alittlelikeme

[alittlelikeme]

Bath full of lemon slices

you came right before the morning light crept into the room

I held you inside of me

longer than I planned to

nails digging into your hips

you couldn’t move

called me a day later

said you couldn’t breathe

we took the path at midnight

until we were lost at sea

[alittlelikeme]

Home

We inherited the brine, wilted Tea leaves of mint and the dense soil beneath Yorkshire.

I inherited the witches mark beneath my left eye, delicately placed on my cheek bone from the tender first kisses of my mother while she laid sprawled on the small hospital bed tucked away on the west side of the island as fireworks erupted around us. She whispered into my ear while her sweat sunk into my new skin “do you hear that Miss Anne? they’re cheering for you.”.

There was death clouding the island and as I crowned it seeped inside of me. The rotting sent of a mango tree fallen from the hurricane’s and my mothers tears were my first introductions to life. Welcome home, the ocean whispered to me in my first hours of sleep.

There was a scream as the plane took off, lifting from the tarmac. My sister pulled a lollipop out of my mothers hands. I pushed my face into the window, my father brushed the sweat from his forehead. The island stretched out below us, it’s arms reaching up to pull me back.

/

It was late July, the strawberries were browning in the front garden, she smoked non sensibly on the lawn, barefoot while bumble bees drank in the pollen of the dying flowers. I watched as the warm breeze of the Santa Ana winds gathered strands of my mothers golden hair, dancing freely in the air. I wanted her to watch me roll down the hill and cheer me on, but I wasn’t sure how to break her trance. She turned to me startled I was watching her, flicked the ash from her cigarette and smiled. “Let’s go find some lemons Miss Anne!” she hopped up, brushed the ash from her legs, and grabbed her car keys.

Where is the loss? Where is the fracture?

I used to sit on the floor watching her pace around the house, feeling each tender break as she stepped. We did not belong here.

We spent the days my sisters were in school in silence, she would take hours to curl her hair, to open the blinds, I would lay on the cool tile kitchen on the floor and push oranges around with my nose, or I would lay on the front lawn and look for interesting shaped clouds that I could tell her about later.

On good days she would say my name with a ring to it, the mornings would start earlier. She would wake me with smells of her coffee and pour me the cereal that my sisters hadn’t gotten to eat yet. We would pack up the car with fresh fruit, magazines and beach towels. Those days started with music and a thick lather of sunscreen. She would turn the car out of town as I would look back and wave to the “Welcome to Camarillo” sign. She’d roll the windows down, let the nearby farms fill the air, we would trace the sharp roads of southern California until we found water, I watch her entranced while Madonna’s voice burst from the stereo. She’d look back at me in my carseat and smile. “It’s a good day Miss Anne! It’s a good day!”.

We were etched in chlorine stained skin, there was an ember burning inside her those years, we’d exist in this silent world of our own making.

She’d tell me stories of the city she grew up in, deep pungent green surrounding, smells of the salt, the sea, and the sky, how water would fall from the sky. She’d speak of moss, deep lush forests, home. I would watch her lose herself in these stories, I would sit and listen dreaming of a place where the sand wasn’t all I could see.

She would hold me tight in the pool as she spun me around, I watched as droplets of water fell from her face onto mine.

We could have left. I wouldn’t have known the difference. Her homesickness was my homesickness. Her aches had imprinted onto me. We were not made for the desert. Salt water creatures we were, we yearned for the sea.

It was 7am, the car had what we needed, she buckled me into my booster seat, we waved goodbye to the front lawn, I snickered as I turned and looked back at the “Welcome to Camarillo” sign. We made it farther than our trips to the water, we made it through and entire Madonna album. We made it to where the roads became greener.

She stopped, pulled into the parking lot of a small cafe, a neon sign read “FRESH BAKED PIES”. Sitting in silence she held the steering wheel, looked straight ahead and said “let’s get some treats!”.  

The car peeled out and retraced the roads we had just crawled up.

I sat in the back putting fistfuls of chocolate pie in my face while we watched the sky go from orange pink hues to black.

We sat at the table that night, neither of us spoke, my father and sisters didn’t notice our silence.

[alittlelikeme]

--

I think we come from the same bones. The driftwood beckoned as it lazily floated amongst the white caps, I sipped on the salty air thinking deeply about our last moments. 

I ache for our disfunction, subtly crave the way you clawed into the deepest parts of me in a momentary glimpse of a summer. Had I known those were the last times I’d be able to stand freely? Had I known of the storm that would overtake my body? 

