2-23-12 They say that it is unhealthy to love only men buried deep in the ground. Under all that earth for so many, many years. I say, well of course it is. I say, it is unhealthy sometimes to love anything . Sometimes I can write things that make me proud. Sometimes the words come, from my rib bones, from my lowest vertebrae. My body forms them; they are a part of me. They are a part of me but I expel them, sometimes onto the paper, mostly onto my keyboard. I pull them out of my body, and in that I feel different things. I feel proud. I feel moved. I feel uncomfortable. I feel home. Home is when you displace your rib bones. To tell someone how deeply that current runs. The incessant, unyeilding current of compassion. The compassion of love. The love that has become home. It is all a cycle, all a circle. And you. You displace me. On a molecular level. Each molecule that comprises my rib bones. You fill the holes in my lowest vertebrae. (Are their holes in your vertebrae? I think there are holes in mine). There are holes in my vertebrae, my rib bones have been displaced. My tiny finger bones crunch underneath the weight of all this thinking about love. "No one, not even the rain, has such small hands." -e.e. Cummings. (This quote crunches my fingers, fills up the holes in my lowest vertebrae, displaces my rib bones.) There are other parts of my body that I could crunch, fill, displace. Why is it the bones that fascinate me so? Why is it the bones that feel so much more than the muscle, the skin, the sinew (How strange, silly, deadly is that word? Sin- new. All sins are new to those who commit them.) I want to crunch, fill, displace you. Not in the way that it sounds. I want to leave a mark on your bones. I want them to be my bones, as well. EXCELSIOR- my hand in your hand my bones in your bones my veins in your veins my spine in your spine

2-15-12 isn't it strange how so very long ago you loved a boy who loved you back and now you can look him dead in the eyes and there is nothing warm in your skin for him? (maybe someday you will be everything that he couldn't be)

2-3-12 i can count the number of times we kissed on one hand (one, hardly counting, through the glass between our faces) but on the other you said it best when you didn't ever even say it at all. i know you loved me (and love me still) and tried so hard to keep me. it isn't your fault that our bodies were designed with spaces in between our fingers.

1-18-12 i keep writing things down to remember what i need to because my brain is full of you and not just the letters y-o-u but that extended period of memory like when david sings it in his song it would look like this, if you could see it. _--/ (that is beautiful, you just don't know it yet)

1-9-12 i have fallen in love with the boy surrounded by christmas lights while his fingers (even when they only lightly touch the piano keys it is a sound you can hear lightyears away) make profound statements out to the universe. his voice trembles in the lower registers it rumbles somewhere behind my lowest rib bone there is a boy (i suppose he is a man now but i knew him as a boy) that seems to have taken all the pretty things that can hurt you so bad and shrunk them into his chest. they pitter-patter on the back of his spine until he frantically expels them with the valiant pen and paper. his voice catches as he takes a deep breath but i'll untangle it loose. let it go, my love. spill your guts out to the stars. let them take back what is meant for them.

when i thought i had lost all of my memories. turns out, things have a way of coming back to you. welcome back, sitd. thanks for bringing my words back.

you know it is bad when he steals one of the 'a's out of your name you spend the rest of the week searching for it and it becomes lost so long that you mythicise it like "thousands of years ago, when there were three 'a's in the family name when we crossed the ocean spent months in the bottom of the ship where great-great-great-great-great grandma lost her life..."

there is something here that resonates: the boy you love is not who you think he is he's not even who he believes himself to be. when you hold him, you are only holding your memories and even those do not exist. when he tells you he loves you, it cannot mean anything because the very fact of his being is the product of loneliness. and yet. you wrap yourself around him. you feel his lips on the back of your neck. you let him save you in all of the twisted ways that should not be. ghostboy, i love you. i feel you in the tiniest spaces of my ear, whispering. i know you. i'm coming.

i breathed those words i thought into your esophagus your lungs but i suppose i never understood your mouth is like concrete. all i ever wanted was for you to feel something. all you ever gave was was a generous amount of brokeness. i cannot go where you are anymore i am ashamed of what i feel for you. make it better or make it stop.

