I have a bad feeling about all of this. I have a question with a devastating hypothetical inside of it. I once had a long list of questions for you, but I answered them myself. I am the one you are losing, remember? I am not a very good person, but I keep saying I am trying. I want to be let in, I said looking at your diaphragm. I used to imagine: [ ] I am making an artform of my own heartache as an enviable talent. I am starting to adore my own unlikely need. I am making something millable out of this, I am. I could mill a life so full, there's no room for you anymore. I am milling around in the quiet space you left, feeling fragile. I am starting to like it. I used to be yours; now I am mine. My dear, my darling, my dark cloud. I have no rules or secrets anymore. I am sure you know by now: you cannot possess a thunderstorm or bring one back from the dead. I was your first full stop, wasn't I? Wasn't I? I don't know anything for sure anymore. I don't want to haunt you anymore. I never said I would keep searching until I found you. I don't tell you what I'm thinking anymore. I keep ripping pages out of my notebook. I am not eating all my meals anymore. I never said I would. Okay, I did. I am making small but meaningful improvements. I am starting not to love you anymore. I still think of how beautiful you are, how your face fits your face. Fits the palms of my hands. I don't tell you everything I am thinking anymore. I am not a nostalgic person. I try to focus on the things I dislike about you. I love you less and less. I am erasing you, slowly. I used to miss you all the time. I used to want to talk to you even when I was talking to you. I finally realized it was the compass that was broken, it just took a long time. I finally realized the map wasn't even right, and anyway I can't read maps. I touch my own sweet and nervous spine now. I will still be the death of you. I would do it all again, but I wish I wouldn't. I don't feel like a ghost. I am not a ghost. I know you'll be okay without me, but not the same. I am learning to forget as a self-defense mechanism. I tore your pages out of my diary and stopped writing your name. "Write down everything and of course you'll remember things you wish you didn't," I read somewhere. Even if you never read this, you'll still feel it. I suspect you will grow to miss me terribly. When it's over (and it's almost over, I promise) just know I meant everything I ever said to you, even if I wish I didn't. I am taking nothing back, even if I wish I could. I would do it all again, even if I wish I wouldn't.
Author Archives for Julia
A Litany of Things I Am Not Telling You in Alphabetical Order
Even if you never read this, you'll still feel it. I am erasing you, slowly. I am learning to forget as a self-defense mechanism. I am making an artform of my own heartache as an enviable talent. I am making small but meaningful improvements. I am making something millable out of this, I am. I am milling around in the quiet space you left, feeling fragile and raw. I am not a nostalgic person. I am not a very good person. I am not eating all my meals anymore. I am starting not to love you anymore. I am starting to adore my own unlikely need. I am starting to like it. I am sure you know by now: I am taking nothing back, even if I am the one you are losing, remember? I can't read maps. I could mill a life so full, there's no room for you anymore. I don't feel like a ghost. I am not a ghost. I don't know anything for sure anymore. I don't tell you everything I am thinking anymore. I don't tell you what I'm thinking anymore. I don't want to haunt you anymore. I finally realized it was the compass that was broken. I finally realized the map wasn't even right, and anyway I have a bad feeling about all of this. I have a question with a devastating hypothetical inside of it. I have no rules or secrets anymore. I keep ripping pages out of my notebook. I keep saying I am trying. I know you'll be okay without me, but not the same. I love you less and less. I meant everything I ever said to you, even if I never said I would keep searching until I found you. I never said I would. I once had a long list of questions for you, but I answered them myself. I still think of how beautiful you are, how I suspect you will grow to miss me terribly. I tore your pages out of my diary and stopped writing your name. I touch my own sweet and nervous spine now. I try to focus on the things I dislike about you. I used to be yours; now I am mine. I used to imagine: [ ] I used to miss you all the time. I used to want to talk to you even when I was talking to you. I want to be let in, I said looking at your diaphragm. I was your first full stop, wasn't I? Wasn't I? I will still be the death of you. I wish I could. I wish I didn't. I wish I wouldn't. I would do it all again, but I wish I wouldn't. I would do it all again, even if it just took a long time. My dear, my darling, my dark cloud. Okay, I did. "Write down everything and of course you'll remember things" When it's over (and it's almost over, I promise) just know you cannot possess a thunderstorm or bring one back from the dead. "You wish you didn't," I read somewhere. Your face fits your face. Fits the palms of my hands.
