That’s when I realized it isn’t good-bye because it feels wonderful. It’s good-bye because it feels so final, like maybe it’s for good. // I wonder if you ever talk about missing me to anyone. // we’re all using other people to distract us from the one person who truly matters // Every star may be a sun to someone. // i’m that kind of person who between two choices always pick the wrong one // i would lose weight but i hate losing // “unrealistic conceptions of real people”

From here on out, I am only interested in what is real. Real people, real feelings. That’s it. That’s all I’m interested in."

Film: Almost Famous

You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how you love. There is courage in that.

 Still writing about you feels like screaming 
into someone else’s abyss.
A void that echoes back and back and back:

I AM NOT YOURS. 

 I stand on a ledge in hell
still howling for our love. 

 As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love. 

 If we both look at the same moon and you still don’t want to call to say goodnight then maybe we’re not looking at the same moon anymore. Maybe the moon has nothing to do with it. Maybe you’re not the same person. Maybe I’m not. 

goals: write something really fucking good about you.

 I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive. 

You’ve got a good heart
I like that about you.

You’re always in trouble
and I like that too. 

 It is so easy to make monsters out of the people I have loved 

 

I think we deserve

a soft epilogue, my love.

We are good people

and we’ve suffered enough.

 

 I swear every poem I write for you is the last one. I swear this is the last one. 

 I still wake up
with things to
tell you.

One day, I won’t.

I will learn placid acceptance.
I will stop panicking when I can’t perfectly remember
the pitch of your voice
or the curve of your jawline.

The smell of cinnamon won’t
make me sad anymore.

At this point it’s not about finding someone
to replace you. I have spread my love
all over the place.

It’s about trying to sleep
knowing

I live in a world
that has your hands
in it. 

“I Still Forget We’re Not Even Friends” 

Wouldn’t we all look guilty, if someone searched hard enough?

 I still have a lot of growing to do
and I know there is more room for it
in your absence. 

 I have found myself leaving fresh kills at the doorstep of an old lover again 

 You think I’m not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you’ll burn. 

 How cruel, how profoundly tender. 

drifting along 
the page,

touching words
from a different life,

asking them
to remember.

We spoke endlessly about everything and nothing. Now, I cannot even remember the sound of your voice.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

Today I heard my heart screeching like a subway train
loudly enough to remind me it was still human
loudly enough to hurt

Me: I met a boy.
Me (two days later): nevermind

if I lie here

if I just lay here

I’ll probably fall asleep so leave me alone

You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.

In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.

Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn me, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.

you have to love yourself enough to not tolerate disrespect, disloyalty, and wishy washy feelings. If a person doesn’t value you, move on.

Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

Alcohol will only make a person cheat if they’d considered doing it while sober. Being drunk changes your behavior, not your morals.

The (500) Days of Summer attitude of “He wants you so bad” seems attractive to some women and men, especially younger ones, but I would encourage anyone who has a crush on my character to watch it again and examine how selfish he is. He develops a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projects all these fantasies. He thinks she’ll give his life meaning because he doesn’t care about much else going on in his life. A lot of boys and girls think their lives will have meaning if they find a partner who wants nothing else in life but them. That’s not healthy. That’s falling in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person.- Joseph Gordon-Levitt








Soon I’ll just be a series of images that sometimes flash through your mind, when you least expect it. And after that, only a few will stay.

Then, one. A memory of a memory.






so when am I gonna sit on a roof with someone at 3am like in the movies

In the end there doesn’t have to be anyone who understands you. There just has to be someone who wants to.

*contours and highlights my personality*

 I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.

please fall in love with me so i can steal your clothes and buy you coffee in the morning and be the one you call when you can’t sleep and hold ur hand 24/7 and kiss you when you get mad at me and just be next to you all the time and oh my god i am so sad

If we do not make it this lifetime, I hope we have enough love left to try again.

“why are you awake at three in the morning” asks the person who is also awake at three in the morning

Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’

if there is light
it will find
you.





She still smiles from time to time, definitely a charming smile, but it’s always limited somehow, a smile that never goes beyond the moment. A high, invisible wall surrounds her, holding people at arm’s length.

My dentist once told me that letting go is like pulling a tooth. When it was pulled out, you’re relieved, but how many times does your tongue run itself over the spot where the tooth once was? Probably a hundred times a day. Just because it wasn’t hurting you doesn’t mean you didn’t notice it. It leaves a gap and sometimes you see yourself missing it terribly. It’s going to take a while, but it takes time. Should you have kept the tooth? No, because it was causing you so much pain. Therefore, move on and let go.

