really? seriously. fuck this, and fuck you, and fuck all these fucking words and if I never speak or type another god damn thing it'll be too soon. I hate this. I hate all these words and these moments piled up and this shit and those moments burned into my head like fucking scars that I'll never erase before you said too much and I didn't know any better.
fuck you.
fuck the notes I left you thrown away, and fuck you for leaning in. and fuck everyone who says things like "this is a learning experience" and "you'll walk away from this stronger" and "look at all these positive things" and yeah, so much -- So. Much. -- of my world is open now, out on the front lawn, my ability to hide down for the count in the last round... so there's little snapshots and milliseconds of gratitude for that, but the rest of it is like a fucking freight train bearing down in my mind every minute of the day and night. the page fills in by itself like a player piano from the instant I wake. the things you shouldn't have done. the things you shouldn't have said. and how I did what any girl in my shoes would do and fuck you for not owning your half of this. fuck. you.
dear all the girls in the world that I haven't met yet, to the woman with the notebooks on her shelves just like me who will look at me the way I looked at her, while she was too busy looking back: please, if you're going to start a fire, show up for it. either burn with me or hold the water for when I can't stand it anymore, I don't care which. but don't light it up and throw me in and then throw the matches away, one by one, in different trashcans and in rivers and in-between a stranger's car seats and out the windows of distant highways, like they do with clothes after a murder so they won't get caught. I'm more than a shoe in a dumpster and a t-shirt flung off the aurora bridge.
and for the love of whatever the fuck is in charge of the universe, don't make a fucking mix tape for me (or for anyone else) if you're not going to wade in past the rough surf. it's not fair. keep it to yourself. be the most epic of your besties. but don't leave it for me, signed with a heart and the beginnings of a promise.
and imaginary girl, if we make it past that rough surf and l-words and the awkwardness of the holding of hands and we swoon to the bands and lay side by side, night after night, don't expect me to not get caught up in you some. don't start any of this with dirty pans on the back burner that you can't bring yourself to clean. and when we make dinner in your kitchen, and cut vegetables and sing songs, and have all those moments starting to pile up on the corners of everything we touch like polaroids in little haphazard stacks -- if you've got those fucking pans sitting there, don't tell me it's my problem that I wished you'd have cleaned them.
god dammit.
it is my problem.
fuck.
I saw that fucking pan from day one, congealed with the remains of a dinner for the girl who came before me, that last dinner of love and hope having you by the fucking throat -- and I pretended it wasn't there. I believed you. you probably even believed yourself. and a smarter girl than me with colder blood in her veins would have seen through those grazings of fingertips and eyes that watched me cross the room and stepped back and said what I wanted to say from the first fucking night -- that you weren't alright and that I should go home. and you wore my shirt and sent pictures and talked about summertime in november and europe and your whole face softened sometimes even when you weren't drunk and you fucking knew. you knew you couldn't do this. and I did too. and at anyone else's house, that dirty pan would have sent me running for the hills, or to help with the cleaning, depending on the context.
somewhere, in some of the literature of alcoholics anonymous, it talks about trusting our instincts -- and (paraphrase, obvs) it gets to like going to the gym, from timid and tepid to a force that is strengthened and relied upon.
I just answered the door. the ups driver asked me how I was doing. I asked him if he really wanted to know. he did. I told him. girls are crazy, and apparently I'm too pretty to be all sad-ed up in a basement apartment on a friday night.
time to change the laundry.
me
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