too fast and the wax melted and I plummeted back into the crumbling relics of what I thought to be my long forgotten past. In short, I’m lonely, again.

He’s not picking up. I can’t work. I can’t function. Rather, I don’t want to function. This is a really good excuse to not work. That aside, I feel deflated and tired. I just want everything to go back to the way it was. 

Sometimes, I want to cry. I sit around and think about all the people and all the things we’ve done and then, in a little while, it wouldn’t even matter anymore. People, places, it would all just go away and melt, like memories generally would, in the back of my mind. I wish I can keep onto them forever. But it is difficult and I do not know how.

I want to live forever, even though I absolutely hate being alive. Perhaps, it is because I know I’m no constant fixture in the world and my existence is only temporary.

Strangely enough, I feel nothing. I feel neither sadness nor longing. I am apathetic.

I deserve most of it, don’t I? I was being an ass and well, this is what I get.

Sometimes, it feels like people will never understand me. And, when I try to explain myself to people, they’ll look at me like I’m silly, childish, immature. After all, the source of my passions, my joys is an under-appreciated art form that might not even be an art form. Aside from my budding, somewhat but most definitely serious, romantic relationship of one and a half years, what really gets me going, what really makes me feel alive, what really ties me to down to filthy, sordid earth and keeps me going at night is anime.

Think about it, when colleges ask me to elaborate on one of my interests, who is going to know what the hell ‘anime’ is? And, the real question is: who’s going to take me seriously when I mention I spend hours upon hours watching, oogling, crying at some animated Japanese hoopla? No one.

So, where does that leave me? After watching something so damn epic, something so beautiful, all I can do is tell it to my word document. Is there really no hope for a person like me? Is there really no hope for those trying to escape the unbearable miseries of their own lives? Probably not.

Sometimes, I want to cry because something in life just can’t be explained in words. I feel like everything will be alright. It’s just a thirty minute anime series, but it feels like it solved every single problem I’ll ever face in life, just as long as I can remember how epic, how motherfucking epic it was.

I love Roy Mustang. Goddamn how good it was. Damn damn damn damn, it was like, like, everything! At once!

Goddamn, it was so damn good. I love Roy Mustang. God fucking damn…

I’m a hopeless insomniac. I’m afraid of losing time, sleeping and waking up too late to do anything worthwhile. I’m afraid of waking up, waking up to a world I didn’t really want to be in. So, what am I to do? In the middle of the night, when the world is quiet and the air is cold. Shall I sleep, or not? To sleep or not to sleep? To which beckoning call do I answer? The lure of sleep, safety, ignorance or the wakeful pains of a morbid reality?

If I could, I would give my life up for him. He makes me forget everything, forget all the things that plague my life. I just want to curl up with him and surrender myself to this feeling, this feeling of safety, comfort, love. Is it a weakness that I am displaying, a secret yearning for security, defenselessness towards loneliness?

What should I write? What do I write? For whom….

It hurts a lot to be a part from him.

He sits at the foot of the bed, moonlight spilling onto his back. The patterns on his boxers are faded and the material is soft, worn from repeated washing. The sheets slope gently toward his form, like ridges on an alien landscape. They are a muted shade of blue, but appear dull gray in the moonlight. His shoulders are broad, wide, folding inwards like a jacket slung over a chair, misplaced and tired. He is unaware of her watchful gaze, her mental narration of his present appearance, of his thinning hair made all the more apparent by a short haircut, of the tiny pink volcanoes that landmine his skin, of the skin folds in his stomach when his sits hunched like he does now. She wonders why he does not come back to her side of the bed.

She reaches out to him, her arms catching him by the waist, drawing him closer to her. A rush of heat moves back and forth between their bodies until it settles, like ripples on a lake, equally between their two forms. Her cheek presses against his back, her fingers stroke the fine muscles of his chest, firm and taut beneath skin like the muscular fibers of a race horse. She hears the hollow whisper of his breath.

Gently, he strokes the faint hair on her arm. 

She’s always right. I hate to admit it, but, she’s always right. People have priorities. I don’t have any. People put themselves first. I put people first. It’s such a problem. It’s such a problem.

What I honestly can’t understand about this whole is why it even matters if he says yes or no now. How much of a difference can it possibly make? It’s practically the same time every year, the same month, the same place. It’s only one night, one motherfucking night and he can’t manage to find the time for that? One night! Am I asking him to move to Florida with for the rest of our lives? No! Am I asking for him to take a month off and not doing anything except be with me? No! Am I asking too much of him? Am I asking too much, too early? We’ve been talking about this since, like, what, since the first prom that we went to together? Like, what the fuck. WHAT THE FUCK CAN POSSIBLY HAPPEN BETWEEN NOW AND PROM!? Seriously. It’s just Thanksgiving. He planned it, he pushed for it and the day before he drops out. Why? Because he has an interview. Why? What the fuck is this shit? Holy fuck. His parents are fucking annoying as shit and even worse, he persistence to do as they say even as their actual presence in his life dwindles. Worse than all of these aforementioned infractions is the fact that I’m constantly the one losing, in every fucking scenario. His fucking parents are just that goddamn important. Going home is so goddamn important. Dude, you’re like bigger than them! Holy fuck. It’s like, I have some sort of a place in life and it’s the worst fucking place. I’m stuck in a long distance relationship that pains me to no end. I have to not only work and study for the next two decades to even begin earning a living, but I also have to wait for him to find his way in the world, wait for him to be a dentist or something and even then, I probably will not get to spend any time with him because we will both be working individuals. How much does this situation fucking suck? What do I get out of this? Eating his food? Video chat? Winter breaks and summer vacations? What the fuck! He even has an internship this winter break. So much for seeing him, at all. I mean, this is my last year in high school. I thought it’d be nice but apparently this is the busiest fucking year for him in college. Fuck this shit, I don’t care if I sound like a whiny bitch. Fuck you people. Fuck everyone. I hate this shit. I hate this life. Nothing ever truly works out and I’m always stuck doing some stupid shit that fucks me over in the end. I’m not getting in a good college, I’m not getting anything. I have tests and more tests and classes to attend that teach me nothing, essays to write about myself for my second round of applications. I have a month to do what took me half a year to do for two colleges, but now for a dozen. It’s tragic. It really is. I want to kill myself. He doesn’t make it any better either. All I do is just waiting for him. Him, even he puts himself first. He who is so in love with me puts me second and puts his family, his career and everything else first. I know that’s what you’re supposed to do. I know that’s what my mother preaches. I know, I know, I know it’s the smart, right, proper thing. BUT FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHAT ABOUT ME!? Really, maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s just me who lives not for myself but for everyone else. Me who lives for a few lingering emotions that I’m not capable of receiving because I’m fat and ugly and no one wants to squander their all too precious time doling it out to me. Maybe it really is just me. I hate being alive. It hurts. Even when you have someone to hold your hand and walk with you, it hurts. It hurts because he’s never here and when he, he’s always being taken away, for reason or another, for one thing or another, but it’s better this way for him. He’ll have experience working in a clinic, he’ll be a good boy and please his parents, he’ll be successful at whatever it is he planned on do. But why the hell am I always the second priority. It hurts when I put him below Intel, doesn’t it? It might really just be me. It is just me.

