Laura Pierce Horton

If you have an iPad, you should check out Katachi, an iPad magazine, and download the latest issue. Scott Foley and I have been working on a 12-part video series, The Shifting Hours, the first episode of which premiered this week (though I think the first three are actually available if you scroll through the feature).

Below is the promo that Scott did up (pretty bad-ass) -- get excited:

I dressed for mid-October, though it is mid-November, and I’ve found myself in mid-May. I have excused myself from my desk – a place where seasons have no meaning except during those first and last two minutes of the day when we add or remove layers – because my walk to the train indicated an opportunity to sit and read in the park. And so, here I am. Sitting in the park, autumn sun filling me like water does to a parched sponge. I think of you because I always think of you and because I am warm, a feeling I have come to associate with being in your arms.

For the last couple of weeks, I have been reading a love story, of which my opinion wavered in and out of favor. Today, warm and reading the final chapters, I am immersed. The story has become inseparable from our own. That a year ago today I was taking in the same sounds of crushed leaves and the same spectrum of burnt fall colors, and also the first taste of you, the first feel of your arm holding my frame to your chest, the first blurry gaze of you asleep on my pillow, probably has a lot to do with why I can’t stop imagining this day as if you were by my side.

I am calm for the first time all month. Blissfully calm. Stomach-completely-pit-free calm. I am outside of myself, hovering above everything, detached from my life and my worries and my uncertainty. I am both wholly present and wholly absent. I sit and observe my surroundings, breathe them in, bear witness to life unfolding. I am lost in the beauty of the scene – the soft afternoon light filtering through the not-yet-bare branches and reflecting off the wake of the ducks and geese eager to rescue crumbs and crusts from their certain drowning.

We craved a storm so extreme our insides would finally find relative peace. In watching naked destruction fall upon our road, our trees, our power-lines, we hoped we might watch something succumb to the same fate that had been ravaging our hearts (rubbed raw by our ribs with each overpowered beat), our lungs (worn down by whispers and wails) and our brains (overheated and undernourished). Instead we found scattered twigs and torn leaves and took refuge in TV marathons and video games.

In another form, in another situation, I'm sure I have felt the same heaviness, the same scorched chest, the same tendency toward tears and small corners. I have been a girl pouring over lyrics, fairy tales, and old movies, and I recognize my senses now filled with the same uncertainty that was once scrawled on crumpled paper and whispered into starry skies. But it is different to feel this way with you. It is different to feel both so utterly afloat and so completely anchored.

You are the only one who sees what I'm feeling, through the muddy water I hide beneath, and makes me feel it. Though sometimes to stop drowning and start breathing feels like simply drowning in a new way, you are the only one whose arms can make the mess in my head subside for a moment. I have never known laughter like ours. I have known no hands, no arms, no lips, that make me feel as safe. Wild, alive, and safe.

Our story has a different taste to me now, something like the faded mint of chewing gum that has been stretched across your tongue too many times. Our visits are shorter, our conversations less interesting. (We've stopped admitting flaws, and I'm not sure what that means). As I sit across from you, your words wash over me like a swarm of insects that I have to wince and dodge my way through, and you are increasingly aware of my discomfort.

We run through the motions of what we once were, occasionally admitting a detail that our current relationship doesn't warrant, but somehow we still feel obligated, like we're committing some kind of infidelity against our former selves by feeling so distant.

Then you sip your drink the same way you always have, and I bring my knees to my chest the same way I always have. We smile. For a moment, I think I still know you the way I've always known you. I could paint the way you tie your shoes, the way you drive, the way you run your fingers through your hair.

But we can't seem to dig ourselves out of the silence.

