ultraviolence-hue

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So she rose from her cotton coffin, bony legs carried across the darkwood floor to the wide, expansive mirror of her bord beige-slew of a bathroom. Her eyes were rimmed with a redness only ever matched with hangovers. And from what she had remembered, last night had consisted of unpopular youtube videos of middle-aged men fixing some clunky cars, and a few crumbled joints before plopping onto her bed into a dazed, hauntingly-plausible dream.

She licked her lips, flexed her fingers one by one and felt the sweat moisten each crooked line of her palm.

Her mind hummed with faint realizations. She had accomplished her mission, to suffice a full two days without eating. Only gulping back sultry sips of black coffee and smoking expensive weed in an attempt to seem more mysterious. Like the goth girls in her art history class. The ones that passed out fliers for sorority orgies and underground basement shows. With gauged ears and piercings lining every inch of synched skin on their face.

She was so unlike them, in their mass of black and powdery smokey eyes. They always chomped on sweet cinnamon gum and worked on posters for protests they organized in the dirty quad.

[ultraviolence-hue]

excerpt from a story i've been working on...

“Can you spot me a five?” 

I suppose that sentence, both clumsy and spontaneous—like our short-lived friendship—summed up the type of boy Mack would ever grow to be. He was never mature—or serious—enough to earn the title of a “man”. 

At least in the traditional sense. 

And for a short while, when all of my other friends from Freshman year had fizzed out throughout the summer months, getting lost in the hot world of teen boys, Mack was the only real friend I had. I would jump into the front seat of his beat-up hunker, kick my ripped vans up on the dashboard, and follow the roads and the Northern California skyline as my eyes would grow more and more weight, until I felt like a feline.

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when he...

I want a boy with black hair and black eyes, with black studs and a black fire that lights up his insides. I want a boy who's deliciously cruel, hopelessly romantic, and terribly sappy in all the right ways. One who’s clumsy and cares an awful lot about his skateboard, one who’s always shooting off somewhere mysterious and feeling me up in every way he knows how. I want a boy that’s always out to get something, always moving and grooving to the beat of life and not knowing (or caring) where he ends up. I want a boy that’s foreign to the confined, Jersey walls I know so well. I want a boy that’s taller than me (not exactly a challenge since I just reached the feasible height of 5’0), who will look down with admiration in his terribly active eyes. 

I want a boy who will grab my face and kiss me tenderly, with all the energy he’s got because I’m the one good thing in his clumsy, teenage-dirtbag life. 

I met a boy like this once. He wasn’t foreign enough that we had a language barrier from polar-opposite countries (although at times it felt like it), he grew up in the stoner mountains of the near west coast, so it was no shock he churned out the stoner-skater lifestyle that makes me melt into my shoes. He was curious about the most boring things that I thought a guy would never notice. He was sweet and witty, action-packed and nonchalant, a true cool boy at heart. He’s the kind of guy where you know he’s not a virgin and hasn’t been for a very long time. Something in his smile gave it away, gave away how high up his ego had been, and yet he was mysteriously humble.

He’s the one where you worry about their relationship status often, because you want him so bad, you’re convinced every other girl in the world would, too. He seemed like he dated dumb, pretty girls. Girls who bored him to death but were a good accessory, the ones who get blasted at parties and throw themselves on top of him. Not knowing which way is up and proving so by stumbling and slurring over every rock, every long syllable. 

I find myself missing him as if he was ever mine, as if our kisses and hugs and intimacy ever seeped out of my deluded brain and out of my ears. Leaking into the saccharine reality of the life of a dreamer. 

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reflecting during mid-july

High school parties are this weird phenomenon that no one really addresses unless they’re reflecting on the sour, regretful days of their teenage-riot youth. Each high school party I have been to, outside or in, always has a heap of humid, adolescent bodies stuck together in a crowd too oversized for whatever suburban backyard it partakes in. Each person within the crowd is so easily placed in my mind. I never really believed in cliques before, and my school doesn’t necessarily have “cliques” like you see in the movies, but we do have a handful of broken cliches. The white girls who are either on the dance team or the cheer team, both equally filled with their own drama that makes me head spin and my throat want to hurl from the sheer dramatics of it all. We have the stoners who are always breaking a pot or decades-old garden gnomes from these cookie-cutter houses. And there’s always that one guy, who you’d never expect to, but would be there with a broom and pan, scraping up the remains of his friend’s sobriety, scattered and splashed all across the soiled cement.

We all down beer or white claws, and smoke those fat, salty-tasting joints that we all score from one of the two dealers that would sell to our age group. And while I find that everyone’s eyes are forever, frantically fading into the night, I can never weave off the brink of sobriety, anxiety holding me back like some forced hand weaving into the ways of my woeful world. 

Every time I’m at one of these parties, I feel like a ghost that’s embarrassingly translucent. An outcast that’s being passed through the eyes of all the kids who have always been seen. And I don’t fit in this scene, my shoulders tense and my smile turns straight as I walk through the fleshed halls of the party, walking past drunk make-outs and people zeroing whatever smoke they can get their hands on. My friends hijack their other friends as I succumb into present fomo. 

Wishing I was anyone else in this big cosmic joke of a world. 