I wanted you to study me, I wanted you to take notes, to freeze me in time so I could never forget the freedom I felt with you. The way my body ached for you. 

We watched as the world burned from the Bridge of the Gods, flickers of a train sliding beneath us, I felt myself awaken. I felt the way I needed you and I couldn’t look at you. 

[alittlelikeme]

Needle

This aching in my body has been here since before, as if the fireworks sounding at the time I crowned were merely warning signs as to what was to come. My toes yet to touch the sands of the island, were already sick with grief. There were days in my childhood where I could not walk, where the pit in my stomach was a black hole, absorbing atoms at rapid speed. I ached, I mourned, I treated my skin as a drawing board of every misunderstanding I had about conscious etching thick lines of mis trust and fear.

My body was a dam, holding back each tender molecule of pain, as the tension began to rise up, the only way I knew how to release it, was to break small fractions of the seal holding it all inside of me. I watched as crimson rivers swirled into the sink, floating their way to freedom as relief came in the form of punishment, the pain whispered me to a steady heart rate.

We used to hide behind the barn. He would find us there, lure us to his cabin and practice his needle work on our veins. My braids dangling past my shoulders, not quite ready for second grade, he was discreet. The small of my back, the side of my ankle, I rarely remember the after math. Though it happened twice, it felt like years of falling back into to pillows he’d laid out on the ground. She would scream and cry each time the needle hit her skin, I would giggle and sleep.

I craved the way it slid in. I craved the damp smell of the cabin. I craved the forgetting.

He was escorted out by the cops. We laid silent under her bed. Tears slid down my cheeks. I didn’t want to go on remembering, so the dam built itself and the fissures released. The years turned into check marks, tallies of each moment I chose survival, I chose to release, I chose to forget.

My body fought the struggle, missing him, the pillows, the floating above, how the world seemed so far away as my eyes whirled through visions of freedom, where the terrors were just out of reach, I would taunt them. The guilt as I watched her scream, as he danced above her and I. I was dirty, I was tainted, I was someone who didn’t seem to mind his hands, his voice.

Even now, my body aches the way it did when I was still absorbing how to spell basic english words, I want to slow time and touch it. I feel him around, pushing me towards the darker levees, where I can escape serenely until I simply cease to exist and how pleasant that might be.

[alittlelikeme]

Abstract Empath

standing at the edge of the street light as it flirts with your profile.

I held you once. Wrapped my fingers around your wrists while you tried to force them down my throat, we stood here, leaned against my old purple bike with the broken spokes, you lifted my dress over my hips, spread me and pushed me to the ground. We laughed at the nosy neighbors holding their phones to foggy windows.

I wanted you to chase me down the yellow hue of the streets, they sent a search party, screaming my name because I felt it finally. I felt the weight of all of this. I couldn’t exist in a world where you did not surgically remove me from them. Stuck in the simple whirlpool where I spun elegantly away and towards you.

My mother slurred her words, repenting the same mania, deciding still if she should have me, standing in the abortion clinic that only took two plane rides and a taxi to get to, could have gone through with it but had a mango instead, waiting to get back to a man who ingested book pages over her fears, I wanted to wake up inside her and claw my own way out.

“We’re the same you and me” she’d say over and over again, trying to tell me that my rape was the same as why they all called her a slut,

that the loss of you would ricochet inside of her too.

They make their own mistakes, they project their own fears in the form of knives to throats, waking the same mounting pressures of unopened wine bottles and tightly locked doors.

You knew, you knew I’d always be yours. That’s why you slowly dripped the honey back into the jar, hypnotizing me with the fractals of sucrose bouncing in the morning light while coffee cooled beside sleeping kittens, we made love with purpose, as if we could create our own mess and name it art. Say we tried. Say at least we didn’t almost have a mango, say no one tried to hide the evidence under the lemon tree where the geckos would eventually see.

She screamed more than she should have, there weren’t any pain killers, the women didn't know what to do. I came out sleeping, no pulse, ready to be sent back but they pushed and pushed, forced the life into me.

I’ve been begging to go back since.

We tell ourselves blood does not clot, we hold our wrists to the sky and promise that the more we ache, the stronger we become.

I promised nothing, no grace, no freedom, no unconditional. I dug my nails into her shoulders, begged her to hold me tighter, begged her to see past the lyrics of the same three songs she could not escape.

[alittlelikeme]

17th

I turned the wheels of the bike away from the sinking harbor.

Shifted gears and looked at the ink scratched on my upper thigh as my dress rode up in the murky, overcast summer day.