I'm Peter. Laura was kind enough to host me during my meandering guest posting tour. She gave me "The moment you know you're in love" as a writing prompt. I hope you enjoy what I did with it.


anyone can get it up for a sunset
but
those that just
know
the true beauty
lies
in what happens
immediately after
the colours are darker
richer
the night coolness
shyly introducing itself
to you
to us
it's always
the right after moments
i think
as the echoes of passions shared
and created
fight to continue to be heard
as our bodies are held together
magnetically
a soothing heaviness
coats
us
as our brains recap
the words
that reached escape verocity
shared moments of delicious shyness
wash over
the back of my hand traces your hip
goose bumps follow
with no regard
to keeping
a safe distance
as flashbacks
collide
with anticipation
you know
as i whisper
my lips caressing
barely
your stomach
riling up
the butterflies
once more
you whisper

It was something she needed to say, something she should say, and probably, most importantly, something he needed to hear. She knew this. She knew all of this, and so she sat, impatiently clicking her pen as the thoughts traveled in tiny and incomplete electrical currents, readying themselves for her fingers but not yet making any sense. The pad of her thumb cradled the shape of the end of her pen, and as she saw her body adjust to the lag-time, she worried that the words, if they ever came, would be but crude and rehearsed shells of themselves, stumbling along the pale blue line like a wounded animal. She peered to her left toward a pile of scrapped drafts, the words of which were too clichéd and too impersonal, too vague and too elusive, or simply too much, which made them sound insincere even if that was not the case.

She closed her eyes and took a breath and tried to create an image that depicted the emotion, as emotion on its own is not concrete enough to grab hold of a heart and make a difference, but the emotion of present was too overwhelming in its power to force into something so confining as an image. By luck, her mind chose to carry her through her memories, to return her to a place where the words were not so hard to come by, where she feared never gaining in place of fearing loss. It was a much easier place to be because what she feared was what she had, what she knew, and what she wanted is what she had been or at least had hoped to be moving toward. But now she was happy, and what she feared was going back to place she knew to be not as happy. And so the image came.

I picture myself before you as a stool with one leg slightly shorter than the others – a little wobbly, pretty uncomfortable, giving the illusion of balance but never quite achieving it. That means you’re the little wooden wedge that my short leg now rests on. I feel solid with you.

What she said in those words to him meant more than he would know because what she said in an abstract and indirect fifty words could be said more accurately in six: he was a part of her

Sometimes, my heart beats so fiercely I have to hold my hand over my chest to prevent the whole thing from exploding in some violent bloody mess. I think it’s feeding something, like a vampire tree readying itself to burst through my skin, taking root by crawling through my body like cracks in concrete, reaching toward my fingertips in ribbons of gnarled wood, bending and arching like arthritic fingers stretching after an extended grip.

I know I should be dreaming in butterfly wings and streams of bubbles reflecting the sun in patchy rainbow squares, in kittens yawning or the tickle of furry creatures nuzzling my neck, but it doesn’t feel quite grounded when I compare something with depth to something that rides the wind so effortlessly, or something with strength to something so sweet and vulnerable.

It’s not that it’s painful (although I’m not sure would go so far to say that it’s painless considering how hard I fight for words only to find that they come when I don’t want them, like razored lightning: violent but fleeting), but it doesn’t feel like open meadows and fluffy clouds. It feels like the satisfying final breath of a wild exploration that ends in dirty sweat and blood-stained skin, probably because years of wrangled thoughts and caged emotions have turned my love into something like a steep rock-face soaked in equatorial sun, and we’re left gripping with our toes, laughing at the elements for thinking they have a chance.

My minds feels as though it's wrapped in crushed velvet, a fabric I've always associated with a discreet form of violence because when I touch it the wrong way, go against the grain, each thread attacks my finger like a dull arrow shot from too far away.  I'm of the opinion that a boa constrictor could do damaging things with crushed velvet if it found a way to make its threads sharp.

The layer allows my thoughts to float and mute themselves: my words are slow and my motions diverted. I have to work just a little harder than usual to do usual things. My alarms are in pairs, my coffees in trios, my spills anticipated, my knees permanently bruised. Yet, nothing is out of place. My hair and teeth are brushed, my face and sheets washed, my coffee and bed made. The bills are paid, the week is planned, checks signed, groceries bought, schedule adhered to. The routine is set, and I am not off-track, off-beat or off-kilter. But Ms. Clavel with her French accent and her habit is tearing through my veins, fretting about nothing concrete, muttering her catch-phrase.

You're right, madame, something is not right. My mind is not held hostage by unfinished thoughts. They seem to be, quite obstinately, jointly hosting tea parties, getting comfortable with staying somewhere before complete.