Some days, I just feel really drained. At the slightest emotional provocation, I loose the need to move, the need to continue doing whatever it was that I was doing. I don’t feel like living. It’s a small amount of pain that resonates across my chest, ripping through the tender connections between flesh and tissue. It hurts, emotionally, a jarring pain that doesn’t go away but intensifies with each pulse. I don’t want to live anymore. Yet, I can’t stop living. I want to see it through to whatever might be at the end.

What the fuck. I just wanted to fucking talk. To talk. To talk. Just talk. That’s all I wanted. I’m not happy

I’ve never been happy

This hurts so much. I don’t understand why it had to turn out like this. I hate him. I hate everything. I wanted to talk. I just wanted to talk. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS. I don’t want to leave a message. I don’t want to leave a message…I can’t think. I have no ideas. My stomach hurts.

I’m very paranoid. Specially given the nature of his Skype statuses. On one hand, I trust that he is in fact sleeping. And on the other, I’m really afraid that he’s not. I’m not sure anymore. I love him and I hope he loves me. I’m so insecure and paranoid and afraid that he might be cheating on me. My nuunuu. My nuunuu is faithful to me. He loves me. He loves me. 

He’s never really given the future much thought, partly because a computer can read his short-term future to him with thirty-four percent accuracy

He’s never really given the future much thought. Partly because he hasn’t lost interest in the present, but mainly because he can always pay some back alley fortune teller to read him his near-future with, give or take, thirty to forty percent accuracy off a computer. Of course, the thirty to forty percent bit is a complete lie,

When the university pulled his funding and canceled his project, his first instinct was to place an ad in the Sunday papers.

Major Joseph Rigel had always been a little clumsy. He was not, as they’d say, officer material. How he even managed  his rank of major was a mystery to many in the military establishment.  

The day before her scheduled shuttle launch, Levin’s girlfriend bought him an android. She left it in his living room with a folded note tucked under one hand. From the mole hovering about its right breast to the birthmark on its left ankle, the manufactures had managed to make, with the exception of a circular connection port at the base of its neck, an exact copy of his girlfriend. Not a single hair was out of place.

            Even though he knows that in its inactive state the droid was nothing more than a life sized doll, he approaches the replica with hesitancy. Gingerly, he plucks the folded note from under its hand and opens it. He reads her scratchy, severely slanted script with a beleaguered sigh.

            “To keep me company,” he muses aloud, “to keep me company.”

“So, do you like it?” She is ecstatic when he calls her that night, her video feed practically radiating with happiness.

            “I guess?” He responds with a raised eyebrow.

            Her smile drops instantly and she pouts, “You don’t like it.”

            “No, of course I like it,” he says with emphasis, “It’s just a little weird.”

            “How is it weird?” Dejected, she doesn’t give him time to answer, “It’s not weird. You work with them all the time. You just don’t like it.”

            “Don’t go jumping to conclusions like that. It’s different. This is different.” He pauses for a moment, grasping for his thoughts, for the right words. “I guess the problem is that it looks just like you.”

            “But that’s the point!” She asserts, “It’s supposed to look like me, act like me. Be like me!”

            “Isn’t that taking it too far?” His brows furrow in confusion. “It’s you in every way, but it’s still not you. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

            “Barely,” she replies, “couples do it all the time. It’s supposed to tide you over until I get back. It’ll be as if I never left.”

            “Right,” he sighs. It’ll be as if you never left.

Later that night, he watches her space shuttle launch on the news. The rocket traces a brilliant arch across the sky, racing higher and higher until it merges with the violet-blue horizon.

Rigel doesn’t really think anymore. He doesn’t really need to

Rigel was born on Mars.

It’s hard to write when the only thing on your mind is him. When your heart is a pool of swirling feelings, paranoia, fear, guilt, love, longing sadness, all of it so overwhelming. You just want to see him some days, wishing it would all go back to being normal, wishing you can just hold onto him and lie with him and just let it all be. You wish, but it isn’t and the world has to go on and life has to go on and he needs to work and you need to work and the universe isn’t stopping just to let the two of cuddle in your bed, the universe doesn’t stop just for you.

But you really wish it did.

Colonel Joseph Rigel was, by nature, a clumsy and overly sentimental man. He had neither the drive nor the talent to make it as a career officer in the army. His bumbling tactical successes in the Orion Rebellion and his steady ascension through the ranks thereafter bothered many of his fellow officers. So, when Rigel was finally assigned to a far flung desk job

It’s such a rush of feelings, it’s choking my heart, it’s so intense and relentless. I miss him. I miss him because I almost lost him and now he’s so far out of reach. I miss him because my mind is unsure of where we are. I miss him because I love him.

Rigel doesn’t really think anymore. Like most people, his mind is permanently wired to the net.

First, there is fear, overwhelming and intense. It clinches his heart and sucks the air from his lungs. He is unsure of its origins, but the fear is there. Then, panic sets in. He is nervous, shaking, running. A long corridor, checkered linoleum tiles that stretch ominously towards infinity. There are no doors and he feels claustrophobia scratching at the corners of his mind. He runs, thudding down the warping ground. The tiles curve and bend, flowing together. He runs blindly, his lungs burn and suddenly the ground is pulled from beneath his feet and his falls horizontally down the hallway, a wave, a tsunami of black and white tiles nipping at his feet. He is swimming in linoleum, gasping for air as the tiles overtake him, clawing to break the surface. He sinks, pulled under by the wave. The linoleum pours down his throat, cementing his lungs and he tries to scream but there is no sound. In the silence of his struggles, he suffocates.

Rigel wakes to a garbage collector hovering outside. He pulls up the time, the hologram reads a little past three in the morning. As he turns to sit up, he realizes the other side of his bed is warm, the sheets tossed open and the pillow flat. Was he with a woman? Judging from the stillness of his apartment, she didn’t stick around. The encounter must have been brief because he has no recollection of the affair. A lingering migraine purrs softly in the back of his skull. What did they say about dying in your own dreams again?

The water cooler is broken, so Rigel drinks tap. He downs one glass and takes a second with him to the window. The garbage collector had moved on and he presses his forehead to the cool glass as he surveys the city below him. Earth was different from Mars. The lights were brighter and louder, the buildings were taller, the cars were faster, as if it was trying to exceed what can no longer be exceeded, and having failed in doing so, it was burning out like a match. Breathing in deeply and fogging up the window as he exhales, he lets his mind swim. He digs into his memories, trying to dredge up the events of last night but to no avail. He can almost touch the red sequins on her dress and taste her lipstick. Perhaps it was a mistake to leave Mars.

He leaves the glass resting on the window sill. Pulling on a presumably clean shirt, he leaves the apartment with a trench coat on and keys in hand. He goes out every night looking for something, looking for someone. He prefers to think of it as freelance detective work, but the less euphemistic term is bounty hunter. In all honesty, bounty hunting wasn’t his top choice but there weren’t a lot of options and he had to feed himself somehow. Rigel’s latest case, or the last bounty sent to his feed, is a drug dealer worth a quarter of a million credits. The police say he hangs around at a club.

On the outside, the club is unapologetically bland. Rigel arrives at the a sparse metal door some hours later, having combed through the dense city underground to find the club tucked away in the back alleys, cloaked and hidden by twisting corners and mazelike streets. Without a doubt, Rigel thinks, the sort of place one might find a bounty.