The telephone numbers I had quickly scribbled just in case right above the tattoo I’d had carved into me a month ago, Sylvia Plath’s words haunting over scars I’d inflicted on myself.

Bombs flew around me, missing the ground and drowning in the river below me as the anger of the day fueled anxiety. Turning over my shoulder at each intersection, trucks revving their engines and the smell of smoke, sounds of shouting in the distance. We were in there somehow, deep in the sea of black clothes, pistols and burning flags. I wanted to call the only person Id know would take me to the nearest bar, but I put my phone back into my pack, pulled a bandaid out and placed it over a new scar, waiting in the center of the bridge over looking a city I had once fought so hard to live in, tear itself a part.

[alittlelikeme]

[alittlelikeme]

Beneath the honey jar.

[alittlelikeme]

[alittlelikeme]

thecomedown.

Do not forget the crackling spikes of dry desert air, how thick tender storm clouds gather above you. Do not forget how your naked body felt exposed to the elements while the warm, plump drops of rain cascaded down, how the depth of the lake coddled your body and brought you the buoyancy of life worth exposure, risk and fear. Do not forget the peaks and the valleys, welts of bites that gave you restless nights, heroic sunrises. Do not stumble away from the harsh reality that you are wilderness, sticks, stones, thorns, and brambles of the ever flowing bloodlust to preserve the the resilience inside you, inside her, against the rivers true north. The salt water will rush towards each storm and perpetuate the catalyst, each strike of laughter and lightning. Do not forget, you are the wilderness as you dive deeper.

[alittlelikeme]

It’s 2am, I need to be awake in three hours for work. The street light is making it’s way through my thin, red curtains leaving my room a fuzzy shade of pink. He’s slurring his words on the phone. I can feel the pungent kick of the alcohol in his breath through the speaker, my eyes are closed, I’m barely awake, my phone is resting on my left cheek while he whirls through his subconscious train of thought, spewing it all out as if I was taking notes. Barely taking a moment to breathe, holding tight on any space necessary for me to interject.

“I’ll push you away — this next month I need to work on my book, i have this writing deadline i have to meet and if I don't meet it Im going to be really upset and I don't want to push you away and sometimes I’m short and I want alone time and and I don’t know —

— will you be ok with that?”

“..I —-“ “That’s why i like you, you seem like the kind of person that like we can both go a week without seeing each other and that would be totally fine and in that week you’d write and I’d write and we’d meet up and show each other our stories and it would be fine you know?”

“Yeah I’m n-“ “Anyway I really like you and I don’t want to fuck this up, like i really want to have a healthy relationship with you, that’s really important to me, I want you to have a healthy relationship”

“I’ve —“

“Ok you have to go to bed huh? I’m sorry for keeping you up, I was just at home and I missed you and I don't want you to like be surprised by this, I push people away, I don’t want to push you away like —“

“Curtis! Shut the fuck up and let me talk!”

“Ok! Im sorry”

“Jesus, I’ve been trying to get a word in for like ten minutes. Curtis I’ve had healthy relationships. I want this to work too, I really do, I really like you. I’m not going anywhere, just communicate with me and I’ll do the same I really —“

“Yeah—“

“HEY I'm not done. I really fucking like you Curtis. I am NOT going anywhere. Just be honest with me, tell me your boundaries and I will do the same”

“Yeah. I appreciate that”

“Yeah. Im not going anywhere. I get cold and distant too, it’s something Im working on. I need a lot of alone time, I’m working on that too.”

“Yeah.”

“I have to go to sleep. I appreciate you telling me all of this, it means a lot and it’s really cute to see you care this much, it shows me just how much you care about making this work”

“I really do care about you.”

“I know.”

“Goodnight, I miss you, I can’t wait to see you tomorrow.”

“Im excited to see you too. Goodnight.”