Dear brain, things are about to get wildly uncomfortable.

In a room filled with sawdust,
each fragrant inhale is a pleasant reminder
of something being created.
If the light shines
in the right spot,
it can be hard
not to get dizzy
from the way the dust rides the air,
the way each particle
adds texture to the moment:
everything's blurry,
slightly out of focus.
The colors blend a little,
painted by
the settling sawdust,
and the balance of hues
creates an imbalance in heart rhythm –
an intoxicating moment of peace.

I could fall asleep.
The safeness I feel,
here in this room,
smelling the textured air
now painted with memory as well as debris,
it's never been quite so easy to slip
into my dreams.
The walls were never so welcoming,
the details never so unimportant.
(My yesterday had a flickering light,
reflecting off of and back into the room.
Maybe that spot is covered now
with the film of
those pieces of things we broke in frantic creation,
maybe all the new details
 have diverted attention,
but it doesn't bother me now.)
 

These are words I wouldn't want to say to walls.  These are words I'd rather swallow and have rot my organs than hear come out of my mouth, or out of my fingertips, but I suppose I'm not supposed to do that anymore.  I'm not supposed to pretend to not feel.  I'm not supposed to go back to numb.

But I could. I could pretend like it doesn’t still hurt. Like I don’t remember your face and hear your voice in that moment and clench my fists, digging my fingernails into my palms until I draw blood. Know that I could. Know that I'm so good at pretending like it doesn't hurt, you wouldn't know the difference.  

I wish I could blame you for my needing to say this, but it’s not entirely your fault. Because what I said to you to make you say the things I'm now reacting to, the trigger to everything, wasn’t completely true.  I answered a question in haste, in a nod of a head, ready to accept any answer you offered. Maybe you deserved more.  Maybe you didn't, maybe you shouldn't have asked, but maybe you deserved more.

The truth is I have never told this truth before. I have told the full story in half truths or half the story in full truths but never all of it and true together.

I have it, though. I have it, emotions and all, if you want it. I think you’d like that part of it, that part of the truth. The truth I’ve never told.  I don't. To me it's like a dirty secret, buried under a floorboard or tucked into the carved out pages of an old encyclopedia, because though I'm sure there's beauty in feeling what I felt, in the humanness of it all, feeling that kind of human was more shameful than beautiful. There's is no liberation in looking for meaning, only the feeling of being a receipt crushed into the tread of construction worker's boot as he braves the slushy sidewalk corners to avoid the crowd.

I'm dealing with an absence of things to say, things to think, as though my life has stored its meaning in a carved wooden lockbox because the beauty of it seemed to rest on some complementary frequency but thoughtlessly misplaced the key, leaving the two of us, my life and me, to sit and stare at this work of art wordlessly, afraid to speak lest it be something inane and offensive.  We'd like to actively hope for a means to access the meaning it holds within itself, but more frequently the delicate woodwork and the stained iron of the lock leaves us in a state of hypnosis.  (Keys do not walk themselves to open palms, yet here we sit with our wrists askew, waiting for a weight to fall into our fingers).

We tell a story  – or I do anyway, as my life nods along – of someone who knows where and who to be, of someone who might have lost a key but broke the hinges or manipulated a paper clip because meaning was all too important to be left stagnant in cedar.  This someone is as oblivious to what the future holds as we are, as afraid, as happy to sit and wait for something to come to her, but she is also certain that there is more, some undiscovered fulfillment in the pursuit of dreams and the wild pull of ambition. She sweats when only breath is demanded and bleeds when they call for sweat.

In moments of disenchantment, she grabs onto shards of broken hope and turns them into prisms, which then turn her the temporary relief of her moments of optimism into a mesmerizing splendor – dreams of dancing with green and purple to watch them envelop her in yellow, blue and red instead.

The words of her flow out of me and into the air to settle in the intricate carvings of the box, which now balances atop a bench beneath the readied swing of hammer, the beauty ready to be traded for meaning though not without intent to find beauty in the aftermath.

