writings

Limbo.

in

It’s all different. It’s all changed. Night comes so much quicker than it used to. I don’t remember it getting this dark this early before. But I’m sure it did. I’m sure it was always like this, I’m sure….I just don’t remember anymore. I can’t tell you what month we’re in, or what day. I can barely tell you what year we’re in, or my name. So I can’t tell you much at all, but I like it better this way. Isn’t that kind of scary? I am forgetting everything and I’ve never been happier.

Mostly.

The sky fell last night and I caught it with my face. Last Tuesday, it exploded and it cut my body in half. Tonight, it hangs low, a cautionary sign: don’t move too fast or you’ll trip over yourselves. A hesitating fog-shy, too-tentatively coats the atmosphere in a still shade of grey, overlaying the lavender and pink twilight sky like a smoke screen. If you walk far enough, far into the fog, far into the past, you’ll disappear without a trace. And that’s so tempting, isn’t it? To leave and never be found.

I can teach you how to do that, if you want me to. But I’m really not supposed to. No one’s watching me, so I won’t get in trouble, but if I show you how to disappear-really, how to time travel-it might break you. The human body cannot handle time travel because the human body is not meant to time travel.

Each trip rips you apart little by little; over time, you are fragmented into a hundred thousand separate parts; and by that point, you are no longer in your body and you no longer have any solid semblance of self. However, if you were fragmented to begin with, like I was and still am, then each trip is an opportunity to put yourself back together. Funny how that works.

I did it backwards, and that was not on purpose. I was just trying to survive, so I fragmented myself over and over. It was a well-meaning accident every time I did it. I broke my brain and then I started unconsciously time-traveling. And now I’m here: in Limbo.

Limbo is a haunt, a lonely, isolating in-between. It is not a forever place, but it could be if you’re scared like me. Limbo is a moment that ceases to exist as soon as you leave it. And I’ve overstayed my welcome for three and a half years because I’m not ready to leave it just yet.

–

Sometimes other people appear in Limbo, but they’re all unaware of me, even if I shapeshift to get their attention. I make myself sixty feet tall and wave my inflatable arms like a roadside attraction, stomping through the streets like a sympathetic beast, intentionally leaving craters in the rubbery asphalt and sparkling concrete. These are Stage 1 sinkholes to swallow them up, but they walk around my markings like spilled milk on the road.

I do acrobatics on top of speeding trucks and trains, resisting wind as if it’s just a small breath of air, contorting my body in ways that are anatomically impossible in your world, and all that the other people feel is my rush, me in the form of a warm, dry breeze tickling their soft, unfazed faces. So I get real close, standing centimeters away from them; I lick their cheeks and push my fingers through their necks until they come out on the other side; I bite off their shoulders and use their clavicles as walking canes; I blow my eyes out of my sockets like strings of confetti, and I pull my head off my torso like a rabbit out the hat-and still nothing.

Even as I walk home with my head propped against my waist, my eyes drooling down my face, and I wear my pants like a top and my shirt like a skirt, none of these people notice me. They keep walking by, completely unaware that I’m here, that I exist. That I’m real. They don’t see me at all, so I walk home, in this world alone, with a smile on what’s left of my face.

Tonight, the streets are slick, covered in the glimmering sheen of afternoon rain that doesn’t want to evaporate. But neither do I. For all my big talk of disappearing, parts of me stay put. I’ve got myself chained down to this version of here because I’m still scared of moving forward. So I meander, walk around with no seeming end in sight. The only end I can see is the faint sense of ‘there. ‘There’ is where I’m supposed to be so ‘there’ is where I push myself to go.

But I don’t know where or what ‘there’ is, so I walk and walk and know that I’ll find it one day-because I’m persistent, relentless, filled with desire that won’t subside-but I haven’t made it ‘there’ and the difference between here and ‘there’ looms large most days.

Pushing myself ‘there’ hurts. I drag my feet while doing so. My knees ache. My chest and back, too. My left wrist dangles off my arm like a wilted flower. My face droops toward the ground, and my locked jaw is the only thing keeping the skin somewhat where it should be. I am in chronic pain every day, but I keep going. All of this is a symptom of too much time-traveling I’ve come to learn, but I can’t stop. I won’t.

I’m split across time and have been for over twenty-nine years. The only way to put myself back together is to go back into the past and close the survival loops that keep these memories open, these parts of me unintegrated, my timeline erratic and unstable.