On the inside, the club is unapologetically loud. A caged elevator lowers Rigel deeper into the bowels of the slumbering city, the music pounding louder with each second until he is finally deposited at the bottom of the shaft. He pulls open the cage and steps into a long corridor. Rigel is taken aback for a moment when the familiarity of the scene hits him full force. The checkered linoleum floors, illuminated by pale fluorescent light, without a door in sight, everything about the club was a throwback to the last century and uncannily similar to his dream. He takes a hesitant step. So, what did they actually say about dying in your own dream? A group of neon-haired teens squeeze past him in the hall, their eyes bloodshot and their screeches echoing up towards the surface.

Rigel isn’t much of a dancer, foregoing the dance floor he heads for the bar. The décor might have been antiquated, but the bar is still tended by an android, the band of green wrapping halfway around his neck giving him away. Rigel orders a gin and tonic. The bartender sets the drink down before him, the ice clinking against the glass. He grins at Rigel as a woman slides into a seat next to him. It’s getting harder and harder to tell the androids apart from the real people, save for the colored bands around their necks.

“Are you looking for anyone in particular?” Rigel is startled by the question, but more so by her voice. It carries a tart edge that belies the sweetness she is trying to hide.

He turns to her and answers, “No one in particular, unless there is someone who wants to be looked for.”

It’s really late. My boyfriend’s suffered some sort of a mental breakdown and in the words of my mother, I was “deetched”. It feels awful, when he just hangs up and when it feels like you’re trying to care (me, trying to care, it’s a big step) and he just wants to get as far away from you as possible. Correction, it’s not really late. There exists no ‘really late’ time reference for me anymore. I’m just tired, wasted, I feel like a damn balloon, a popped balloon, the shrivelly bit of plastic, curled up and left over. I feel like shit. It’s not a strange feeling. I just feel like dying, again, all the time. Am I suffering from some sort of mental disorder? A condition? What condition am I? Take the free personality quiz now. I wonder why people try so hard to box each other in. It’s like I’m purposefully taking a marker, popping the cap and drawing a big red, bleeding box around my personality and telling people, jesus fucking Christ, this is me: a word, a picture, something so ordinary if I ever wake up I’d kill myself twice over just to forget it ever existed. I wish he didn’t leave me like this. I need a shower, but I’m lazy and I don’t feel like it. I don’t need to be presentable in any sense for at least a couple days more. I don’t feel like washing my hair. Every time I lift my arms to rinse and repeat I feel like they’re gonna fall off. My skin is sticking to my computer table and I don’t feel like sleeping, I don’t feel like existing, so why do I exist? Did I ask to be brought into this pitiful world? This world that, in my youthful angst, I detest so much? This world that, in a short while will become bearable only because I’ve grown up, only because the neurons in my brain plugged up any sort of rebellion, hatred, hope I might have harbored over the years, I never wish I knew?

Then again, it’s nice that I have my evenings to myself again.

118 214 471 428

As for my event…ehh……

There is nothing special about me, nothing that I can see. I am common, ubiquitous, trite. Nonetheless, I market myself as quite the contrary. I dress myself in words

I am overweight and it bothers me.

I hate it when I get into arguments with my mother, because when I coop myself up in my room and develop the need and urgency to piss, I have to pass by her desk on the way to the bathroom. Thank you, single bedroom apartment, where would I be without you.

He’s sleeping

Trust me, I don’t get it either. Whatever this is. It sucks. I want him to be something he isn’t. It’s asking a lot of him. But things used to be different. Didn’t they? He’d be sweet and I’d be…well, okay, a total bitch, but that’s besides the point. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t. I think I want too much from him and it’s…not good.

He’s asleep. I keep trying to get him to wake up and stay awake. It feels lacking, the way he just passes out after a while, the way he’s limp and bats my hands and head away when I try to touch him. He compared sleeping to being cryogenically frozen. Why would you want to be cryogenically frozen if all the time I have with you is four more days, four more days that you might have work, four more days and then I have work. It makes me feel like he doesn’t appreciate the time we have together, a hypothesis he will completely reject. He loves me. But, he sleeps when we can be doing something else.

I just want to be cuddled with, possibly loved more openly than just saying “I love you.” every once in a while when I accuse him of not. Maybe I’m just a needy bitch who demands too much from him. I probably am. I want my relationship to be the kind that’s practically lifted the pages of some cheesy romance novel. I want him to be something he’s not. That’s it. That’s it. I don’t know what it is, but he was different before. He cared. I guess? Now, he really just farts, picks his nose, roll over and sleep some more. Is it sad? That my day with him can be characterized as such? Sleeping, fucking, farting. The farts, aside from the fact that they are smelly as shit, just bothers me. He does it all the time. Regardless of situation or context and just enters into this fit of giggles every time he does it. It’s not hilarious, because I have to smell it and he has no problem with the smell. It’s not enjoyable. It’s crass and annoying, quite frankly. When I’m looking for a bit of intimacy, I get immaturity. And when I comment on his farts, his lack of, I don’t know, intimacy for a lack of better words, he retracts, like a turtle or some sort of strange snail that curls up when provoked and either starts hurting himself or crawling away, sleeping on the floor or some form of self pity or rejection or hurt. IT’S ABOUT FUCKING FARTS. He gets upset about the simplest things. How am I NOT supposed to be slightly UPSET when he FARTS everywhere, all the time. And it smells like SHIT. Honest to god, it smells like SHIT. My room, my sheets, my bed. He just has to. He just has to. It’s not like it’s even a big problem. Somehow, my discontent with this relationship is manifesting itself in the form of flatulence. I fart, sure. We all fart. Or, there’d be something wrong with our digestive system. But, why, why, why….

I don’t feel loved. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I feel incredibly loved, incredibly close to him. But, other times (like now) I feel like there’s a wall and it’s stopping me from feeling what I want to feel and from getting what I want to get.

I want him to touch my face, stroke my cheeks and kiss me passionately, in the darkness of my bedroom. I want him to make love to me slowly, sensitively. I want to feel him, feel him alive and close and with me. Someday….Maybe?

Right now, he’s sleeping next to me, snoring gently, lying on my stuffed toys. I don’t know. The more I write, the more I love him, the more I remember why I love him. He’s so vulnerable and exposed. There’s a strange sadness in his face that makes me love him. I like it when he’s sad. I like the face he makes.

I haven’t written anything in a long time. There hasn’t been turmoil in my life? No. I’ve just been telling him everything. And stuff like this I can’t tell him. No. It’s about him. You don’t complain to the offender. He’s not really offending anything either. Mood swings? Or, sudden realizations? When he doesn’t reach for me when I turn away, my heart hurts. When he leaves me, my heart hurts. Yet, I’m not satisfied when he’s around. The trouble with me, the trouble with women. We want more when there isn’t more to be had.

I can’t sleep, but he’s always sleeping. I love the night. I love staying up and listening to cars pass by on the street. I love watching amber boxes of light trace arcs across my bedroom ceiling. I love the melancholic glow of my computer monitor, pale, blue and impersonal, fall on my fingers, my sleeves, my desk. I love how alien and alone the world feels at night, how the dark holds a mystery so deep and strong, thick like a sweet, intoxicating nectar. How I am drawn to all this. How he sleeps through all of this. All of the beauty that I hold so deep, so close.

I’m not a morning person. On the bright side, he’s crushing my stuffed teddy with his head. I have to rectify this. Hold on.  It’s been fixed. The bear has been rescued. I think…everything will be alright. Sometimes, I just get sad. Am I pregnant? Am I?!

Stuff….

