When I Was Little, Probably 7 Or 8, I Spent A Summer Working In The Library At Our Church Helping Out

On being weak

Rainy days, everyone is equal. Everyone's pant cuffs soaked, smokers under awnings. We're all missing somebody else.

I basked in idleness like a dog in light. I saved myself.

Things healed and plants grew and if I die here or not litters will still be born. I could be born with them.

Sunny is a girl in a sea of girls

I want to be loved like a piece of jewelry. You would hate it if I were gone and you would feel my absence like a misplaced thought.

The third and last time we met you did not touch me in a new or exciting way. This is when I realized I was searching for a feeling that did not exist.

I want to be loved like a thing you find god in. There are few things like that: writing, discipline, truth. But I am no vessel of god, I am searching for it too.

Even though I looked at your face for many hours I cannot remember it. You had eyes and a mouth, unshaven. Your body cold and made to worship. The missing section of the heart is where humanity lies and your heart is impossibly whole.

Hi im Sophie I like silver jewelry quiet eyes and soft hair. Hot wax and mad cats and a good saxophone solo, I like friends who love me and I like to love; I like to be alone. Empty bathrooms a safe crowd a 1950s fire escape just out of Manhattan from where I can see the stars. I like a rickety thing, unsafe sex, breaking a searching gaze. I like a stranger, a stranger in a big city, a boring kind of stranger to whom things don’t happen; and I like playing a part, a person to whom nothing happens, nothing at all.

I used to love this city and now it just feels haunted

i wish i didn't feel so sick inside of my body i wish i was like everyone else i don't mean that but things would be a lot simpler if i did

everything i write turns out as an i-statement and maybe that means i don't think about anyone other than myself but i don't want to speak on someone else's behalf

Bruises on my knees i don't know where they came from. My seventh cigarette of the day.

Friendship

I listened to the whole of your three-page poem about the life you wanted to live. I cupped your dreams by my heart.

The gasp when the wind is knocked out of you. When you can't do anything but react. It's harder to stay quiet when you have to- the time I just had to smoke weed way past dusk boundaries and brought you with me and we lay on top of each other in the snow, your hand over my mouth because I was so high and each breath felt like a roar.

I brought you with me everywhere I went. Around my neck during hazy nights sprawled on the bathroom floor. Bad hookups where neither of us have had enough to drink. I'll never forget your face in the periphery of every memory.

Last summer I watched as you fell in the pool and your blood stained the water like little explosions. You were fine, it was just your foot, but afterwards we lay naked on the hot pool deck and you confided in me the things only I could hear, that sometimes still you wished you were dead.

I had no advice to give because I felt the same way. It was kind of funny. We've known each other for sixteen years but we're still right where we started. Looking towards the same future. The same people.

I don't think it would be hard to love you

my hair's been falling out in chunks

i only dream about my job

either way by odie leigh // jeff buckley // normal people by sally rooney // unknown, possibly natalie diaz // eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004) // old friend by mitski // halloween by phoebe bridgers // unknown // unknown

The sky is a foggy dark gray like I’ve hotboxed the whole planet and not just my 13th floor apartment, smoke curls out the window and it always has somewhere to go.

There is no room for hesitation or stupidity. It just is, and I am carried by want, impulse, the direction of the wind.

Like she said, I want to feel the heat of all the bodies. I want to be alive but aliveness disgusts me, I want to be predictable and human-like. Every moment I am thinking about how it will end and this gets me nowhere, so no wonder I feel stuck.

Trapped in between two tall buildings, endless city blocks, always paralyzed by fear, asking stupid questions like it’s part of my nature— which it is— existing under a false lightless sky; I’m finding wonder in things that I can’t see, taking the easy way out.