We were always loyal to lost causes.

dream date: we get chinese food delivered, it’s raining, i take a shower in your shower (it must be a nice shower with good water pressure), you let me wear your clothes after i shower, you have a cat that i can pet, we watch movies, i fall asleep in your bed for like fifteen hours, you fall in love with me

 learning to pick up all the things I've left behind and remembering to tuck them into my pockets for later. It is also something about writing as catharsis, writing as storytelling, writing as a quest for bravery. I am still growing into my collection of facts, fictions, and in-betweens.

Tell me what you want, he said. That is, at the very least, a good place to start.

perpetually sleepy

I didn’t mean for this to happen, I didn’t.

 I’m trying to fall in love with books again...

Perfect weekend in a perfect city with perfect people.

all good stories are ghost stories

accidentally turning everything into a love letter

Wanted: someone to deliver me donuts.

1. I have been talking to people I should stay away from because there’s something comforting about the way I never figured out it was a tinge of Southern accent in your voice until I couldn’t recall it back properly anymore.
   
2. I keep dripping orange juice in the crease of my journal as I try to make lists of all the ways I’ve learned to make love. Words have been hard to find, but I’m trying.
   
3. Most days I don’t have anything to talk about except that I’m thinking of ways to leave you and how you’ll convince me to stay without saying anything at all.
   
4. Everything feels disposable, so I crawl into bed every night still drunk with my feet aching from walking so many blocks just because the city air feels good against my skin.

reasons to leave, reasons to stay

Sometimes I think the only reason I would write a book is to be able to dedicate it to someone.

why do people love the ones who could not care less about them?

Maybe because it challenges us. Maybe because a foolish chase teaches you a thing or two. Maybe because those are the ones who will inexplicably reappear. Maybe because that’s easier than facing something reciprocated.

the right person under the wrong circumstances

Sadness has no plot. We wrap plot around it, like a bagel over a hot dog.

It is strange how many miles I’ve crossed just to end up on someone’s doorstep to say goodbye.

I’m sorry, I’d say. I think I’ve always been sorry in one way or another. 

He’d turn on the lava lamp when I told him it was too bright. Quickly, he’d peel of his shirt and I’d think about how I wanted to loop my thumbs under his collarbones and knock my hips against his. His shoulderblades jutted out in odd angles when I pressed my palms into them. I felt his spine and traced it and wondered how many notches I could climb before I had to disappear again.

A few weeks later, I got a phone call from someone else who told me about a dream he had. We were in a bathtub, we were finally alone, he sighed. Perhaps that’s what we wanted from our relationship, someone to be in solitude with. I could be lonely because no one would call me out if I said I was falling in love. I used it as a reason to bury it. An excuse, really. 

Maybe I’ve been doing that for longer than I thought. 

In Saturday’s early morning light, I caught you breathing shallow. Everything was blue. I stretched my mind back to all the people I’ve been, all the places I tried to use my apologies for not being quite what anyone needed. For not having what I needed myself. And I thought, for maybe the first time, how I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to mistake being with someone for accepting my loneliness because of the spaces between us. 

And that’s really terrifying.

 I don’t understand how two people who believed in something so strongly can end up completely on the other side of it, how things can go sour despite my best intentions. that’s terrifying, to not miss you. to be wrong. to feel certain I made the right choice even when it hurt to say it aloud.

and now I am in the midst of something new and it feels so good, but I am terrified of it still. trying not to run. trying to stick around. trying to be just because I can be, buying bus tickets and counting less days and miles. hoping it’ll stay, hoping I will stay.

we were asked today to write a journal about the biggest risk we’ve taken with our writing, and the only answer I have been able to come up with so far is the bravery behind saying anything aloud, the allure of nonfiction. how much can I spill, admit, share, face, explain, before I feel the brush of fear.

how far can I go before I start to wonder what the hell I’ve gotten myself into, all smitten and falling so soon.

I keep forgetting to mention the part where I miss you.

On a side note you can’t love without risk. Sometimes love is a terrible idea, except that it’s not an idea. Sometimes love leaves suddenly and it’s as if you were lying to the other person all this time, or they were lying to you. Sometimes you love someone and they don’t love you back the way you want to be loved back and you think if they’ll just hear your case, if you present the evidence before them as if in a court of law, they will concede to your argument and love you the way you love them, forever even, and then you both get to be happy. But that’s not how it works. You jump from the plane and hope your parachute opens. The other person is that parachute. If you can, jump over water, and from not too great a height. But what am I saying here? As if you had a choice; as if love was a conscious decision. As if, “But it will never work” was some kind of valid argument. I was just thinking about a girl I liked and so I thought I’d say that. I’m stupid with my affection.