The flames behind us made our shadow shape-shift like wind to a pile of leaves, scattering the form across the room with a complete disregard for traditional notions of aesthetics. Our shadow cast a shape on the carpet that looked something like a water buffalo. Or maybe a hippopotamus.

There was something cohesive about the way we sat, our fingers intertwined, our necks curving gently into each other, eyes unfocused in the same direction, as though we were caught in the same daydream.

It had been the kind of day that was too easy to disregard. Nothing so exciting that it would make cocktail party conversation, nothing so riveting that another generation would hear about it, but simple, easy joy found in eyes and smiles, elbows and sides, toe wiggles and head scratches, and the quiet feeling that it didn’t get better (but knowing that it must, or else we would end up like Enno and Eva, looking back on better times with “opaque” expressions on doorsteps), an unintentional high that left our eyes bright even with our heads backlit.

I broke out of the spell and freed myself from the embrace to face him because I wanted to see him, to have a visual for the memory because the feeling would only carry for four days, and I needed seven, and for a moment we looked right through each other, each stuck in some kind of orbit. Again I broke out of the spell and freed myself, this time from the trance we couldn’t help but fall into, to fall back into the same unfocused stare in the same enrapturing daydream because seven suddenly felt heavy, like shadowed forests and cold nights, like bitter winds, like walking through a spiderweb, and I needed the feeling. The memory would have to wait.

I watched the feelings unfold like a flower in stop motion.  She walked into the room with a slump in her shoulder and a crease in her forehead, and it broke my heart.  She looked tired.  Not just didn't-get-enough-sleep-last-night, or had-a-long-day tired.  She looked worn.  Slowly threadbare. Then she looked up and there was this moment of honest relief, and when I felt her arms around me it was as though I was anchoring her to the moment, keeping her from remembering whatever it was she had been going through.

As we sat, her head on my lap, my fingers in her hair like always, I watched her face slip in and out of that same fatigue.  I asked because I had to ask, but never too deeply because that kind of tired only comes when talking about it on anyone else's terms has stopped doing any good, so mostly I sat and waited because silence stopped being an absence of communication between us a long time ago, and I couldn't say or do anything to make it better.  Make it fixed.  Doc Brown could.  I could only say the things like, "Give it time." But what good would that do? She can't very well actively make time pass.  "Things will get better." They might.  They might get better.  They don't get better for everyone.  Sometimes they get worse.  Sometimes people don't recover.  Probably, for her, they would get better, but who am I to tell her what things would happen? I didn't predict this.

So instead of empty words I gave full attention, and we sat –my fingers in her hair, her head on my lap – staring at the ceiling, waiting for the silence to become oppressive.

Most days, he felt sane. He felt normal. Never ordinary (he had just enough pride to consider himself superior), but like he fit in, like he blended. But there were other days, bad days, confusing days, that he felt more like the kind of person who could disappear. Fade away. The kind of person that rode the border between sane and not-so-much a little too carelessly and one day just slipped and didn't recover. Because the parts of himself that stayed in his head? Those he knew. But the ones that knew what to do when people were around... those were trickier, harder to control and not always around when he needed them.

The blinds in his bedroom shut out the light completely, and bad days had him sleeping until mid-afternoon. He knew better than to start a day off with coffee when the sun was so low in the sky, but the caffeine withdrawal had a tendency to make his head pound, and the insomnia had stopped being about not being tired a few weeks ago, so he wasn't quite sure what he was proving to anyone except that he had an anti-social side. A grumpy, anti-social side that winced when his roommate's girlfriend laughed and rolled his eyes when the off-key top-40 notes filtered out over the sound of the shower.

He didn't smoke, but on bad days he wouldn't mind a cigarette. He hadn't really been drunk since the summertime, but on bad days he could see a pool of tequila doing him a world of good. Questionable good. Temporary absences of bad disguising itself as good. But it was better than the bad because on bad days, the bad seeped like venom through his pores, settling in his joints to make them squeak and his bones to make them ache. It nestled in the nooks of his skulls, burrowing behind his ears, in the pressure points in his neck, then crawling up to tap on his ear drums in uneven percussion. His pupils danced in unchanging light.

On bad days, his time had a way of feeling empty, still. Like his brain belonged to a different body, like his heart was trying to escape his ribcage, like it had to grow to be strong enough to last because its rhythm was all off-track.