I just can’t study. I just don’t want to touch my calc book. Ugh, I’m gonna fail that test.

Alright:

Mando

History

Calc

Bio

Those four things. WORK ON THEM. Later…

So…yeah, hopefully bio works out okay. I should buy a book or something.

I do all of this stupid shit and it just makes me feel worse on the inside. I’m such a hypocrite. I know I am and that’s the worse part. Please, just let me go.

He just broke my heart and it hurt. I don’t even get why it’s broken because he still ‘loves’ me. It just feels so weird now. I would have liked it so much better if he just said nothing.

Rephrase, it really fucking hurt. I end up weeping a lot…

I’ll do after 12, if he comes back after 12 that is.

I’m just…annoyed. Seriously. What the hell is with this shit…

I don’t want platonic love, or a little above platonic love. He doesn’t even love. He just wants me to be there for him, to hold his hand and be cute and cuddle and comfort him and listen to him and care about him. I mean, it’s not like I don’t want any of that either, but there’s a flipside of the coin, MY damn side of the coin. What, did I imagine all of this shit? I thought he really loved me. REALLY. Like…what the fuck kind of people do I end up with? Why do I always, always always pick the retarded, fucked, weird ones? How do you think those wives feel when they find out their husband is gay? What kind of shit is that? Even Rosa gets Joe back at the end, so what about me?

He won’t ever look at me romantically? Why the fuck didn’t he bother pointing out before we started dating? Before it got serious and he shoved his penis in me? Did it not occur to him, EVER, that…that…FUCK ALL OF YOU. FUCK FUCK FUYCK FUCK.

I hate this shit so much. Why…

The more I look at this crap, the more I hate it. He doesn’t want me to hate him, but how can I not?

Clearly, we are incompatible. This is what I told him. This is what I said. And he said, no, no, it’ll work out. WORK OUT HOW?! LIKE THIS! THIS IS GREAT! I FEEL LIKE SUCH SHIT ABOUT MYSELF I WANT TO TEAR MY GUTS OUT.

And where is…he has class and I have break. I want to go see him. And to hug him and kiss him and sleep with him and he doesn’t want any of that from me.

I quit. I really just want to quit.

Life just annoys me. I can’t do anything right. I can’t get into college. I can’t loose weight. You feel inferior? I make you feel inferior? I laugh at the comment.

She doesn’t remember a thing. Maybe it’s better that way. She doesn’t really care. Her movements are quick and lifeless. She kills people like Mozart composes music, like Louis Armstrong plays the trumpet. It’s a god given talent.

So, yeah, bored, have to leave for Flushing, soon. Need to find out if there is bio test. Goddamnit if we have one.

No one knows if we have a test or not, but I know that I’m retarded. Well, at least I can get to be an officer. I’m trying not be upset about this. It’s difficult. Okay, yeah, I have a lower IQ than Jeffrey. Lol, what does this mean? Actually, I’m just sorta pissed my IQ is low in general, I’m clumped together with stenographers and nurses and post graduate students, while he’s considered a genius and a possible Nobel prize winner. Maybe I’m just slow. Profound mental retardation.

I have no profound abilities. I can’t draw. I can’t write. I can’t even score high enough on a fucking IQ test. And you feel bad for yourself because you don’t have friends? God. The grass is always greener on the other side.

I am scared of a lot of things, like applying to colleges and getting my SAT scores back, like

You wake up morning, like every morning, only to ask yourself: why am I awake? Why did I even bother waking up? There’s nothing, save for school, which compels you to wake. Not the crowds trying to push into the subway, not your mother and her coffee grinder and morning news, not even yourself, because you know you want to go back to sleep. So, why do it?

It’s hard to write about things I believe in, mostly because I don’t really believe in anything. I’ve already written two of these and a third one is just difficult.

I am waiting on the corner of Lafayette and 8th Street. I gaze east because I know he’s coming from St. Mark’s. I am carrying a bag of Sun Chips from the Walgreens and a bottle of ice tea.

He waves at me from across the street, awkwardly, and I see the oil stains on the brown paper bag he has in the other hand.

“Why did you buy more food?” He asks, exasperated.

“I felt like Sun Chips.” I shrug and give him a helpless look. It’s hard to say no to Sun Chips.

He shakes his head, awkwardly. His mother always wants to cut his hair, which, I think, is just ridiculous because her haircuts make him look like a pineapple.

We walk down the street together, towards my house, to give my mother her friend fries. My mother, on the other hand, always wants him to run errands for her. Jeffrey, go buy some McDonalds. Jeffrey, go buy some Duraflame logs. Jeffrey, go buy some fries from that place on St. Mark’s.

And, he never objects. Okay, he says and waddles out of the house to get some logs, or fries, or McDonalds. Sometimes I think that saying no to any of my mother’s silly requests would be just too awkward for him.

My boyfriend is an awkward person, but it is all a cute sort of awkward. He likes awkward things, he talks about awkward things, and he does awkward things. Some people find him a little bit creepy, which is entirely understandable because sometimes he is also a little awkwardly creepy. But, then again, if he weren’t, I wouldn’t be in love with him.

I push away the large, uncooperative Venetian blinds and twist open the little knobs that fasten my windows closed. I stick my head out far enough to see the street below. He is waving, ear buds in hand and an awkward smile on his face.

I’m supposed to feel happy for him, I know, but sometimes I just can’t. It’s like your teammates breaking in speech. How are you supposed to really congratulate them when you’ve failed so miserably?

Some days you just feel like shit. I gain weight instead of loosing weight. Everyone is skinny. I don’t get how any one thing can make you feel so much like shit.

He hasn’t been gone for more than an hour and I already miss him. The thought of sleeping in my bed alone frightens me. I am no longer accustomed to this silence. Without his voice over the headset or his presence here next to me, abysmal loneliness overwhelms me. I wonder if he has boarded the train yet, or not. It is nearing three.

I cannot resist the pull of sleep. To enter the world dreams alone, numbed I am from the thought of waking up without him. Will he call me soon?

Watchmen is a powerful story. Can’t stop thinking about it. Talk like Rorschach. Few words. Blunt. Characters memorable. Story convoluted. Worth re-reading.

Sometimes, from the things he says, I’m not sure what I feel for him, pity or sadness. The more I know about him, the more I love him, good or bad, or just plain terrible. All of this little anxiety, all the little things he does to try to remedy his situation, the fact that his life actually has vivid undercurrents, ideals that govern his life. No, not even ideals, just ideas, driving forces behind his actions, intent, something, like a magnet that guides each little iron pellet into curves on paper, that motivate all of his actions, his justifications for everything…is it more like awe? Bewilderment? Astonishment that someone can actually live with purpose, but a purpose so simple and elementary? Something like that…

If you think about it, no one wins. We’re all losing to something, someone. It’s inevitable, it’s just how you end up dealing with the loss and how you earn your next victory.

Omg omg omg omg omg I’m gonna spazz and kill someone. Oh my dear god. That was the most beautiful, most epic chapter I’ve read so far. He’s a god. That’s it, pure and simple. You don’t fuck with gods. I’m gonna ohhhh myyy GOD…

They need to have sex after this. After he calms the fuck down and like, kills envy. They need to kill Envy. Oh god. Oh god….

I actually just can’t quit. I can’t, I can’t, not when it’s so GOOD like this. If I were a crack addict, there would be no hope for me, at all. AT ALL. I’d just…Roy is sex. Roy is agod. ROY IS GOD. I SUPPORT ROY FOR 2010!!!