(a month ago we ended “us” and things became quiet and I spent a few nights wondering how I could change an outcome I had accepted but not agreed with and a few more nights sleeping in the crook of someone’s arm who kept me warm and sometimes I would consider stretching the spaces but I made pacts in transit but tonight I heard your voice again and attempted small talk for the first time since we said “this is a hard goodbye” and at first I thought maybe I was sad because I missed you, because you meant so much to me over our two years and now I had to allow myself to grow out of that, yet I think the reality of it is that I’m sad because I don’t miss you the way I thought I would, because I romanticized everything between us and now reality feels raw and unfortunate and I still don’t have a goddamn thing to say to you)

there is always a chance that one of us will mistake comfort for importance

We are only something, but that is better than nothing.

We are nothing, but at least once we were something.

The moment we begin to hesitate, hide, or lie, we’re damned.

sometimes it is nice to sweep your apartment and put books on the shelf and call your mom and work on things to mail people and drink cups of gingerbread tea because today was the first day it felt a little like winter and that’s a-okay with me.

I can’t decide if I’m homesick for a place or a person.

lazy summer sundays

something about home, something about words, something about you

so many words tonight, beautiful little fragments of all that is before and after

“anything i can mistake in the dark for being what i’m looking for is good enough for me”

early morning hours filled with nostalgia

always seriously joking and rambunctiously soft-spoken

maybe i didn’t mean to bruise so many hearts along the way

methods of procrastination:

+ eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, drink tea, eat, hate food, eat
+ write lists on post-it notes
+ send facebook messages to everyone you miss
+ keep shuffling your itunes, make playlists with two songs
+ type nonsense on the typewriter
+ write bad poetry about snow
+ think about showering
+ think about going outside
+ think about how in a week, you’ll be home
+ write hate emails to the boy scouts
+ contemplate taking a nap
+ daydream about more useful career goals
+ daydream about things you’d be good at other than fiction writing
+ hate everything you write
+ nitpick every sentence in every paragraph of your short story
+ eavesdrop on homeboy’s arguments
+ consider bribing people to do homework for you
+ send text messages stating the amount of fuck you do not give

There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

a relationship between the way that we experience desire and the ways that we harm each other

for the bad actors, we are all waiting for someone to ask the questions we skillfully avoid with passion and purpose.

for being close but not close enough

 i was one year older but not much wiser

She is two summers ago. 
She is your favorite piece of artwork at the gallery. 
She is lovely,
She is lonely,
She is leaving. 
She is always ten steps ahead with lips signaling code red. 
Signaling lust,
Signaling love,
Signaling louder than your favorite past time. 
She is three seconds of reckless courage. 
She is a lifetime of brutal bravery. 
She is a tragedy,
She is a travesty,
She is a fantasy. 
She is a choice you would make over and over again. 
She is the dawn of a revolution. 
She is dusk,
She is stardust,
She is wanderlust,
She is the September rush that leads you away from home. 
She is Rome. 
She is ruins. 
She is history.

I will never apologize for being me, but I will apologize for the times that I am not.

I like the idea that there is a midnight somewhere that you are not a part of,
that hair falls out and regrows
so there will be parts of me that you have never known and I like
the idea of lines of coke,
of your body wrapped around me,
your hands on my throat
on the floor of a party somewhere west of here where the wind is colder.
I like the idea of growing older,
and the cracked grins, and the taste of gin and your
lips are like a space god missed.
And you are godless, and I am limp.
And I like the idea of us, of giving into lust, or of growing
up. I guess you’ll never know me
wholly
holy.
I like the thought that things keep going
even when I am in bed, breathing softly under the weight of my own head
and you are in a field somewhere west of here
coloring your hair. And I like the idea that there is somewhere
you have never existed. That there are people who don’t know you,
who can’t miss you,
who can meet people with your name and feel unchanged
by the experience. I wish my bed was big enough for the two of us
but I like the idea of a space all my own. And I don’t like being alone
but it is getting easier.
When you kiss her, I hope you don’t think of me.
I like the idea of you feeling a little less empty.

i just want a boy to see me and go “yes” and keep thinking “yes” for a very long time

i’m cuter than everyone who has ever hurt me

Our backs tell stories no books have the spine to carry.

current emotional status: sighing on the couch eating a loaf of bread wondering why I’m not Kanye West

portrait of a girl who hasn’t written anything for almost a year,

In the quiet
times our dreams
come creeping
up around us,
whispering softly,

“When did you
forget?”