Most days, he was alright, in control.  He was just another guy on the street, just another guy on the subway car, just another guy in line at the pharmacy. And even on the bad days, even when he was so far lost in himself that he couldn't be reached, he hadn't reached unrecoverable. Not yet.

I sit across from a familiar face at a familiar table and have a familiar conversation – a commentary on shoes and late night television programming and a strategy discussion on awkward social encounters (exchanging tactics and horror stories).  The conversation is buoyed by jokes and words that are more fun to pronounce than useful to the discussion, and I watch the gaps in conversation fill and wonder when my moment should be, wonder if there's a not-awkward way to steer the conversation, because her not asking isn't necessarily a product of her not caring.

I'd like to tell her everything even though she probably doesn't want to hear it because telling everything is the only way this will all make sense.  I have previously given bits and pieces and walked away feeling misunderstood, and this is too important for her to misunderstand.

I want to tell her it rained on a Friday night in October. I want to tell her that I begrudgingly left a blanket-nest in my apartment to find a substitute comfort in cheap beer and conversations with near strangers, and that my watch refused to lie and let me believe I could leave without questions, so I paced and rotated through the people I knew until a conversation became a little bit interesting, but before the conversations grew distracting enough, my reason to leave walked through the door: a reminder of everything I hadn't figured out, everything I wasn't doing right.

I want to tell her how I didn't leave.  How I froze.  How I sought sanctuary in the fading crown molding and how I buried my head in the shoulder of the only person in attendance who understood, but that beer had made that person distract-able, and the story was stale and not keeping her focus, so she passed me off onto the next person. I want to tell her how I let a stranger be my sounding board.

I want her to know that it took me a few minutes to make eye contact, that I don't actually remember what it was he said that made me turn my head toward him except that it was a challenge in some way, it was something I wouldn't expect a stranger on a couch to say, and it wasn't the familiar empty house-party banter that leads to more drinking and less talking. I want her to know that at some point in what had evolved from my rant to our conversation, the stranger and I made the kind of eye contact you have to recover from and that after a few twists and turns of the evening, we found ourselves on the front porch with uncertain smiles and sideways glances.  She already knows that the empty street once had meaning to me, standing as I was across from a house filled with a bumbling series of mistakes, but I want her to understand that as the stranger disappeared into that same street, I lost my thoughts and my balance.

She knows he's not a stranger anymore, but I want her to know that his kisses separate me from reality and his arms keep me from losing my mind, and that even when phone calls get tripped up by awkward pauses or we unintentionally hurt each other, it feels like we've figured it out, like we're doing it right. I want her to know that it's not the familiar story to tell at the familiar table amongst familiar jokes and familiar conversations, but I'm in a world with a whole new concept of familiar, and I'd kind of like her to be part of it.

I lie and say reality has become so troubling that I need a break from it, dipping my nights in poisons encased in crystal so they catch the light and make me think I've found gold. I lie and say I love the nights I spend forgetting the days I've spent failing to grow.

I wander back to a warm bed or a warm couch and find myself curled up in the arms of people I love, whispers in my ears of how they’ll never let me go, but the back of my mind has a digital countdown to the day they see my mess as nothing more mysterious than a sink full of dishes (the day they make me someone else's problem, the day they give up).

Because where I'm from we hide the mess. We rake the leaves into neat piles to be picked up by men with trucks and carried to somewhere with high fences, meticulously repainted as soon as weather starts to wear them down. We hide wire and cords behind plaster, laundry baskets behind doors and garbage bins in little wooden huts. We have rules about neon lights. We use fake grass, or truck it in from a farm upstate – purebred like our blood and our pets that cost more than your annual salary.

It's not so bad, to drive along and not see the dirty laundry, to walk among beautiful people with beautiful clothes and beautiful cars and consider myself among them. It's not so bad until nightfall leaves my room lit with starlight and I have to escape out the window to breathe because the voices in my head have taken up all the oxygen. It's no so bad until the idea of feeling beautiful has faded along with the green in the grass and the life in the trees. So here's my mess, my dirty laundry. Here are my wires and cords, my imperfections, my scars, my neon lights. I lie and say I'll never change.