And once I do that, I will be whole: one me, one stable timeline, and one reality (supposedly). No more limbo. No more any of this. And no more me as I’ve known myself to be.

How willing am I to forget myself forever?

Clarity

in

my sadness stains the light. and though it filters in, it’s obstructed, broken up into little pieces, divided into halves, quarters, or eighths. i feed on the slivers, dance in their warm familiarity; i jump over the shadows on the floor, sway in the invisible cages they make. despite the seeming and makeshift momentary joy, the grief lies heavy underneath. 

i do not recognize myself, it whispers. 

i want my mom, it says.

my grandma is going to die, it pounds.

i turn around and fix my gaze on the bench by the wall. the bench is empty, half of it drying in darkness, the other half soaking in light. i move toward it, wanting to rest, finally close to allowing myself to, but then i hold back. my loneliness awakens easily, and my grief is always clawing at the base of my throat, desperate for some acknowledgement from me. once i sit, i will be reminded of the oceanic gap between myself and others, of the insecurities that make up my second skin, trapping me inside of myself and keeping me tucked away from anyone else’s love. once i sit, my grief will rise into my face and i will be pulled down into an abyss twenty-eight years in the making.once i sit, i will come face to face with myself and i’m scared of who i’m going to find.

so maybe i shouldn’t sit. maybe i should keep standing — or, better yet, walking. i’m really good at that. i’m really good at moving, moving, and moving and never stopping and always going, always going because if i’m always going then nothing can get me. but if i stop and slow down, slow down until i’m still and standing and only with myself — all my selves — well, i’m not ready for that just yet.

but the bench is made for two. someone else can come and sit next to me. and i know that Danny is around here somewhere, floating across the floors because his feet don’t always touch the ground either. he can come and sit next to me — and he’ll want to sit next to me, and i’ll want him to sit next to me, too. only i can’t allow myself the pleasure of that because if he sits next to me, he will want to hold my hand. and i know that as he holds my hand, i will be waiting for him to let it go because he always does. because he always leaves. because everyone always leaves. 

but he can’t leave if i never let him come in. 

so i won’t. 

i about turn and stare up at the skylight instead, letting go of the bench and all the possibilities it could offer me. 

the sky is bare blue and timidly-tinted with a little green, subtly soaked with yellow and gold. its placed behind parallel and dissecting lines of glass — and there are no clouds, just reflections of different bits of glass in other bits of glass. the afternoon sun is somewhere off to the left, somewhere in the distance, somewhere on its own just like i am beneath it. its light dissolves through the windows, slinks down the walls, rolls off the hundred-year-old paintings, and lands on my still face. i let it melt through my skin and glue me to the floor. for whatever now is i am here. 

spring is different this year, nearly impenetrable. i wake up before the sun. i walk along the shore. i talk to the birds, but they don’t talk to me. two years ago, the white butterflies followed me. last year, it was the bees. this year, no one follows me except for me. i smile and say “hello” to strangers. i know everyone but no one knows me. i stop and smell the flowers: lilacs, dogwoods, cherry blossoms, roses. i bring their branches to my face, the flowers to my nose. they’re so body-meltingly sweet, but my head is dull so i can only access some twenty percent of their scents. i rise on my tip toes to get more of their fragrances, a familiar attempt to drown the entirety of myself in one sensation, but nothing comes in — i’m blocked. so, my feet fall to the ground and i start walking again. 

i should go, i tell myself. i should move, but i can’t. my feet and legs are somehow so solid, so grounded to this museum floor. some of me is down here, and some of me is still staring up at the skylight. but some of me — a lot of me —  is somewhere else and it’s my job to get them back.

i become so quiet as my identities reveal themselves. there’s the me looking up. there’s the me noticing my grounded feet. there’s the me observing both of those me’s. there’s the several dozen me’s from the past armored tight inside my body, incapacitated by fear, focused on protection. there’s the me trying to soothe them. there’s the me trying to get rid of the me’s from the past that are armoring me. there’s the me observing those me’s. there’s the me wanting to get rid of all these me’s. there’s the me trying to stop that from happening. see, i’ve never been bored in my life because it’s never been just me. me is plural — and, yet, it’s so lonely seeing things only i can see; i live in a world all by myself. 

i’m one foot in this reality while several parts of my body are stretched thin across pasts of mine that i willingly disintegrate more and more with each day. i have very little to hold onto, and very little to define myself by, and yet somehow i’m still defining myself by things that i felt when i was a child. i remember everyone and i have also forgotten mostly everyone. if you call me by my name, i might take a while to register it as belonging to me. i’m not myself, and yet i am becoming most me i have ever been. 