- “the silence betrays you

http://sporkpress.com/2_1/Pieces/Siken.htm ---> o mamo, jakie dobre!

my friends: you're so mean sometimes.
me: i'm not here to make friends. i'm here to become america's next top model.

You deserve to need me, not to have me.

I hope you fall in love with someone who makes you fall in love with the entire world

I need someone who will sit on a rooftop with me at 2 in the morning and will tell me their favorite songs and their family problems and how they think the earth was made

I don’t want to be
the other half of your soul.
I want to be the one
who reminds you
that you’re already whole.

let’s be friends with benefits. the benefits? you get to be friends with me

i find it so incredibly attractive when someone is really good at something, like you can play the violin? damn son. you’re a really talented dj? good for you! i don’t care if you talk to me about quantum physics for an hour straight if i can see the passion in you at some point in that hour i’ll think “whoa, this is really hot.” 

Hell is the space between our hearts.

honestly if i send a boy a nude i expect like a 3 page paper analyzing my beauty and comparing me to great works of art

I be acting like idc but I think about ya everyday 

I didn’t love you. I was sick, I just needed to feel something.

and then there are some who
believe that old
relationships can be
revived and made new
again.

but please
if you feel that way

don’t phone
don’t write
don’t arrive.

“you’re up early!”

jokes on you i didn’t sleep at all and am in between energized and dying

I wish we met before they convinced you life is war.

It’s sad, isn’t it?
How we defend people who treat us like absolute shit?

You are wrongfully apologizing, precious. 
You & your love has always been more than enough, and if he makes you feel any less than that, 
He’s the one that doesn’t deserve you.

This is an apology letter to the both of us for how long it took me to let things go.

after we watched a video in class today someone turned on the lights, but then my history teacher went over and dimmed the lights and said “ahh that’s better, now the lighting is like my students. Not so bright”

Well, darling,
You should care. 
Do not let toxic people stay in your life. 
If he is bad for you, do not be good to him.

“he’s the reason why I write” 
this is too true for so many people
(myself included)

friend: how are things
me: please don’t make me think about my life

do you ever just get so zoned into your music that you forget that you’re staring at someone’s dick or that you’re walking in a crowded hallway or that life is real

I think relationships in general are over romanticized like at the end of the day I’m pretty sure a good relationship is just two people who know how to hang out and talk to each other not whether or not they can right all your wrongs or paint a picture of a thousand suns with the breath from your lungs or some shit

*txts back 20 days later & picks up the conversation where we left off as if no time has passed and without an excuse*



You are the 
silence
in between
what 
I thought
and what
I said.

my “won’t speak until i’m spoken to” game is strong af

"Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment."

You may think I’m small, but I have a universe inside my mind.

"That’s the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget."

 Occupation: sleepiest girl on the planet



*throws phone across the room after sending a risky text*

"She’s a keeper, too bad you didn’t keep her.

"Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women, kitchen of love, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers."

A woman who knows what she likes. Confidence in her skin. She doesn’t put down other women, and she aligns herself with other women. It comes with age and experience. I hope younger women are cultivating their wit and wisdom. Sex and seduction are not just your looks, beauty and body."

wow like i don’t fucking care if people don’t text me back when we’re just having a normal conversation, but if we’re supposed to be hanging out soon and i ask you details about it and you don’t fucking text me back we have a problem 

someday someone is gonna be so soft and gentle with your heart, you’re gonna be so glad you kept it open, you’re gonna wonder why you ever thought about quieting it down

 Once I saw an x-ray of a heart and I was alarmed by its smallness, its translucence. A thing we ask entirely too much of. 

 I used to say I’d know you anywhere,
but it’s getting harder.

 I am happy to have held your hand on that day, when you were that exact person. 

 

Conversations about her always start the same way. Someone asks: “What does your tattoo mean?”

And I say, “I loved somebody too much once.”

They shake their head. Like I don’t know what I’m talking about. Like I’m one of those parents with selective hearing. They shake their head and point. “No, not that one. The one on your foot.”

I say, “Every part of me means the same thing.”

 

i have a big crush on the moon

I want a lot and I’m gonna achieve all of it

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.