We sat down at the tiny cafe table, angling our hips away from each other but still managing the occasional knee bump or foot graze.  My fingers were inconsolable, tapping against the paper cup, worming underneath the cardboard sleeve, and picking at any anomaly with each fingernail.  You smiled at me, and I winced.  I tried to cover it up with closed eyes and a half-smile, but the half-smile was hard to keep in tact with my eyes closed because the ball of fear and tears and memories welling in my throat fed on the darkness.

I shook my head and opened my eyes in time to see yours staring back at them.  You were grinning in the same way as the time when we buried our legs in the sand so the bugs would stop biting them, or when the rainstorm had us soaked and piled on top of each other for warmth in the back of your friend's SUV.  I couldn't stand to see you so happy to be there, so I averted my eyes to the cup in my hands and watched the whipped cream disappear into my hot chocolate.  Shit, this was an awful idea.

Then came the portion of our evening for mean-spirited questions, for answers formed from words carefully chosen and quietly released, for dialog.  Because with you and me it had always been late night talks about 1996 Nickelodean programming or lists of animals that have defied evolutionary norms to stay around, but talking about "us" had been carefully avoided, and we had missed our chance because there was no longer an "us" of which to speak, only a "you" and a very separate "me," and that day a "me and him" that I wasn't prepared to discuss and you weren't anxious to leave alone – a screaming example of everything that we had never been neatly packaged into the word I never let you be, graced with the time I never gave you and the patience we never had.

You had long since become an image from my past that I tucked into my suitcase for emergency self-esteem, a souvenir from days I left behind for a reason but had the odd experience of falling back into every now and again by virtue of geography and school calendars, so you and I persisted past our expiration date and on that day were left with stale conversation and a bitter aftertaste.

By the third round of interrogation, in which I hesitantly revealed a few details you begged for but didn't actually want to hear, my fingers were desperate to avoid your skin but kept landing too close because the tiny cafe table seemed tinier. The hot chocolate had lost its heat, the flavor of the whipped cream now an assault on my tongue, which paired with the assault on my ears was finally altogether too much.  The bells on the door sounded with a cruel holiday spirit that reminded us both how lonely the afternoon had been.

I stared down at the bubbles floating around in my cup, wondering if they were, in fact, carbonation, or if something had dropped from the ceiling and caused a commotion. (Then I thought perhaps I'd be better off not knowing.) My shoes were sticking to the basement floor, and my brain was not yet so clouded that the sound didn't make my stomach turn. We stood in the corner, beneath the pipes making disconcerting noises, contorting every so often to ensure successful evasion of the walls.

Not that any of this was particularly unusual. Trying to avoid letting my elbow touch yours... that was less usual. Being afraid to speak to you as we stood alone in the corner of a dark basement... that had only started making headlines a few weeks earlier (when we realized that whatever fault-line we had been sliding across had finally left us disconnected).

I peeled my feet off the floor, left then right, then left again and right again because there was nothing better to do except perhaps be entertained for a moment by the couple prematurely inebriated on the empty dance floor.

You had disappeared. Your eyes were disconnected from the scene, your elbows pulled in tightly to your sides as though you expected a guy with an ether-soaked cloth and a scalpel to drag you into a closet and leave you without a kidney.

Your facial features twitched along with the movement of your thumbs on the touch screen that had given you more cause for attention than any person in the room, and we were both losing patience. I broke and spoke. You broke and screamed.

My grip on my cup tightened, the ridges leaving marks on the pads of my fingers, the beer inside forced toward the rim. I felt my tendons melt and turn my body into a stack of useless bone and tissue, my shoulders frozen in tension, my eyes retreating into my head like a trapped homecoming princess in a horror movie. I watched from within as my mouth made noise, as my feet pivoted and carried me up the stairs, as I sunk wordlessly into a stranger's couch.

It sounds like theatrics. Like a man in a tweed hat and a tweed suit in the center of a dark stage telling us how to suspend our disbelief as he puffs away on a corncob pipe. It sounds like something that becomes an eighth grader’s away message, something that I would have clung to in my 15-year-old heartbreak when I doodled the lyrics of songs that I didn’t understand on my shoes. It sounds like a temper tantrum, like Tom Cruise on Oprah, like the girl whose Facebook status updates tell her life story.