[alittlelikeme]

Spok-ane

He sits on the chair, the only real chair in his small studio apartment. Defining real chair by a stool and not the other two chairs in his apartment that might as well be broken and are currently covered in my clothes and our rain jackets. It’s the last few hours of 2017. I watch, I listen as he slowly strums on his guitar and I feel my heart rate slow, I find the comfort in the way he loves, the way he finds his own peace through his passions. I over analyze the moment, him playing the guitar, me lying on his small, twin mattress pad on the floor, the dimly lit room, the way he looks at me — as if I would have many more of these moments, dim apartment, him looking at me, playing the guitar, me falling slowly to sleep. I take this moment and place it apathetically on my mental shelf and pool memories around it like a cloud, I think about his lips. i think about the way his body perfectly matches mine. I think about the way the worlds lull at the end of my tongue, how I suck on them like a Life Saver, waiting for the flavor to overwhelm me. I think about how one day soon, this will not exist for me. The cognitive dissonence this gives me, the dissociated sensation that I cannot truly savor. I cannot truly immerse because how does any sense of love, comfort, peace grow on something built on fear? The existential dread, the loss, the string of grief. Built on a night when I had to convince him that instead of drinking all night, he should come stay with me. Built on “I always feel like Im missing out on something.” built on “Im fucking this up” built on “I’m scared”. But 2017 comes to and end, I push him deeper into me and I let his finger nails rip the fear from me, I let him suck the pain of this eventual loss from my collar bone and I blow the candle out. “I wish for this. I wish for this. I want this one to stay. I want it to work. I want everything else to fuck off so I can savor this” and I turn 24. I watch the fireworks explode around the city, I watch him roll close into me. I watch. I wait.

[alittlelikeme]

Exhausting.

The last drips from the shower are plummeting down the drain as I focus on the slurping noise the water makes as it cascades down the old buildings plumbing. Exhausting.

As my lower back aches, my toes squirm, the pulsing beat behind my eyes hums along to the same rhythmic migraine it’s been stuck in for the better part of the last five years.

Exhausting.

The nervous tick of sweat beads down my back while my mind whirls through scenarios, ways I could have been better, ways he could be thinking about me, how soon this will all end because,

Exhausting.

Remembering the day I sat in the dim room

“Anyone ever told you, you’re bi-polar?”

The relief the explanation laid out in front of me,

the look of pity on his face.

“You suffer from years of PTSD, this is going to take a life time to conquer.”

Exhausting.

“With your chronic illness, this is going to be an uphill battle, each flare up will set you back.”

Exhausting.

“Of course, we cannot medicate you with your other medications.”

Exhausting.

“Please call the suicide hotline the next time you feel that way.”

Exhausting.

The way the same cut and dry of cold desolation their turned back screams as I play victim to a mental illness I’ve never bothered to master.

Exhausting.

As I play victim to a physical illness that never subsides.

Exhausting.

As I ride out the same perils each lover faces while they face me, naked, dripping, towel wrapped around my hair, gritting my teeth with a Iknowwewerejokingbutpleasedontcallmethat

Exhausting.

It’d be easier if I was dying, it’d ward them off quicker, give them a time limit they could count on.

“I love her but I can’t handle these mood swings, I never know what to say around her, I can’t keep doing this if this is all it will ever be.”

Exhausting.

As each partner holds a seance, brings up every dead lover they can muster and finds all the right avenues to trigger, poke, prod, promise, and be gone.

Exhausting.

I’m here, until your mania isn’t quirky, I’m here until your mania directly effects me, I’m here until you become a mirror to everything I fear.

Exhausting.

[alittlelikeme]

Check-In

“Hi. Yeah. I checked in online. Can I - Just go to the room?”

Same nurse as last time. Pain worse than last time. She see’s it. She calls me Honey. I let her hold me up while I stumble to the back room, my knee’s giving in. Pain getting worse, fluorescent lights burning. Inaudible noises surrounding me, she helps me onto the bed, warm blankets covering me, lifted up to my chest.

The doctor rolls in, I can see her face, it’s concerned. Annoyed by how concerned she looks, we’ve been through this so many times, how is this new to her? “When did the pain start?”

“Hour ago.” “How bad is it? 1-10?”

“Well, compared to the last time I was in here, like an 8.”

“Ok. so bad.”

“bad.”

“We can’t do much. We’ll try what we did last time.” “The saline drip and the pain killers that turn my pee fluorescent?”

“Yep. That’s about all we can do. Is it getting worse? It seems like it’s getting worse.”

“It is.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“Aren’t you the doctor?”

“Right. We could do that surgery but it could make it worse”

“Yeah significantly worse.”

“Ok so not that. Honestly, you know what I’m going to say, we’ve been through this before. I can make you as comfortable as possible and that’s it.”

“no such thing as comfortable with this.”

“I know.”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, we’ll get you some sleeping pills so hopefully you can get some rest tonight.”

“You know those don’t work. I don’t want them.”

“Ok.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

She walks out. The door closes. I bite my lower lip till it bleeds. I let the blood pool on my chin and try to distract myself with the stinging sensation from the fresh wound and not the mind numbing pain erupting through my body.