Tell Me I’m Nothing
Only the atrophied animal sleeping at your ankles. No need to chain me to the bedpost. Every seduction needs only the smallest of aches. Every concession: my shoulder tapping your shoulder. My teeth tapping your teeth. Call me your error. Call me your stray. Know that I am more than my heartache. More than my strangeness, more than my arms tied up together. You can't fix something broken with something else that's broken. Empty bucket. Spineless bird. Although you now know me like a nightmare and undress me with your moonlit mouth, I know it's not enough. Sometimes everything works out. But no. It doesn't. Please don't do that thing anymore. Please forgive me. For this and for everything else that's coming. And believe I never meant to let you tunnel into me like that. The way love twists into a heart, mercilessly. And keeps twisting. I believed you when you said you would not be gentle. I just thought there was nothing left unbruised when we met. Only my threadbare heart crawling with larva, brimming with ghosts. I thought I could take it. But then we got quiet. Eventually, I opened my mouth. Call me your downpour. Call me your death. That night, I know I dragged you through the gutter of this. How could you refuse me once you'd turned me over. Once you made me your sorrow, your specter. Your spiral staircase. Your cistern full of pond water. When you said do this and I wanted to. I would live here for another year just to feel like that again. A sharp grip around my wrists. Cool breath like bee wings up my spine. But now all I feel is the vacuum of your egress. Believe me I have enough grief to flood the basement. And enough regret to burn the house down. Tell me, what could stay upright in the aftershocks of this. Even my doorframe is now a skewed and haunted thing. So everything broken keeps breaking. And we can't take the bones out of our bodies. I can't unsay that I loved you. Now that you're gone, the moon follows me home. Call me your aimless. Call me forgotten. Call me your fuckup, your weakness, your garbage. Your favorite aberration. Tell me I'm nothing. You refuse to dismantle this, so I will. If it's harder to unlove a thing why didn't you just leave me there that night on the porch to whimper and crawl up the steps alone.
Hack Me
over and over
you cipher and decipher me
again
again
and hack me
into 1s and 0s
you hack me
into pieces
in addition to my heart
take my lungs and all my teeth,
lumbar, larynx,
Jarvik 7
twist my screws out
one by one
by one
by one
it's been hard for me to care much
lately,
nothing really hurts
except TypeError:
print "I really am sorry."
config==source(avoldprogram)
loop
loop
loop
it doesn't even hurt
keep hacking
A Long Time Ago
We did the very things
we never imagined we would do.
And it's too late now,
I've had a long look at you.
Suddenly
it felt as if I'd never had any other life at all:
I woke up wearing a black crêpe dress, sangria lipstick,
and a tooth-crunching headache, dark and sharp.
But I remained a masterpiece
of composure
didn't I?
Nothing ever ruffles you, you noticed and also how
I was not beautiful, but self-mastery
can have the same magnetic pull
as beauty, can be so powerful
that molecules and people
realign themselves in a room.
The days that followed were a blur.
There were times I couldn't even hear
my own voice; it was hollow
and infinitely far away.
I didn't eat for two days.
The doorbell rang and rang.
I was busy reliving the moment where you and I
ran up the library steps.
Your navy shoes, the rain flecking our faces.
I fell in love exactly how you'd arranged it.
With my connivance, sure. But still.
It was refreshing to find someone
interested in me
apart from my achievements or misfortunes,
not always prying for more
or trying to pick my life apart like a fish split in two and splayed open—
those messy pin bones everywhere.
You sat me down and told me
the truth.
Even if you don't like Poe, he invented the detective story.
That was a long time ago.
There was the evening you stopped me in the doorway
to pick a thread off my sweater.
Days later, I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound
of your voice
speaking clearly in my head.
Come here.
When I knocked, the door had opened
quicker than I'd expected;
I was staring out at the street
thinking of something else.
You stopped me in the doorway
to pick a thread off my sweater.
And how spectacular to be reflected in your eyes.
I couldn't understand what you were saying,
I was too busy
turning your words over in my mouth,
those delicious syllables.
I heard you say: come here
Then the amber-colored everything,
like the afterglow of a dream.
Your Cézannes and owls and playing cards,
the closeness of your face in the dark.
There was a certain disorientation
of being the wrong girl,
with the wrong man, in the wrong apartment.
But what can you do
when someone implores you: come here
and reaches for your hip.
And their eyes can see inside of you.
And they know you've got the blues.
What song is this? I asked
to have something to say.
My loyalties were all over the place.
My hands, everywhere.
And even then,
despite everything,
it still came as a shock to me.
The next day, you used the words think and love
as I moved my breakfast around the plate.
Do you even know what love is?
What it looks like? What it tastes like?
How it shimmers for a second
before it turns to ash
and moves right through you like a ghost in the room.
How it tastes like two takeout boxes,
the clinking of glass,
another red mouth full of teeth.
Weeks can go by like that,
and it gets harder and harder not to be hungry.
You said I hate to keep harping on this,
but you really must eat something.
Yes, I know.
My parents said Intelligence isn't everything, Julia.
Yes, I know.
Yes, I know.
I like fried eggs! I like jam and toast!
I can eat four slices! I can eat the whole loaf!
I was speaking in a very loud voice, everyone
pretending not to hear.
Really, my wolfish ego eats everything in sight,
devouring affection and paperbacks, demanding
loyalty and silence and caffeine.
But the body is weak,
can be turned to off like a lamp.
That's what I did.
Meaning: the sculpture will emerge,
but only when we stand still
and are patient.