dear friend, this is the line in the sand or whatever that phrase is. the future is right there, crackling on the surface of my lower rib. soon you will leave me. soon you will go off and do things. just things. let's not euphamize here. sometimes you will do great things. sometimes you will do very awful things. (i know this to be true of you because i have known you for these years.) sometimes people will love you, froth at the mouth with praises for you. (and i know this to be true because there is something about you that makes everyone desire your attention and eyeshandscheekslips) sometimes people will not love you. but i will love you. i have always loved you, even when i know it to be wrong and cruel to. sometimes you will be lonely though mostly of your own accord. and you will never be happy simply because you don't believe you are capable of being so. but remember that there is a silly little girl (i know this to be true because it is true) that thinks you have the propensity to be kind and gentle and true and loved becuase you have been because you will be that is happiness.

sometimes i find myself saying words in a way that is very... you. i wonder what goes on in that brain of yours how you articulate the things that you ultimately convey. it is kind of unnerving but at the same time, very comforting i think i am becoming fluent in you.

your firm fingers grasp the bones inside of my shoulder i feel them there, when they are gone i know they will still haunt that spot. when you touch me, i know it is not because you want to feel me that looming spirit, the one who can look at you the one who thinks she loves you. you need to feel something but not me my skin, maybe it is warm, it exists. feelings do not exist. please do not think you are fooling me, love. i'll do this for you because it is what you think you need.

it's only when someone points it out to me that i can vaguely sense something that i don't remember. it's only when i'm on the brink of absolute madness and desperation that i see the clouds and am able to fall asleep. vincent told me i was crying. i didn't trust him till i felt the tears on my fingertips.

this is the whisper of your fingers through my hair on the concrete this is the hollow of your chest to my spine this is the silence of our whispers and sharp breaths this is the numbness of my smile this is my memory it shouldn't be like this. let me map out the creases in your lips let me feel the dull sting of your cheek on my neck

once upon a time there was a young girl and she didn't feel like sleeping on a mattress on a frame two and a half feet off the ground so she made a pallett on the floor with all of her blankets and quilts and she scootched the cd player and speakers triangularly around her head put on the "purple dots" cd (she could never figure out that title, it was one of the things she loved most) and she listened to it the whole way through because you made it for her and she loved you. a few years later, she would look back on the significance of this evening. maybe there was none, but for some reason, it seemed deeply embedded into who she was. many memories involving you seem to be that way.

i'll always do it better than you because i love it, i breathe it, it consumes me and i blush when i think about it. but you are just a copycat you feel none of that. and you are the reason i'll never be friends with anyone even remotely like me ever again.

you still remind me of those christmas wreaths even though my dad didn't put them up this year. i think it is kind of weird that your brother remembers the year i got my braces off or that you still think of that sunburn i had when i came to watch you swim. and i think it's strange that i haven't spoken a single word to you in months but i still have muscle memory of you: you are one of my favorite human beings.

the thing i love most about the english language is the curvature in the spine of the word tenderness.

i once wrote my name in the snow on your lawn. i don't think you ever noticed. i would go to kiss your face and fall through straight to the floor. you were my glass half empty yet i can still see the imprint of your body in the sheets. fuck you, ghostboy.

"i'm hearing what you're saying. no, i'm hearing the words you are using. but there is no meaning to them. or if there is..." she took a step back. he was just staring at her. like it was her fault. was it her fault? "what is it that you want me to understand?" "i'm not a human being," he said. "i have all the parts, everything i need, but nothing seems to fit. i mean, i eat, i breathe, i think, i live, but it's on a completely different level. i wake up in the morning and i don't even exist." she thought back to all the times she said she'd never do this. "i'm telling you this partly because i need to and partly because you need to hear it." she felt torn between scratching his face off and screaming euphamisms at him. "no one is like anyone else." she took a step toward him. "oh, yeah?" another step. he looked alien to her. she didn't know why she even felt enough for him to be having this conversation. another step. he backed away, up against the wall. she hated everything about him. especially how she knew she meant nothing at all to him. the last step. "then you won't feel me." she reached out with her right hand. her fingers were shaking. their tips make contact with the material of his shirt, and she thrust her arm into his chest. she felt all of the things he said didn't fit. his ribs, lungs, his heart. it was convulsing in her palm. she kept her hand right there, while the rest of her arm just melded into his body. then it started to hurt. she felt the meaning behind those words crawling from her hand, up behind her spine, snaking through her chest and constricting her throat. she looked up into his eyes. he was scared, too. she couldn't breathe out, only in. she stopped. she fell backward, but her arm was still inside his chest. her back was arched, in some sort of contorted grace, like a dancer's. he tried to pull her out of him. he couldn't. she was him, like the twin that died inside of him before they were born. he sighed. he walked over to the bed and layed down. he felt her weight on top of him, but it wasn't as bad as he'd thought.