I thought about the notebooks I filled up in high school, the ones that I’m still too scared to open up and revisit, not because I think my bad writing will make me cringe, but because I’m afraid my bad writing will make me yearn to write like that again—and I don’t mean writing poems that compare my loneliness to a black hole or my love to a prairie devastated by fire, but rather to write with tremendous heart and without concern for taste or craft, without concern for the entire wretched literary canon that has come before me, the literary canon that is still mostly populated by boring, uninspiring white dudes whose writing will never change my life.

remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

It’s not my job to make you a better man and I don’t give a shit if I’ve made you a better man. It’s not a fucking woman’s job to be consumed and invaded and spat out so that some fucking man can evolve.

“I drank you like the cure
when maybe
you were the poison.

Something is wrong.
There are flies over the bed.
Everything smells
like wasted blood.”

I think writers are often terrifying to normal people, i.e. non writers in a capitalist system, for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have this time. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy more than acclaim. Acclaim which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.

“Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.

The world paints pictures everyday, you just have to look in the right places.

The sky is the perfect canvass. It constantly changes.

Sometimes books don’t find us until the right time

I write about you because it’s 
easy and it doesn’t hurt.
Because I can say whatever I want
until it feels like I’ve done something
brave.

"I crawl back to the sheets and ask how they were lucky enough to hold you."

Some afternoons, I wander through your photographs. Letters.

When she’s getting off the bus she smiles at me and i feel at ease. i want to tell her she is beautiful but I remember that every time a stranger told me I was beautiful it has made me feel uneasy. so I watch her go and I am grateful

we build ladders 

like towers

to taste the rain

before it falls

We could say he’s like

this or like that, but “like” really only tells more of what he is not.

we’ve all our flaws

so there’s no use

worrying about 

yours

when everyone else is

busy 

fretting

about theirs 

I lay in a book
full of unwritten masterpieces
you will write in my sleep

“I never saw a wild thing 
sorry for itself.”

“We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.”

“You’re wearing your last goodbye on your face like dirty clothing and she won’t look at you, she won’t look at you because she loves you and this means forgetting, this means closing every door that leads to your hands and the bedpost notches on your spine, the both of you passing each other like lonely ghosts in the night except you held onto her wrist before she could leave and she stayed with you ever since.
She loves you so she won’t meet your eyes or unshackle her unsteady deer like legs to get up from the sofa and tell you to go and fuck yourself for making her love you and not staying around for the collateral”

— AZRA.T., LAST GOODBYE

You were in my dream and I woke up thinking you would be beside me.

Some things you can never leave behind. They don’t belong to the past. They belong to you.

But can you love me? ” she whispered, 
not in the way of a question, 
but in the way of a dare.

Stop thinking about everything so much, you’re breaking your own heart.

The best portion of your life will be the small, nameless moments you spend smiling with someone who matters to you.

this was no accident

this was a thereputic chain of events

I am writing to you with my eyes.

you’re just nostalgic and it wasn’t even that good

I want someone who will adore me so much that they cannot even walk past me without touching me in some way. I want someone who will worship me, even when.. I’m sick and tired of being on my own. Most of the time I’m fine. Some of the time I even quite enjoy it. But at this precise moment in time I’m fed up with it. I’ve had enough..

The bottom line I always ask myself is: if I look at everything I’ve had with this person, good and bad, am I better or worse off without them?

WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR GOODBYE?

never give up on your dreams

keep sleeping

My special talents include: jumping to the worst conclusion possible and worrying about that thing for hours.

seduce me with ur history knowledge 

vikings made their woman handle the finances because they thought math is witchcraft

special talent: dramatically lipsync songs and pretend that i’m in music video

She was the prettiest Hell I have ever been in. I didn’t mind burning at all.


One of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do is to stop loving someone because they stopped loving you.

You are the 
silence
in between
what 
I thought
and what
I said.

I still remember you 
as a little girl 
who overwaters plants 
because she doesn’t know 
when to stop giving.

 they’ll ask for a ghost story and I’ll tell them
ours. 

Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric…

And also, you didn’t ask. And also, I’m glad you didn’t ask.

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.

 Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. 

hey guys, hope your skin is clear and you get a text from someone you like real soon.

also that your lunch tastes good, you find twenty dollars on the ground, and that thing coming up that you were dreading turns out not so bad

men: women who wear makeup are just lying to us

men: it's 8 inches

"I still remember the feeling I felt when I first started talking to you.

This used to mean something to me but now I don’t fucking know what it means anymore.

If it isn’t making you happy, find something that will. Don’t waste another second.