God. -ly. So….fucking…epic….

Yeah, dude, like…..royai is just around the corner. It’s so fucking close I can smell that shit with my hands. That sentence made no sense. But oh jesus Christ. I’m going to spazz, die, have a heart attack. Royai Royaaiiiiiiiiii I love everything!! Oooh, god.

Well, I’m really hoping Envy dies. It’s about FUCKING time. I mean, how AWESOME is Roy? Like, seriously. He pwned two homunculus. Like THAT. Snap snap die bitch. How good is this shiiittt?!?!?

I’d devote the rest of my life to this man if it were possible. I’d dress Jeffrey up like Roy and just fuck him.

If he ever finds out how obsessed I am with Roy, it’s going to hurt him like crazy. But good god, Roy’s like sex. Seriously.

Granted, I’m dead scared of that look in his eyes. I hope he calms down. I’m so scared and so excited. Another month. Holy crap.

Royai is so good, I’m going to cry. They need to come out with this shit faster. When this series is done, I’m going to buy every single volume and carry it home, in like five different languages too. Oh god.

Random Recovery

And that one thought, brought on by a word or two, a sentiment or two, drives me crazy. Crazy. Completely fucking crazy. Every little inch of my mind is filled with just him.

Every once in a while, I miss him like crazy; I’d hear a song on the radio and listen to the lyrics and hear him in every word. And, every once in a while, even though I don’t need it anymore, I long for him arms, for his face, for him, for him, him, him, to be right here.

Every once in a while…

And that one thought, brought on by a word or two, a sentiment or two, drives me crazy. Crazy. Completely fucking crazy. Every little inch of my mind is filled with just him.

Some days I wish things were different, not that I don’t appreciate what I have now. Some days, I just regret not doing a few things that I should’ve gathered the courage to do. Words come to me so easily. Across a sea of letters, I stand on my lonesome island and wait for your ship. Never, not once, will I call out for your attention to come and rescue me.

I’ve gone crazy from the moment I met you.

And I need you so much.

Truer words have never been said.

I’m crazy. I miss him.

I shouldn’t.

Goddamn, I should’ve, I should’ve. I didn’t. I’m going to regret that one little thing for the rest of my goddamn life.

Christ, Meyer. Lol

If only you knew this shit, you’d get a good laugh out of it.

I hate things for a reason, you know. A fucking reason. I hate people, I hate school, fucking working…my teeth, my life….there’s just so much shit and I don’t want to deal with any of it. Why can’t it just be alright sometimes…why can’t you just run away with me? Do you see why I hate this so much…what is the point of staying if people hate you….

I’m tired. Really, really tired.

Yeah, pretty much, I hate everything. I hate my mother. I hate my boyfriend. I hate pieces of myself. I hate my fat, it’s terrible. I bet you it hates me too. I hate my teeth. I know they hate me because half of them aren’t even there anymore. I hate just living, breathing, fucking cellular respiration and all that crap. It’s all just crap. Names, dates, people, crap, crap, crap. I can’t spend two seconds of my life re-evaluating my own crappy existence without some blaring through my non-existent French doors that barely close, ever (I live in a fucking closet), “Are you gonna go?” I’ll go on my own time, when I’d done with being sad and weeping and hating, I’ll go when I feel inclined to go, I’ll go when I’m already considerably late, but no, I will not go because you’ve asked me to go. I will not do what is good for me because only you know what’s good for me. And, if you tell me I’m old enough to know what’s good for me, I will tell you no. No one knows what is good for them. You are all in denial. And, I hate every single fucking one of you and if I had the chance, I’d a) kill myself so I will no longer have to spend my life looking at you, or b) kill every single one of you and feel quite satisfied with my accomplishments and document the extinct of the human race in a shitty history textbook, c) shit in everyone’s face.

I like that last one.

She’s always, like, how much she isn’t like grandma. She’s the same, and she’s worse. She nags, at least grandma gets the idea and leaves.

Klondike Summer

He sells ice cream, she knows that much, at the street corner by the park. The sun is strong, so he wears a red baseball cap. He is a Mets fan, how will they ever get along? Children, big and small, crowd around him, dollar bills clutched in their hands like their own personal fortunes. He passes a rainbow colored cone to one of the kids.

During the school year, he sits in the back corner of her history class. He doesn’t talk much, but he knows all the answers when Mr. Rubbel calls on him. Who was the first king of England? How long was the Hundred Years War? Explain Wilson’s fourteen points. He knows everything.

So, what does she do? She sits, in her blue summer dress-the one with daisies on it-and

I’m never naming my weird ass stories ever again. I’m really, really, really fucking hungry-but not! Not, at the same time. I’m consumed by and lacking hunger, at the same time.

My heart is about to explode. The little sounds you make over the microphone. I know you but I do. I don’t know what I’m doing with you, but I know. Security, love, contention, peace, I don’t want drama. I want apple pie with a dollop of whipped on top and your hand on my shoulder.

I want to feel your lips, warm and wet, greeting mine. Your big, calloused, scarred hands, your fingers, curling around mine, I want to feel just for a moment used and loved. I want to feel your awkwardly cut hair, the scrape and sound of black, straw like strands, against my forehead in the morning. I want…warmth.

I’m tired. Old. Shrively? Is that a word? Shrivelly?

More member activities!

STOP WITH THE WORM, STOP WITH THE WORM. STOOOOP ITT WITH THE VELVET WORM.

Life hates me, god hates me, god laughs at me, my sports teams never win. No, really, life hates me. I’m too tired to even curse and yell and SCREMA AND FUCK IT WAS FOUR FUCKING POINTS YYOU FUCKIGTN SONS OF BITCHES! POFIUOIR!! FOUR!!!! FUCKING POINTS!!!!!! You let me win Monopoly, but you can’t like Kurt Warner win the damn Super Bowl? YOU FUCKING PIECE OF NEGRO SHIT YOU!

I’m racist. And, I’m angry. Larry Fitzgerald you have my sympathies and my love. I’ll add the Cardinals to my small, growing, list of sports teams that never win. I’ll start watching hockey. I will. And they won’t win either.

Ketchup Mustard
Salt Pepper
Sour Cream Onion
Fish Chips
Peanut Butter Jelly
Mac Cheese
Cereal Milk
Cookies Cream
Mint Chocolate Chip
Tortilla Chips Dip
Nachos Cheese
Peas Carrots
Cheeseburgers Fries
Pancakes Syrup
Meat Potato
Sushi Wasabi
Noodles Soup
Gin Tonic
Spaghetti Meatballs
Martini Olives
Sandwich Pickles
Chickpeas Lentil
Cumin Coriander
Ice Cream Soda
Hotdog Bun
Buffalo Wings Blue Cheese
Vinegar Olive Oil
Lemon Chicken
Beef Broccoli
Bacon Egg
Mashed Potatoes Gravy
Popcorn Butter
Crepes Nutella
Turkey Cranberry
Bread Butter
Rice Beans
Apples Oranges
Pasta Sauce
Lettuce Tomato
Aeronautics

I’m over the Cardinals. There’s always next year. I really hope I don’t fail English. I hope it’ll be okay. I’m no longer going to think about it. Alright. Shut up. STOP. STOP. OKAY. SHHHH.

O-o;

I wonder what it says about music when Pandora plops Nickelback next to Avril Lavigne.