i miss my mom. i miss a past that doesn’t exist anymore. i miss my grandma’s in different ways, but i am still nowhere close to accepting what happened and what is happening. my older brother never came home and he owed me that, but, really, he didn’t owe me anything at all (no one does except for me). i’m a small and scared child in a big adult body. i intimidate men, or so they tell me. i wear a second skin of embarrassment beneath my performing top coat — and no one can even tell. my anger is leaking onto the floor, and sometimes people slip on it. i lean down and wipe their bloody noses, but then apathy takes over, covering up the rage, and i walk away. ‘that wasn’t real anyway’, i believe about nearly everything, but the blood on my hands says differently. i don’t know what i’m doing with my life and it isn’t charming. i wish i could stop walking for miles, but if i stop, i’m going to crash into my selves. i walk into every room with a pervasive feeling that i am unwanted. i move through life with death nipping at my face. i haven’t stayed still since i was 5 and yet i’ve been frozen in place all my life. i think i’m going to blink and miss myself, too. if i’m lucky, i won’t remember any of this. and if i’m not, well, we’ll see. 

there is so much grief because the time passes and i can’t get it to stop. death has been ever-present since i was a child — a full-force cage around my heart, a deep awareness that everyone i love will die and it could be in a moment or a day or a week, but it’s coming and i can’t stop it, even if my occasional grandiosity thinks that i can. i almost died when i was born. then i almost died when i was five. after that, thirteen. then seventeen. twenty. twenty-three. and a bunch of times in-between. i almost died a million times and now little bits of me die every day to make way for some version of me that’s meant to be greater, better, lovelier. more likable, lovable, desirable. i watch all of this happen in the in-between lands, a bridge between the old me and the new me, and i wonder if all i’ll ever be is a widow of life. 

danny’s hands swoop over my shoulders, palms flattening across my sternum. i gasp from the sudden touch. his cool, calloused fingers rest against my skin, but he can’t sink into it because there are a hundred layers of armor protecting my heart. my breath hitches in my throat.

“hi.”

there’s a smile in his voice. his heart beats into my spine, soft and steady, one. two. three. and four. then five. it’s a fisherman’s pace. i match its rhythm, slowing down my body to line up with his. his warm breath paces around my neck, looking for some contact, some part of me to brush up against. maybe he can unravel my trapped breath, pull on it like two fingers unraveling a knotted necklace. maybe then i can breathe more fully. maybe then i can lift up off the ground and soar toward the sky. 

i’m no longer looking up at the skylight, but at the wall across, trying to find some point to land my eyes on.

“where are you?” he asks. 

i don’t know. 

where am i? 

where do i want to be? 

his words float toward the skylight; i reach my fingers up, hoping to loop into their hooks so that i can pull them back down to me. 

where am i? who am i? who could i be?

a little smile, crooked because i’m in on my own joke, grows on my face. my hands reach behind me, wrapping around his waist, and pulling him closer into my body. i hear a breath of surprise, and i smile even wider. my fingers sink through his shirt and into his skin. i brush against his bones and thread through his fascia, looking to reach his heart, looking to find memories of me that may be buried inside. am i in here? where am i? who am i in here? what me’s will i find?

across the way, i see myself smiling and staring right back at me. 

“hi,” she mouths. 

“hi,” i mouth back cautiously. i still get momentarily startled when i see myself outside myself. it’s been two years since it started happening and i’ve only gotten slightly used to it. there’s never any warning. it’s just there i am. 

her hair, my hair, is wild, unruly — golden curls spiraling outward like sun rays; her eyes, my eyes, glisten with joy; her smile, my smile, is unrestrained, meteoric. a soft, subtle power courses through her forearms, up toward her shoulders. her shoulders stand tall, her legs are long and strong, and her chest is relaxed, not a single layer of armor in sight. she tilts her head to the right, lips slowly curling into a playful smile as she waits for me to realize what she’s always known. 

that’s where i am. the answer to Danny’s question is: 

right 

there. 

untitled

in

Time lost linearity two years ago. I am in some form of eternity now. 26 and 27 were headless years, and 28 is a black hole, a spiraling sense of detachment from everything and everyone.

I move through these years like amniotic fluid looking for a body and like a body looking for amniotic fluid to sink back into. 25 was the last seemingly real year of my life before I walked through a door I can never reverse out of.