Look at me, I'm talking to you. I
could see inside you, too:
all that art and math and regret
adding up, mixed together,
slowly frothing over. That's why
you could sense my loneliness.
Black tea, that's the ticket, you knew.
No sugar but a heavy splash of cream.
You told me things would get better,
and they did.
Anyway,
that was a long time ago.
It's been
a while now.
This Sunday morning, I woke up late
and climbed from a heavy,
complicated dream. Nothing left
but a ringing in my ears.
Someone who looked like you
put ground glass in my food
because I had no discipline.
I am telling you this dream for a reason.
Because heartbreak
is my great secret, too. Don't you know—
almost everybody's got one.
Don't you know
that I never stopped loving you
so much it ached inside of me and almost felt like
a sadness
but a certain heaviness can take over, eventually
it prompts
a gentle goodbye at the gate, a parting glimpse,
our fingers tangled then no longer touching.
There is
a death haiku for this,
accompanied by a gorgeous piano elegy.
It doesn't really have a name.
Anyway,
that was a long time ago.
All I am trying to say is
Hello, old love.
I am still waiting for you.
You've always been a planet
without an atmosphere.
What I mean is that you're smart.
People like you.
They tie themselves
in knots for you.
I did.
A long time ago. Although it was unlike me,
I itched to reach for your hand
and when we were alone, I took it. Remember?
How sensational to be holding your hand,
to wake up next to you in the morning.
You took me to the mountains.
Taught me the difference between ebonized wood and true ebony.
Swept the hair off my face, gently.
By September, everyone noticed my appetite had improved.
You'd be surprised
what small, everyday things
can lift us out of despair.
Dark
When you latch onto me, I can feel your heart writhing, and mine too, reaching. Tightens like any muscle. But inside the body there is no light. Standing in front of the mirror is a barren errand. Most mornings I barely resemble myself; it's like waking up with a stranger. I realize that you too have a profound misrepresentation of me as someone delicate and sick and needing to be nourished: looks underfed, looks like a trapdoor, looks like someone who owns nothing in the world. So what. I prefer to surround myself with little. I let you overestimate my fragility. I like to look like prey. Unlike you, always trying to need more than you need. Never learning that accumulation only makes you lonelier. I am going to break you of that habit, just wait. I am going to rearrange your insides until they are exactly to my liking. You're not even pretending to resist. Just wait until I smile at you with my teeth. Oh yes, what a lyrical, lilting laugh I have. I can see how nervous you get. But you never just go home. I know exactly what it is that you want me to give you, but I don't want to give it. This is not an attempt to be cryptic: you aren't going to get what you want. You don't even know what you want. Really. You should just go home. Even if we are alike, my dark is darker than your dark. Swallows it whole. I'll create more dearth inside of you than I've ever sated. Don't follow me. Don't look at me head on. The desire for nourishment can be nourishment itself. That's why. When you look at me, I start changing your insides. A look can do that. My eyes take on a new wetness to them. Don't follow me. Don't go where I am going. There is no bottom to my depth. And inside the body there is no light. You just keep falling.
Torch
there is a torch right now between us and the only thing which will prevent us from lighting it is whether or not you can allow its ashes in your otherwise perfect atmosphere it would be easier to dismiss this view as simply pretty and walk away because it is getting cold and we forgot to bring heavier jackets to cut off this conversation because its levity is speckled with what-ifs and we-coulds so why make me say it? when you can see it in my eyes and all these lashes! spelling out: yesiwantthis waitforme maybeoneday youdontfoolme dontleavemehere hurryback tellnodonttell something tells me to be careful here and oh how i do hate being careful i have not been delicate but i have been precise: gritty and colossal. and you know what that took courage i see you've found those crevices in my character the curve of my spine that arch, that apse such a spectacle so sure i like to make my messes there it's okay we are both learning how worlds start to explode and then they don't there are birds with bad wings there is winter honeysuckle growing wild everywhere there are places we can go all of this means i... all of my thoughts are going down a chimney somewhere and burning but it's okay, we are learning and i only regret that it is taking me a lifetime to learn how to live if i could i would do things differently, i would i would i would have kissed you in that dim parking lot everything melting away in the dark we looked at each other so long it felt like bursting into flames your eyes said want and they parted my chestplate like an arrow i could eat salads for a month i swear i am cold but i am learning that before nourishment there must be docility as in, you can live by the ocean and still die of thirst now: hand over your kingdom. it is still solely your choice so do you want this? torch if only this metaphor were more complex if only i could allusion away my own existence i swear i have done it before, have you? for a lifetime i have been defined by my distance and my exclusions by the love that i dismiss when i try to fly away bird with bad wings it's okay, fly away if you need to but know that i am waiting for you i am lying low in the grass and staying perfectly still i am burning up with patience so i know all the math in your head says you shouldn't but my torch is yours if you want it and if you don't i have nothing left to hold onto and this sweet compulsory fire is starting to burn right through me