Swallowing hurts.

I’m sick at heart, as always. Hormones suck.
You know, when I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut. Generically childish, but, hell, it seemed wonderful at the time. It gave me a strange sort of thrill, a shiver down my spine, to think about reaching out and feeling the cool, black marble of space against my palm. A strange sort of thrill to imagine nebulae, dressed in wispy, diaphanous robes of stars, a strange sort of thrill to realize that space is empty, that space is big, that space is a never-ending void where the light of my tiny planet Earth goes to die, where the light of my tiny planet Earth is reborn anew, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, in the colors of another world. I’d cut the cable anchoring me and drift and drift and drift, past the valleys and mountains of the cosmos, past the milky lakes of galaxy, past the dying dwarfs and the supernovas. Space would be my grave and silence, my requiem.

It’s nice to be a kid because you’re allowed these kinds of dreams. You’re allowed to sit with your mouth half open, staring at something. You’re allowed a canvas and some paint, your creativity and your imagination, you’re allowed all of these things like you’re allowed toy trucks and Barbie’s. But, once you get to that age, that age when people start thinking you’re retarded because you sit with your mouth open (and draw with crayons), the dreams stop. And, also because there are no stars in Manhattan, there are only helicopters. Dreams are little kid stuff, when you grow up, you have to deal with grown up stuff, like doing the dishes, taking out the garbage, learning how to drive, learning how to cook, learning how to do your own taxes (someone forgot learning how to learn, a small task most people seem desperately incapable of understanding), but most importantly, learning how to run the rat race. There are no dreams in Manhattan, only Lexington Avenue stretching south to the tip of the island. Concrete would be my grave and the closing bell, well, it’d be the closing bell.

On yet another childish note, dark chocolate is only dark, according to the Europeans, if the chocolate contains 35% cacao solids. According to the Americans, who have no real standard for such things, dark chocolate needs only to contain 15% chocolate liquor to maintain sufficient darkness. The real question: Is my American Dream…dark? When you stop running the race, what do you taste? White chocolate-a misnomer if I ever saw one because the thing contains no cacao whatsoever? Or, just pure cacao powder, bitter and raw-the kind of stuff that smacks you a couple times to make sure you’re tuned in to the proper episode of Life? Or, am I just talking about something completely pointless?

I mean, when you’re reading something like Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, its like life just handed you lemons and insisted, if not pleaded, for you to make lemonade. All right, I make the lemonade. The little voice inside my head can’t help but quip every two or three seconds, “Look! Look! He wrote Moby Dick! He’s gotta have a point! Something real deep and philosophical! Look! Look!” So, I look. The thing about classics (and, by default, the people who write those things) is they’re expected to have a point. They’re supposed to teach you something nice and important and warm, to fuel the intense flames of your imagination, to keep you going at night when you’re down and out (though, really, ice cream does the same thing). Why else would you have them? Entertainment? A thousand page tome on the finicky details of Victorian courtship? Say hello to my trash can. And, when you read a classic, you’re expected to get something out of it. You’re expected to take away with you this wonderful understanding of something new. You’re expected to enlightened! But, what if I’m confused? Or, bored? Or, just plain don’t care. Am I any dumber than someone who enjoyed Pride and Prejudice? Am I any less worthy than someone who loved The Great Gatsby? Am I just a kid, sitting my mouth open, if I couldn’t even get through The Great Gatsby because life demanded my attention elsewhere? Well, Life, thank you for the lemons. I’m going to enjoy my lemonade, without the added sugar.

Reading a classic like Bartleby the Scrivener, for example, is just like living the American dream. Examine, for a moment, the conditions under which I found my copy of Bartleby the Scrivener. It was Halloween, of the year Two Thousand and Eight and people down the hall were singing the Village People. I’m late as usual, hardly unexpected. In an attempt to get into the Halloween spirit, I’ve somehow bothered to waste my time and squeeze myself into a costume. Upon arriving on the sixth floor of the pasty colored building that is my high school (high school really ought to be a synonym for hell) and waddled down the hall to the last room before the Hudson Staircase, I was greeted by Mr. Murray (whose name I’m quite sure I’m spelling wrong)! What a vision he was indeed, a number 2 pencil in hand and the attendance sheet in the other, in the place of my usual English teacher. Dressed, as usual, in non-descript sweater and pants, Mr. Murray beckoned me towards a seat, with what curiosity I took my seat. Immediately I was told to grab a hideously red book off a cart. What I’ve never truly understood about books in the public school system is that they all come in this awful, smelly, deteriorating form. The actual cover design of the book is shrunken about an inch on all sides and printed in the middle, with bright and often disagreeably colored border. And, on the back, in large, black Serif print exists a blurb of, usually, irrelevant information. The pages are brown and smelly and awful to the touch. In my copy of the book, all some thirty odd pages of Bartleby the Scrivener were happily detached from the actual binding, making for a handy portal addition of larger, already portable object. I thought it was quite charming. Then, I proceeded not to read it until class the next week.

If a classic is classic and should be taken seriously, why in the name of god did it arrive in my hands in such conditions? If the American dream is a dream of striking it rich, a dream of rising from the quagmire and cesspool of anonymous oblivion, a dream shared by men like Gatsy, shared by men like Bartleby, why is it nothing more than just a nightmare? Examine, for a moment, the conditions under which I found that my life had no meaning, in possibly all too metaphysical sense. I was sitting at a computer, some years ago, though not that many years ago because I haven’t lived many years to begin with. It suddenly occurred to me, as I ogled at why it was that computers worked, that I’ll never be able to find an answer. And, yes, I know, there are people out there who know how computers work. But, rather, the question is, why computers work? Why do I work? Why does my heart beat? Why do I write essays? Why do I even fit in the proper scope of the world? Why can’t I say, “I prefer not to,” and just not do something? The simple answer, and the short answer, is that I’ll end up like Bartleby, I’ll end up dead.

The amount of trouble I’m having with an English essay really just makes me wonder where the hell authors get their inspiration. Do they just plop down next to their typewriters and word processors and let their fingers run wild? And Melville said, “Let there be Moby Dick!” And, born was another classic, one to toss into the flames of high school English curriculums, one to fuel centuries of imaginations. Christ, Moby Dick was about a whale and Bartleby the Scrivener was about a scrivener.

The world isn’t a patient place. It rushes people, rushes people into things they don’t like and never wanted to do. It makes people write essays for class at four in the morning. No one likes that.

This essay isn’t fun. The American dream isn’t fun. It’s a relic of the past.

The back of my head is itchy, it’s persistent and annoying and I’ve been scratching at it for a while.

Bartleby, the Scrivener, quit life. Slowly but surely, he steps out of the world of the living and into the world of the dead. However, the world is an impatient and rather pragmatic creature, eventually leaving Bartleby behind in his resignation. Only on an act of charity, and possible nuisance, does his employer, an unnamed lawyer, come to retrieve him, to attempt to coax him out of his grave. In his simple minded ignorance, the lawyer fails to provide Bartleby with the simplest of all charities, understanding and sympathy. Instead, he showers upon Bartleby more values of the material world Bartleby so aptly abandons, illustrating the fatal flaw of the American dream. Thus, Bartleby succumbs to life and is granted the ultimate sanctuary of death.