Fluorescent lights continue to burn. inaudible noises continue to emanate from the hallway. My palms sweat, the nurse rolls in a bag of saline, she gives me a look of pity and wipes the blood from my lower lip.

I try to not glare at her.

She’s just doing her job.

I want to go home.

I want my mom.

[alittlelikeme]

“I have my own life and it’s complicated and messy, but it is significantly better without you in it. “

Why Im not texting you back. 

[alittlelikeme]

CanWeGrieveYet?

The lights are dim.

The howling of the Pacific Northwestern autumn storm whirls around the living room on the second story of her parents home, neatly tucked between evergreens and sleepy hills on the small slopes above the jagged cliffs that cascaded into the Puget Sound.

He stood up from the couch and stumbled slightly, letting the wine adjust in his abdomen as he grabbed her hand smiling, pulling her up from the couch with him. She lifted her body towards his and felt the whirling sensation of his presence, the way he could shift a moment, the way the wine seemed to hit her harder while she tried to find her footing, holding onto him for support.  

The rest of the party had moved downstairs where everyone was loudly playing ping pong, it was just the two of them with The last Waltz playing on the television. “This is my favorite song” he said shyly.

She focused on his eyes, how the piercing green kept her distracted, how familiar they felt. She told herself it was because they were the same color as hers. Neil Young sang off key in the background, his harmonica placed awkwardly on his chest while he bellowed on about a Harvest Moon. He grabbed her waist and pulled her in, slowly rocking back and fourth he hummed along to the song pushing his lips to her ear. “You know, this is the first ever live recording they did where they actually had to go back and edit the footage?” “Really, why?” “Because good ole Neil here had so much Cocaine on his upper lip they had to go back and photoshop it, they did a terrible job too, you can still see some of the white powder up there.”

He chuckled and pulled her in closer, she smiled and pressed her head to his chest while they swayed, she watched as the tree’s whirled around the home in the dark autumn night smelling him, feeling the moment, focusing in on the lyrics of the song.

“Because I’m still in loovvveeeee with y-ouuu on this Harvest Moon.”

[alittlelikeme]

yougiveamanaFace.

I want to explore all the ways my feet land on the pedals while I slowly whirl through the rumbling streets as lives coexist around me, beneath me, above me. How I slur my lyrics while I try to enunciate words I can no longer clearly hear, the new adaptations to vowels that don’t quite hit as my hearing fades out from it’s once fresh, bright existence. 

I let the muscle memory of city streets take me to a different scene from this shower,  while I hold back tears, listening for some form of clarity, some reasoning behind my heart palpitations, my deep breathing, my inability to feel him, here, in this moment. 

 he places his fingers on the tips of my lips

and says the phrase so clearly, so boldly.

“You can cry. I won’t go anywhere”

and I almost slap him. I almost scream and run away. I almost fall to the floor. The simplest human experience, to convey, the allude emotion

to be. 

Stripped from me each time someone walked out the front door,  suddenly if I took a deep enough breath it was too much.

If I took a step left instead of right,

if I existed in a body that was not the epitome of health.

They’d give me that look, the look I understood to be, the Imnotcomingbackthisistoomuchyoumakemecrazy and I would slide lower onto the carpet, outline the small fractals of yarn and think of the times my feet hit the pedals and I felt power, I stood up on my bike, I skidded to a halt, I passed cars, trains, and buses.

Pulling on the yarn the adrenaline was rupturing, it ate away at my chest, gnawed at my strengths.  Now, in the heat of the rising shower, another man’s arms wrap around my waist saying phrases foreign to me, phrases that taste raw, sticky, they lag, they glitch, his eyes don’t sting when the blue fades to green, they rush through flights of skimmed lavender and dusted robin’s egg blue.  

“I won’t go anywhere”

I can no longer trust. I can no longer hear. The vowels don’t even make it through the canal of my inner ear, they rest on my forehead while he repeats them over and over again, slowly licking my frontal lobe, prodding at anxieties, neurosis.

The eucalyptus plant stings in the air as the water turns from hot to cold in the shower, as he stands there dripping and I stand here internally screaming each time he repeats the phrase, pushing the hair out of my face.

“I’m not him.”

pulling the towel off the rack, I wrap it around our bodies, letting the fabric stick to our wet sides and I close my eyes to visions of the time I thought I was dying, the way my hand felt in someone else's when I could feel the world slip from below my feet and I was catapulted into the sky, how terrifying those first three seconds were from lift off and how much more terrified I was of that hand I was holding.