But I’m sitting here, staring at the wall with a smirk on my face, and I want to bang cymbals. I want to learn how to play the trumpet so I can announce things off balconies to unsuspecting passersby. I want to stand two inches away from a stranger and tell them my life is changing. I want the side of a building as a canvas and three shopping carts of spray paint.

The words sitting stagnant on my tongue, the ones I am always careful not to let get mixed in with the clutter, deserve some theatrics. They deserve a quiet moment to explode, echoing back at me in new and interesting tones as someone else’s taste buds discovers their flavor. But I may have kept them inside just a little too long, and now I'm carbonated and not yet settled from a bumpy ride, ready to provide theatrics even if the moment's entirely inappropriate.

Her lips rolled into a pointed smile, stuck onto her face like clay, and the tilt of her head was just a little too choreographed. Her voice echoed in my ribcage, bouncing off bones and organs like a fiery pinball, her words sharp even buried in small talk. No different from the last time I saw her, I had braced myself for tension but hoped for warmth, waiting for her eyes to register, to connect. I stood in front of her with an uncertain smile on my face, feeling her words pour into me unfiltered, trying to find the place in my head where it didn't hurt to hear her speak. Where is that head of yours? The words slide over your glossed lips with a sordid saccharinity, but there's something distinctly ... Jafar-like about the way you hold my attention. 

Sometimes she touched my shoulder as though she had invested something in me, as though we were family, and the way her fingers pressed the fabric of my shirt into my skin made me instinctively tense my neck in flight defense.

When she left, we paced. We exhaled. We gripped hands and locked arms and buried our heads in the throw pillows. Our unease pooled in the center of the room, growing as we cycled through thoughts, placing bets on how many weeks it would be until the other shoe dropped, until our instinctive-grimace-reaction to her re-established itself as justified, until her thoughts dribbled through the phone speakers to draw blood.

I’ve been teasing you with cloudy tidbits about the past and the future, embedded in my cryptic speech and my tendency to say everything except what you want: cold, hard facts about us; painted in glossy, white letters against a matte, black surface. Because then you’d know, without a doubt, that my head was in the game. They would be there: words. As if strung into the air by a wave of purple, shimmering light: words to the thoughts of this … strange girl.

I’ve been ready, waiting, watching the words fall into place, one by one, trying not to lose my mind because where are the priorities, after all, in a brain that manages the perfect adjective for the electrician, but fails to conjure up anything beyond a measly pronoun for the consuming thought that’s hasn’t left since it took to nesting a few weeks back? And I’m finally at the point where I’ll just take my brain in whatever capacity and do what I can because sometimes… sometimes when you kiss me, I want to cry because it hurts how perfect it feels, and every time I look in your eyes, I want to run a little faster to what we might be, and even though I know that means that if I trip, it will hurt more when I fall, I’m still running. I’ll keep running till you say stop.

The wind carried the sparks off into the dark sky, teaming up with the smoke to take a moment of brilliance away from the stars.  The six of us lay on the ground, he with his head on the sand, I with my mine on his chest, and for the moment we weren't worried about the grains of sand seeping into our socks and waistbands. We stared reverently as the silhouette of the bonfire shivered against the night, glowing like a spotlight on a dark stage.  I changed the grip on my beer and shifted my weight to my elbow, eager to see everything the evening had to offer: the way the waves took turns giving us a new look at the moon, the glow of the horizon inviting our thoughts to dream with a little more risk.

"We need a soundtrack."

Cue headlights, someone's fingers fumbling over the dashboard, and an Atmosphere song making its way around the windshield of the Jeep. Our feet jumped across and dug into the cooling sand, our arms swinging without direction. I could feel his eyes follow me as the shadows from the bonfire made shapes on my face.  It wasn't the first night of obscured lines of friendship, and it wouldn't be the last, but it was always contained in day-lengths, encased in memories not spoken of, just replayed like the best verse of a forgotten song, almost as good as we remember it to be.