In one of the last exchanges between Bartleby and the lawyer, Bartleby declares that the job of a sales clerk is too confining. To which the lawyer replies, “‘Too much confinement,” I cried, “why you keep yourself confined all the time!'” To these two different men, the word ‘confinement’ held different meanings. To Bartleby, perhaps the word takes on a much deeper, more metaphysical sense. He speaks not of the physical confinement that the lawyer remarks of, but to the inner confinement of a sales clerk, the repetition and the boredom of doing the same thing over and over again. What for Bartleby is an essential freedom is but a trivial absurdity to the lawyer.

The exchange continues: Bartleby remains adamant to stay as he currently is, preferably stationary. This enrages the lawyer, “‘Stationary you shall be then,” I cried, now losing all patience, and for the first time in all my exasperating connection with him fairly flying into a passion. “If you do not go away from these premises before night, I shall feel bound-indeed I am bound-to-to-to quit the premises myself!'” The world, obviously, being such that it is, has no place for a useless man. The lawyer attempts to either grant Bartleby a form of obsolete charity to console himself, or attempts to bypass this obstacle in the course of his life, like a stream bending around a huge bolder. What he does not understand, a fact that Bartleby never articulates, is the intense monotony of what he is rushing forward to greet. Bartleby’s strangeness is but a tired and weary defiance, a quiet anger, at the world that had neither shown him mercy, nor patience, but has only instead robbed him of his will to live. No form of charity will mend this hopelessness.

The last paragraph of the short story adds one essential piece to the Bartleby mystery: Bartleby’s previous station of work as a Dead Letters clerk. Dead letters, aside from having a potent connotation, as Melville writes, are “on errands of life, these letters speed to death.” Humanity, in an attempt to escape death, only rushes towards it, only rushes head first in the furnace of an unending hell. Bartleby realizes the futility of this American nightmare and simply kicks his own bucket. He did not quit his job at the Dead Letters Office, rather, he was removed. Adding to his place more despair and hopelessness that eventually drove him over the edge. The American dream is not a dream, it is a nightmare, a nightmare sugar coated for the unsuspecting that flock century after century to that golden door. What waits beyond those sacred doors save for a Bartleby ending? Perhaps not everyone is prone to “pallid hopelessness”, but everyone is prone to the relentless grind of life. The American dream is a poison for the world, opium for the capitalist masses. There is no cure, for “he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities.”

Though I am not prone to any sort of hopelessness, I often wonder whether or not it’d be worth it to join Bartleby in his preferential resignation. Shall I not prefer to write this essay? Shall I prefer not to live? Shall I quit life? How tempting an idea it is to drop everything, to stop typing, to cease to care about everything, and just sit silently upon a banister. Sadly, I’m kept running this rat race by a pesky instinct called survive. Against my own volition, I’m kept swimming against the tide by nothing but a preference to live. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

I want to cry sometimes, but I can’t. And, there’s a feeling, a little latch of feeling that comes up, creeps up and fills your entire body. It hurts and it’s strange. It’s like loneliness mixed in with sadness, with anxiety, like a cocktail of feelings without the alcohol, just raw bitterness. It’s sharp and tangy and wet and it tastes a little like a piece of me dying on the inside. No one knows, no one cares. Everyone’s too caught up with there crap. Garfinkel stuffing his face with a plate of food coming up from the fifth floor. Katerina and her weird vaginal cramping during SING practice. Jeffrey, how much I love Jeffrey, and his non-descript grunts over the phone…

If feels like the world’s abandoned me, or, in another sense, I’ve abandoned it.

I want to make up. But I don’t.

I’m scared. But I’m not.

What am I then?

Hurt? No, not even. Apathetically depressed about everything.

Is being content really that bad, so I need drama? Do I need happiness, do I need anything but you? I want to cry, to grab you, turn you around, bury my face in your chest and hide. But, you don’t love me anymore. Not the same, anymore, you’re distracted, distant, elsewhere. You need to sleep, you need to work. You need your life and you don’t have time for me anymore. Go, please. Go. Don’t worry about me. I’m sure you don’t worry about me. Forget about me. Forget about it. I want to end it, but I can’t because I’m still clinging to some sort of hope that it won’t end. Please. Don’t go.

He hasn’t called back. He hasn’t messaged me. It’s quiet and the quiet is eating away at me.

There’s a hole in my sock. I’m in my winter jacket, the periwinkle one that made Ehtesh look like a woman from the back. The periwinkle one with the dirty sleeves that’ll never wash out, browned and oil stained. The hole is strangling my big toe, I can feel where the edge of the fabric digs into flesh each time I move. There’s a hole in my pink sock, stained black and blue by my trousers, my shoes, the dirt on my floor, in the gym, perfumed by the pungent smell of my feet.

I can’t help it. Shut up.

I enjoy being tormented like this, all the time, all the time. I miss the pain, gathered up like a little ball, a rubber band ball of my problems, in the center of my chest. Like Iron Man’s heart reactor. If someone said that three years from now, you’d be long gone, I’d stand up and punch them out.

Come back. I love you. You bought me all these things, all the little Pooh’s, everything, come back. STOP UNDERLINING SHIT IN RED. FUCK OFF WORD. Damn everything. And the fucking capitalization.

I can’t get my toe out of that hole if I don’t use my hand. Damn. He’s not responding. I’m worried? Or, just lonely?

Welcome to the Renaissance.

Obessess

Portfolio

My brain, simply put, aches. It feels like I’ve been away from everything for such a long time. I made a paper flower today. The whole paper ball-kusudama thing didn’t go as planned. I bought a binder today.

So tired, my brain feels like it’s going to explode. Touching it hurts. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Welcome to the Renaissance.

The sniper makes his home in the last remaining tower of a crumbling church. The church sits, as the architects had intended, above the town, the landscape dominated by its remaining spire. There is a hole in its arched and painted ceiling, letting in a small drizzle. Shallow pools of rainwater gather between the pews as the rain drums against the masonry.

The sniper sits in a damp corner of the tower, back against damp stone, eyes lingering on the damp sky. In one limp hand, he holds a half eaten piece of bread. His canteen lay open and almost empty by his side. His rifle, a scoped Karabiner, rests in the crook of his arm as he is in no rush to shoot. Consuming the rest of his bread, the sniper falls into a reverie.

The smell of freshly baked bread, warm and sensuous, fills his nostrils. Involuntarily, the sniper closes his eyes and rests his head against the wall. He sees his young wife by the oven. Her apron catches in a knot at her waist, her long lashes lower as she slices the loaf.

Artillery. Instantly, the sniper jolts up, knocking over his canteen as he raises the scope to his eyes, the rifle pointing out of the tower window. The reticle zooms from street to street, house to house. Another shell demolishes a bakery. The scope moves east. He spots a Sherman, emerging like a lumbering beast, from beyond a hill. Its treads raises the dust and sand of the road, the turret pointing upwards uselessly as it flattens out at the apex of the hill. Friendly artillery returns the greeting.

Enemy infantry snakes it way into the town, under the cover of tanks. A solitary Panzer fire at the advancing column, its shell sets the lead Sherman ablaze. A beacon, almost, of fire in the gray drizzle on the outskirts of town, a flaming symbol of hope no one has for the dying Reich. It simmers. The remaining ammunition in the tank explodes at interval.

He is a good sniper, not an excellent sniper, simply one that knows his M.O. If he lives to see the end of this war, they will not talk about him. They will not remember his name and his kill count. They will not remember his face. The sniper knows this; he is not in it for the glory. There is no glory. Glory dies in the face of reality, repelled by the gray, the smoke, the prickly August drizzle.

