Always in the end you will have intentionally well angled photos or polaroids or photographs you’ve edited to look like polaroids. Always in the end you will erase these and wonder if the next round of photographs, of memories, of sheets, will feel as good and you will hope it will not feel as good but better and you will hope that you never again have to ceremoniously erase, delete, and throw out the snapshots that you carefully and lovingly created. The belief that you will have photographs of the two of you forever- lips buried in necks, mouths open mid sentence with light pouring out from inside of you, sleepy morning eyes with dry lips and soft curves-the belief that you will never throw these away, this time, is what makes people fall in love all over again despite history and despite plain common sense.

I could tell I really could fall in love with him because the last time I felt this way about someone, (when I was too tangled up in body and in heart with another to really even notice) I could not stop giggling and eating off their plate.  Jesus, stop speaking so much and so quickly.. I thought to myself several times over the course of four hours. I just want to write about how I have not yet touched him, not even a hug, and yet the thought of perhaps feeling his skin underneath my fingertips has made my stomach flutter today a few times over. 

Normally, I would not have gone, I would not have looked forward to it. When you work long hours speaking to people and having inane conversation after inane conversation the thought of repeating it, socially and by choice, is unappealing. But with him, I didn’t even really consider-I just went. When we were walking towards the corner, after he showed me his office covered in art work and sketches of happy thoughts and multicolored floor pillows,  I told him I did not know anything about art. And for some reason i told him about when I went to New York City and saw Marina Abramovic and that her “Nude With Skeleton” piece made me cry. I told him I cried over a piece of art. I really did… I did not tell him that it made me cry because Abramovic did this for 700 hours, lay nude with a skeleton on top of her that is, to emulate a tibetan ritual of getting closer to death by sleeping next to or near decaying or decayed human bodies.

I did not tell him that it made me cry because it made me think of my mother, no hair, delicate like a tiny rose in familiar sheets and a familiar room but in a foreign world, and how I use to lay alongside her and run my fingertips along her skin when she slept or rested or just closed her eyes from the pain and from the trauma of it all. I didn’t tell him this of course, we had only just met, but I could have and I considered it briefly, and this means, I think, that I could love him in some way. In a way that includes intentionally made to look antique photographs or in a way that includes thai food and no make up and no pretenses… Or maybe in some of these ways, or maybe in none of these ways, or maybe, just maybe in all these ways.  

     “What if I just send him a message that says: I want you to come over and go down on me till I come all over your face. And then leave.”

    The soft light in the restaurant was highlighting her cheek bones and she took a bite of ceviche and threw her head back a bit and laughed, “bro, do it,” she said. 

   I instead stripped down to nothing and climbed into my familiar spot, sprawled out, new sheets, to only the smell of my own skin.  A tree branch with green full leaves, but light-feathery, that has recently grown to reach towards my bed was singing me a lullaby each time the wind pushed it towards the glass next to my head.

   Hours later, in a dream that my ex was kissing my thighs and squeezing the fleshiest parts, without touching at all in between, I awoke to my phone ringing incessantly.  

   His hands on my face felt invasive and the words in my ear-obnoxious, but he was almost instantly between me.  Its funny how you can forget or forgive a year or two, if only for a fleeting five minutes, when someone’s familiar and knowing lips are deep against you.

What can I say, really? 

papercrushed:

karenfelloutofbedagain:

Lots of things might happen. That’s the thing about writers. They’re unpredictable. They might bring you eggs in bed for breakfast, or they might all but ignore you for days. They might bring you eggs in bed at three in the morning. Or they might wake you up for sex at three in the morning. Or make love at four in the afternoon. They might not sleep at all. Or they might sleep right through the alarm and forget to get you up for work. Or call you home from work to kill a spider. Or refuse to speak to you after finding out you’ve never seen To Kill A Mockingbird. Or spend the last of the rent money on five kinds of soap. Or sell your textbooks for cash halfway through the semester. Or leave you love notes in your pockets. Or wash you pants with Post-It notes in the pockets so your laundry comes out covered in bits of wet paper. They might cry if the Post-It notes are unread all over your pants. It’s an unpredictable life.