[ultraviolence-hue]

jeff buckley my beloved

[ultraviolence-hue]

dust it off

All at once, I’m afraid I’m beginning to feel the weight of the world (and my life) fall heavy on my shoulders. I thought I knew what I was doing, what I was working towards these first few years in high school. I was ambitious, and maybe a part of me still is. But I feel like the simplicity of a low-key life, has been more appealing to me than anything else. I used to dream big, of walking over ivy-covered cobblestone, my Dr. Martens standing out in a sea of bareback faces and simple people who only ever cared about academics. But I would feel enlightened as I knew I had more depth than any other person out there. I don’t necessarily know if I would be so sad if I didn’t achieve that dream. I’ve begun to cry over things that me a year ago wouldn’t have shed one tear over. My life is becoming mundane, and although I feel like it is my duty to become one of the greats, I don’t know if it’s my destiny. 

I’ll update my extremely critical and philosophical take on this life soon.

 But for now, this is it. 

[ultraviolence-hue]

don’t mind this mind of mine

I keep trying to think about things in a more serene kind of way. One where I’m not constantly thinking about romanticizing every single instance of my life. Maybe it’s good I make sweet, tender lemon cookies out of these sour lemons I’ve been handed, time and time again. Yet I can’t help but wonder if this is how humans have always been, staring at a small creature scurrying along the dead grass, and becoming involved in this little one’s story. I wonder if this is how all the great poets of the world lived their lives. If this is how Sappho took her lemons, made lovers lemonade out of them. Squeezed all the material out until she was suckling at the teat so harsh it turned dry and dusty in her poetic hands. 

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are you gonna hurt me now or are you gonna hurt me later

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flow me through

You haven’t made any effort to become the girl you said you would be, you haven’t given thought to what your freshman self would think of you now. Lying in bed and thinking about all the things you could have said or done these past couple weeks, all the steps you could have taken. All the notes and romantic, yearning letters you always dreamt of writing and sending out, to a void of no response and empty answers. 

You like to say you changed, that your face sunk down into the girl who now consumes media to feel cool comfortable and inspired by strangers online. You don’t let your past self fool you, however. But you watch from afar as your all-grown-up cousin lives the4 care-free, born-to-be-me life you had dreamt of. Yet you sit alongside your records and your mounds of books that have diminished and left sitting over the years, and you think if anything important has happened in your life that would be worth the effort to write about. You watch your friends move on, you watch them as they develop crushes on the guys they always viewed from afar, and yet you feel left in the purple dust. 

Choking on the faded, clouded sky and choking back tears once removed from you, forever living the mundane existence of a girl who’s “always been too much of a dreamer”. 

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mundane, monday past

Friday is supposed to be hot, where our sweet-smelling, adolescent sweat is just starting to mist from our caked-up pores. Start of summer hot. The type of hot where the mediocre Jersey beaches are littered with cans of mysterious liquid and chalky ashes of cigarettes and musty marijuana from Shiesty Bag and a sweet girl named Steele. I can never tell if I particularly enjoy those days on those messy, overcrowded, overly stinky beaches. I’m just kind of there. Lying beside my lobster-colored mother, feeling the beads of beginning-of-summer-sweat trickle down every tight, cinched skin cell against my body.

The past few days have been a sweet blend of each other. Mixed between a wanting of motivation to a lack thereof, swirled along the lines of bitter fatigue bordering on the line of a sinking depressive episode. One where my limbs are spread surely over every inch of my sticky comforter. Staring between each poorly plastered poster on my poorly painted wall, drawing invisible scratchy stars in between as my scratched-up record spins into oblivion, spins into disuse and disregard.

[ultraviolence-hue]

All My Blood.

Today is the death anniversary of Jeff Buckley, whom I love more than I’ve ever loved anything. Jeff Buckley's music has touched me and my heart in a way that nothing ever has, I really don’t think that any other music can compare to the way he makes me feel. I truly believe he was one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and I can’t believe that he died so extremely young. I know that if he had just a little bit more time, he could have made numerous more albums that had that same similar, earth-shattering quality that Grace had. I want a romance that Jeff described in that album, one full of never-ending longing and swirly feelings. One that makes you see everything in a new, honey-baked light. 

I remember the first time I heard Jeff Buckley. I was laying on the edge of my bed, a broad, expansive feeling of mind-numbing boredom making me weak. Scrolling through TikTok with an attention span that would decrease by the millisecond, and I remember coming across a black and white live performance, of Lover, You Should’ve Come over. I remember being perplexed as the video went on, not because of anything negative, but because there was this mysterious guy strumming a guitar with all his white-boy might, and belting all of those cold, expansive feelings into a microphone for an audience of a few mediocre white guys. I remember being baffled as to how beautiful this little snippet of this song sounded.

So I close TikTok and opened YouTube, finding the full version. I don’t really remember what happened immediately after that. I think I listened to the studio version then, and that day, in the Winter of 2022, was when I first discovered the artist that would quickly become my favorite.

Learning about his death didn’t surprise me, I was already extremely deep in the 90′s music scene to realize that many of the great artists I would come across would have a tragic, young, and disappointing death. Most likely even before my mother would even think about conceiving me. 

Nonetheless, each year I’ll weep and bask about Jeff’s life. I’ll always wonder what would have happened if he didn’t swim in that river that unfortunate, daunting night. I’ll never know, but I’ve come to peace with his death because his life granted us something too beautiful for this solemn, melancholy world. And I’ll forever be grateful. 

Just to always have the album permanently with me, I want my first tattoo to be this: