xyears

[xyears]

What do we any of us live for but our illusions and what can we ask of others but that they should allow us to keep them?

W. Somerset Maugham, The Sacred Flame

[xyears]

The Grim Alternatives

I love no one but you, I have discovered, but you are far away and I am here alone. Then this is my life and maybe, however unlikely, I’ll find my way back there. Or maybe, one day, I’ll settle for second best. And on that same day, hell will freeze over, the sun will burn out and the stars will fall from the sky.

Iain S. Thomas

[xyears]

She said, "How could I love you back, you, who dropped your dreams in the gutter?" And in my winter, she'll be burning slow Feels like December knows me well

— Dermot Kennedy, Moments Passed

[xyears]

I’d sit in your sadness. I’d soak up your light. I’d swim in your laugh. I’d radiate your anger right back at you, right back at you. And I am tempted to think I ought to just leave already.

[xyears]

And do you miss the rogue who coaxed you into paradise and left you there? Will you forgive my soul when you're too wise to trust me and too old to care?

Taylor Swift ft. The National, Coney Island

[xyears]

So we meet— you’ve got two kids, or three, and you dote on your boy so sweetly, and your daughter becomes you, and you are your mother’s daughter, ultimately— and you think I look so similar to someone you once knew, a face you cannot place as you card through the endlessly long deck of your memories— and I think it’s so fucking fascinating how complex, how complicated, how rich our short existences can be. I’m flawed and in my hopes you give me some grace, so now I let others speak for me and I acknowledge the distance between us. I hate you but I at one point loved you, and that’s all I really have to say.

[xyears]

The stars were beautiful, and have you ever seen a slice of moon so perfect? I nearly forgot about you—it isn’t true, then, what they say, is it?

(Winter into spring and back again. A year later this will have flattened out to nothing at all. The truth scrubs my skin clean off.)

I think: So many missed chances. So many. Lifetimes will fly by. And winter bleeds out into spring. Yet there are sidelong glances and trailing silently behind your footsteps, which must be enough. A lifetime of that. My darling. Won’t you look at me this once?

[xyears]

Let me tell you this: I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what importance it holds. I don’t think I laugh about these things, even years later. (The wanting is gone, perhaps, or at least most of it is, but I don’t quite think of it as ridiculous. Ever. Not yet. And that might be a fault.) Tell me that you’ll be around. Tell me that we’ll speak of each other again. Tell me it isn’t so bad to hold on. I would like to think it isn’t. (So it isn’t.)

Tell me three things and we can walk away from each other on and on for the rest of time.

You should not become my entire identity. I should get out of here. Stop getting lost in it. Dig my foot down somewhere in the ground. Look up and there is just the sun, and there are just the clouds. And sure, the breeze in the air is as lovely as you, but it is also just lovely.

It’s okay.

[xyears]

People pass through like ghosts and my mind still wanders over to where you’re standing in this world relative to me. By that I mean, I wonder how the axis of the world tilts, and how I should orient myself to lean in its direction so. I seem to do too much, yet never enough. It’s a disappointing thing, the way I know I’m satiated until I don’t.

I scrutinize myself. I question attraction. It isn’t so profound, perhaps. You’re pretty. You’re unabashed. You’re annoying. You’re kind. You’ve got dreams. And I wish I knew more of what they are. I wish I could tell you: I like you. I just like you. That’s all you should know.

We run in two different directions on separate planes. Here, we meet for an instant, and I seem to get caught like an animal. I seem to trip over my two feet. I seem to be staring at the ground. I seem to be staring at your backside. Breathing. And looking. And breathing.

Even much after, with all the distance, with the pulling apart. I’m staring. I’m looking. So let me tell you. Let me say something.

[xyears]

I think: So many missed chances. So many. Lifetimes will fly by. And winter bleeds out into spring. Yet there are sidelong glances and trailing silently behind your footsteps, which must be enough. A lifetime of that. My darling. Won’t you look at me this once?

[xyears]

I think about how genuine you are, and your pride. It goes both ways, doesn’t it? I only want your eyes on me for a while. I think about how you love people—the truth is I don’t know how and I never will but I can imagine you do so wholly. I think about how I’m sick with love, how it probably isn’t even love.

I think about, what are you afraid of? What can’t I bring you down from that someone else, someone, could easily? I think about how I bare myself to the world just for a shred of something. I think about how I can’t keep even the sacred things to myself. I wonder if you have walls, too. I think about how you’d be ashamed of me, of that, of all this in my head. I wonder. I wonder. I wonder.

I think about nights in the kitchen with the warm golden light and laughter bubbling up from our food-drunk bodies. I think about the distance in thirty centimetres. The warmth in the air and how cold my hands always are. I think about bumping into the knob of the drawer and you. And you. Your leg. I think about how I wouldn’t acknowledge it and continue to think about it for the next year. I think about things that could transpire, possibilities like frayed thread. None of them will and that’s okay. We can stay here and we can keep breathing. Even if our eyes meet for only a moment. Even if I turn so you can’t see my smile. (The light catches on your bare shoulders and I’m lost in the freckles. It’s just another night, and that’s the best, best thing.)

I think of the things we never say to each other, ever. I think of all the missed chances and souls floating by, just brushing fingertips.

(I’m sick with it, I think.)

[xyears]

and i am covered up in spine so tell me how i can love this how you can love this

[xyears]

And I think about it all the time Lights went out, you were fine You kinda struggle not to shine

Dermot Kennedy, An Evening I Will Not Forget

[xyears]

pack your bag and let’s go.

And is it old school, baby, to still feel stuff? Just a memory, then suddenly Tears come rolling down, babe, don’t worry - Fink, Not Everything Was Better In The Past

There’s a certain loneliness that comes with living in suburbia. I can’t describe it. It punctures your soul; it seems to define you for a while too long. It turns a smile into something too painfully brilliant to look at. It’s romantic, and it’s painful, and every time you get close to escape it catches up with you, almost instantaneously. It is utterly confused as to why you were running in the first place. You’re inside and you hate yourself for continuing to breathe; outside, it’s a perfect day. Outside, a child laughs, a dog barks, a squirrel sprints across backyard posts, someone’s car won’t stop going off, the sky is blue, the clouds are white. Your heart hurts in your chest. You hate the music and your skin. Like I said, it isn’t something that makes sense. Maybe it does if you’ve experienced it before. I think the only solace comes in the evening, when most all is quiet and dark hallways serve to soothe the strangely chipped plane of your body.

—

But let’s romanticize it anyway. Let’s do it, anyway. Because why not? Why not turn this beautiful-ugly dream thing into something that resonates in a way that is lighter, easier, more achingly? Take me to the old fields and let’s pick weeds and call them flowers and tuck them behind each other’s ears. Take me down to the pond and let’s race back up the hill, let’s cool down under the trees with pine cone-bruised feet. Take me to your house, where I’ve never been and will never go, to drink lemonade when the afternoon sun gets too intense. Let’s be children again at the end of our senior year and mourn all that we are about to lose and laugh about that time when and remember all our good days and promise to make some more.

—

Let’s run on the track behind our old high school, red clay staining the soles of our shoes, crunching as we push ourselves.

Let’s fall back against the warm ground and spill cold water over our mouths.

Let’s pretend the sun makes us happy, and this is nostalgia thumping in our chests, not sadness.

(But maybe, in this context, those two are the same thing. Perhaps what I should say is, not pain, and hatred.)

—

I feel like I’m never actually laughing anymore. It’s always in the middle of a loud long laugh that I realize how easy it has become for me keep the sound real.

—

When I imagine it, I imagine hitting a wall. I picture it like my greatest fear. I have all this, you see, so the obvious next step is this house, this school, this place with the cul-de-sacs and identical maple leaf trees lined up on every road, one after the next, block block block, like someone has transformed child’s play into a livable habitat. Cheap, efficient, profitable. I hate the nitty gritty of it. It makes me squirm, it pokes at the scream stuck in my throat.

All the same, it’s where I made all my friends, where I was once happiest, where I could go one street down to the plaza in the summer and buy whatever for my latest failed recipe. This is where I have staked out my own little sense of belonging for the first eighteen years of my life. I don’t want that to mean nothing, and it doesn’t. Maybe if I leave and never come back, I’ll miss everything from before. I will eat my words and I will turn this place into a dream, a glimmer of the ideal that I had grasped for an instant before it slipped through my fingers.

What’s talking, now? Paranoia, hypocrisy, or the system that’s wound its way through me?

I believe, undoubtedly, that’s the hardest part.

[xyears]

Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays

[xyears]

i looked at you and i saw words i didn’t remember writing

[xyears]

I saw your eyes behind your hair And you're looking tired, but you don't look scared

Brandi Carlile, The Joke