The tip of the black needle finds the helmet of an enemy; the sniper leads the target a little. He pulls in the trigger, the stock drives into his shoulder as he pulls back the bolt. The casing spins and clatters to the floor of the tower. He does not need to see the corpse of the man to know that he is dead. He is not arrogant, but he never misses. Ribbons of red mix with rainwater in the cobblestone streets below.

Shells whiz by with stark accuracy. The screams of men, of artillery, of dying vehicles, of rifles, of battle fill his ears. He listens carefully. It is a sound he forces himself to remember. It is a sound that keeps him awake at night, but he is not frightened of it. He will learn to embrace it. The bolt ejects another case.

When the sounds of battle dim and the gray sky gives way to darkness, when the smoldering wreckage of the Sherman ceases to burn, when death perfumes the town and rainwater in gutters are tinted pink, when the world is still—a moment of silence, when the sniper makes his home in the last remaining tower of a church, he does so with regret, he does so with remorse, he does so, regardless. How he loves wars.

A good day…so to speak…

I have nothing else left to do, and honestly, Old Spice can get annoying after a while.

So, realistically, I’m not really thinking about him anymore. Truthfully, I miss my days of being an obsessive lover, on the verge of tears at the mere thought of this…idea, this person, whatever you, which is really me, want to call it. Nowadays, I’m just in denial about it. Or, maybe I’ve become numb to my fits of emotional insurrection, but I still can’t bring myself to IM him when he’s online, despite my need to ask him, “So, how’s that phone line of yours holding up?” Maybe it’s the fear that he won’t answer that keeps my keyboard happy fingers at bay, but then again, it works against me that he’s been idle for the last eleven hours and counting.

Then, on the other hand, you have the other kid. Of course, even in retrospect, none of this will make sense to anyone, not even me. My feelings for him are a mess, a stew of lovely, incoherent feelings and whatevers, and god, the spell of Old Spice is really, really strong. You know, the other other one, meaning the one above, had a particular smell too. No shit Sherlock, of course I know, I was there the entire time, you flipping moron. Shut up, this really isn’t a time to be schiz. No? Really, now, you’re telling me after some ten odd years you hate me? No, fucking Sherlock Holmes, I’m telling you to fuck off.

Right, anyways, there’s no real purpose, his screen name on AIM just makes me giddy. I really shouldn’t be, because I swear I’ve gotten over it, though I feel I will never actually get over it, but, really, we ought to move along. He’s still idle and he’s still there.

I just hate…being almost there.

I really hate just being almost there.

So much, so much, so much…that it hurts as bad, if not worse, than a headache, than a stomach ache, than anything else…

Well, there, I did it, my wireless just hates me, so much…

So much…

I’ll wait, I’ll wait. I’ll sit it out. This is actually legitimately annoying. I’d like my internet back and functioning.

So, wait, what was that page loading then? Some godforsaken tease my wireless network has become? What in the name of god is this?!

Judgement

I am, now, very satisfied.

Among other things…

Light reading turned out to be very boring, so I’m gonna just go for it when the torrent’s done and hopefully my one point something gigs of a cracked game is going to work. If not, I cry. For now, I suffer the throes of a dying love, unfinished homework and a stomach ache.

The search function is inherently useless.

I’m satisfied, today, with almost everything that’s happened. Jeffrey, Ricky, moomoo, food, movies, TCGs, games, everything today feels exceptional. A very good day, in the fine words of my friend, a very good day. And by god, I hope it stays that way. Maybe it’s because I’m recovering from a week of feeling deeply unwell and sick on the inside. Maybe it’s because I cut prep and stayed home the entire day, rolling around and doing nothing. Maybe it’s because I shared a moment with Ricky Meyer and nothing awkward happened. Maybe it’s because I’m accepting the fact that I’m going to miss him and he’s going to stay a friend. Maybe it’s because YOU ARE AN INANIMATE FUCKING OBJECT! Maybe it’s because that all my college bound senior buddies aren’t going to forget about me. Maybe it’s because I scored a 21-something on that practice SAT and there’s hope for me yet. Maybe it’s because, today, for the briefest of all moments, the world, the whole world, life itself, seems to be going my way, walking right down my block, up my alley, heading my way.

And now, I’m going to sleep to some good ol’ Yoko Kanno. Or, maybe Nine Inch Nails, though I don’t know how that’s going to help me sleep at all.

Calliope?

Okay, honesty…

I feel like shit. I feel like shit. I feel like shit. I feel like shit.

I feel like shit.

I feel like shit.

STOP FUCKING CALLING

Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop…

Life is just like buying a pina colada from the San whatever fair and wasting my money. Life is just like that, just like that and with a straw too short and with a straw too short. NO ON FUCKING ASKS ME OUT

Is that all that bothers you? IS THAT ALL THAT BOTHERS YOU? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Stop calling. Go away. I don’t want you. I don’t need you. I don’t want to love you. So go away. Go away, go away

It looks like I have a giant tattoo on my left arm. ]

I’m tired, I can’t feel my arms

I’m sore? Bruised all over?

I don’t need you, I don’t need this, stop, stop

I’m caught halfway between being tired

And being overactive

I need….to….I need….

I hate this and everything about this

Yes, sure, I feel like a complete idiot. I am an idiot. Who the hell did I think I was…who the hell did I think I was…oh, forget it, forget it.

I’m….lousy…weepy…fat…ugly….worthless…tired….of all this bullshit….I’d like a bullet to the head…..I’d like to die….

Please, please, please, just stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop

I wish I never met you

I wish I never met you

I wish I was a sophomore again

I wish I had physics with Ricky

I wish I could still go home with Miles

I wish I didn’t really have to care

I wish I could spend late nights with Abu and Ehtesh in a Starbucks

I wish I could be weird and chat with Harrison on AIM

I wish I could go to anime cons

I wish I could sleep over unannounced at Katerina’s

I wish I still had Ms. Brown

I wish I still had two classes with Sahil

I wish I could bitch about things

I wish I didn’t cry

I wish I wish I wished for something else besides someone to love me

I wish I wish I didn’t need it

I wish I wish for something else

Please, can I just be alone

Can I just stop

Can I get over myself and how small and how shitty and how annoying I feel deep deep deep down where commas don’t exist and where all of damn silly feelings are suppressed. Yes. Yes. Yes. I thought I was some sort of savior but I’m not, so whatever, I’m relieved of my…position, my need, I’m no longer needed for a role that I thought was essential, I’m just another whatever the hell

FUCK IT

And maybe, maybe I am using it as an excuse to get rid of him, to just end….so, I’m all good, but I’m not….I can feel the drop of liquid running down my lip

I feel like….shit.

My arms, my back, my entire person, I feel like crying and just crying because I’m not worth a damn thing, I’m not worth a damn thing at all

And I’m the one who drew the short stick and I’m the one that no one likes

So okay, okay, okay, I get it, I get it. I FUCKING GET IT. Spare the pain and leave me alone.

I’m flawed, I’m weak, I’m pathetic.

I wish I could just die.

I have no purpose, no point in living, no one to ask me out, because I’m not cute, I’m not anything, I’m just fat and annoying and fat and annoying and that’s all I am…please stop giving some sort of mock hope that someone out there loves me, please stop giving me hope that someone cares, I liked it better when no one did.

Fuck.