But what happens if a writer falls in love with you?

This is a little more predictable. You will find your hemp necklace with the glass mushroom pendant around the neck of someone at a bus stop in a short story. Your favorite shoes will mysteriously disappear, and show up in a poem. The watch you always wear, the watch you own but never wear, the fact that you’ve never worn a watch: they suddenly belong to characters you’ve never known. And yet they’re you. They’re not you; they’re someone else entirely, but they toss their hair like you. They use the same colloquialisms as you. They scratch their nose when they lie like you. Sometimes they will be narrators; sometimes protagonists, sometimes villains. Sometimes they will be nobodies, an unimportant, static prop. This might amuse you at first. Or confuse you. You might be bewildered when books turn into mirrors. You might try to see yourself how your beloved writer sees you when you read a poem about someone who has your middle name or prose about someone who has never seen To Kill A Mockingbird. These poems and novels and short stories, they will scatter into the wind. You will wonder if you’re wandering through the pages of some story you’ve never even read. There’s no way to know. And no way to erase it. Even if you leave, a part of you will always be left behind. 

If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die. 

I love this.

When asked who my hero is I immediately think of Martin Luther King Jr… However, I also would like to publicly state that men on craigslist who post full frontal photographs of their faces under titles that read, “I WANT TO LICK YOUR WET PUSSY ALL NIGHT LONG,” kind of are too. For different reasons obviously, but, wow brave.

My night just ended with a date stopping the car so I could drive myself home….. Because he was so exhausted he was starting to nod off at the wheel. I just tried to spell “nod” “knod” and then “knodd.” Ladies and Gentleman, it is repeating stories like these that have started to quite literally make my dates fall asleep.

Its a fucking bitch out there, you guys. Dating people in a city where vices that lead to staying up the entire night or two days in a row, is incredibly commonplace, is really fucking with my potential getting laid prospects. 

The sunlight  streaming through the glass windows spilling over me was paradoxical to the coldness running through my veins.  The laughter next to me in the hallway was irritating and the pretty women with shiny hair and manicured fingernails eating their breakfasts was equally as irksome.  Two sleepless nights, three unanswered messages from the one who broke my heart.  The thought of engaging in mindless prattle with people I work with or customers made me want to crawl out of my own body.

Last night was utterly pointless.  Another bar, another drink, same guy, same chit chat.  Some making out, me being exhausted, too much work, too high expectations, too much chatter richocheting in my mind about the last one. Too many images of big brown eyes, and familiar hands, and big lips continously playing in my head like a projector on a blank screen.

“You have bruises all over your legs.” His voice startled me out of my daydream. What was I even doing? Looking for a bottle of wine, perhaps? Yes, I was stretching up towards a too high shelf.  Yeah, I fucking know, I muttered. And for what? I thought.  I was trying hard to ignore him; being mean to him is the equivalent of becoming angry with a puppy or small child-you immediately regret it and feel even more terrible than before when you were wallowing in self pity. 

The next thing he said was, “Do you have any 2012 resolutions?” And I locked him in hard eye contact and said, “I’m not going to have drunk sex because I can’t fucking come anyways and I’m not going to have small talk that doesn’t interest me.” I raised my eyebrows and waited for his reply. He smiled gently and it warmed me more than I wanted it to. He said, “I can’t imagine having sex with you drunk-why would anyone want to dull that.” He shook his head like he really couldn’t imagine it and for a brief moment I hugged him from behind. My chest against his back and I reached on my toes and let my lips graze his neck for a moment.  I said thank you very quietly.  Too quietly, and I wondered if he knew in that second I had tears in my eyes. I wondered when I was smelling his neck, the way you would smell your father’s or mother’s or sister’s or brother’s what it would be like to live if people could see the bruises on the inside of others as easily as they could see the bruises covering legs and knees from drinking too much and being too rough.  I wondered if everyone would be more sincere with each other. I wondered if everyone would be more careful with their words and glances. Mostly I just wondered if he and everyone else in the entire workplace knew I felt like I was coming unraveled.