I sometimes wish that I could go back, if only for the comfort of familiarity, if only to sink back into the ‘miserability’ that I used to know so well—as if it was the first and only skin I ever had. For a long time, it was the only skin I ever had. I miss repetition. Now everything’s new.

In many ways, I am ending, and in many ways, I am beginning, but I am also in between, watching it all happen, realizing that this process is forever now and that I will never be the same as I was two years ago or even yesterday. And I miss who I used to be because even if she was too much—and only ever knew how to live outside her body— at least she was familiar.

And I, I am not familiar anymore.

I have watched every identity I ever had disintegrate within and without me, leaving me with an emptiness that has been both fascinating and frightening. I am slowly becoming finite. I am slowly seeing all my edges (no longer borderless, no longer shapeless, no longer always and only outside myself. For the first time in my life, it has become so quiet in my head, but it has come at the cost of everyone I used to be.

There goes that choking sweetness, there goes that hiding deer, there go the only me’s I’ve ever known.

Who am I without my selves?

That’s what I’m slowly figuring out.

sheepshead bay regal

in

I think the perimeter outside the Sheepshead Bay Regal is a liminal space. I leave the theater, and I am no longer real. I was hardly real before I went in, but I'm far less real now. Everyone else is real, though—that I know for certain.

I walk down the never-ending ramp, my bag bouncing up and down against my stomach. Then the bag somehow disappears. I keep walking and then my torso disappears. I keep walking and then the rest of my body disappears. My body turns into a concept, an invisible construct with no seeming bounds. If I get hit by a car, the car will go through me and the director will yell "CUT!" and I'll turn around and smile, and everyone will applaud but no one will see me, but they'll know I was there, and that's good enough for me because I like being an idea that passes through people's heads more than being an actual person they think they know but really don’t. Then, I'll leave the theater again because this is a time loop and I am doomed to repeat this cycle forever because I have walked into a trap I set for myself. 

I think the perimeter outside the Sheepshead Bay Regal is a portal to nowhere. I leave the theater and everything has moved one micrometer in the wrong direction. I sense it, the off-ness, but I can't wrap my hand around it and squeeze it through my fist. I don't ask anyone if they feel it, too, because I have no one I want to ask. My solitude is so impressive that it could wrap the whole world in a blanket, but instead, it wraps me in a coffin. 

The offness shifted me one micrometer back to equilibrium. I let everyone continue to be real while I dissipate. Everyone acts accordingly, everyone talks the way they normally do, but I have become a passenger in these shared conversations. I speak, but I don't direct it. I smile, but I am looking off to the side, at the cars coming down the road, at the teenagers hanging out, at the last twenty years of my life—where did they go? Where did I go? 

The stark white stadium lights taped to the roof of the theater shine bright; they stare me down like lamps in an interrogation room. It's striking and unsettling but more so odd than unsettling. Something eerily calming about it if I think about it too long, but I try not to think too long about anything. I keep my thoughts five seconds flat. Any further and I'm not sure what happens beyond that, and I don't really want to know. 

I avoid standing under the lights because I don’t want to be seen. I hide in the shadows and wait for the lights to fade away. Whenever the morning comes. Whenever the sun rises and cuts through this portal like a knife, revealing a sliver of a familiar somewhere. If the morning ever comes. If there even is a familiar somewhere left for me to get back to.

If is a liminal space.

If is a delicate draw-bridge, ready to disappear as soon as I step foot onto it. 

I don’t really know where I go from here anymore. I think this is it.

I can't remember the last twenty years of my life. That’s not an If, that’s a Fact. I can’t remember anything before this moment. Two years ago, I stopped trying to remember my life. This is what I wanted. Now I got what I wanted and now is where I am.

Now is a summer evening, late June, on the edge of Brooklyn. Cool air brushes against my revealed skin, curling around my T-shirt sleeves and swimming towards my shoulders. The cool air wants to sit on me but isn’t sure it can, isn’t sure it should. It speaks in whispers and embarrassed-for-me hushes: "She's too fragile," it concedes before leaving me alone. 

Everything leaves me alone, but I leave it first. 

I bend underneath the lights, avoiding their spotlight. I walk towards the car that isn't there yet. My body is suddenly fifty feet away from me. I keep walking towards a future that cannot be built because it has no past to go on. I'm in nowhere and I am alone with no body to show for it.

I wait on the grass. I look sparingly at the dilapidated parking lot across the street. I hold myself down and what’s left of me. If I don’t, I’ll float away. I look at my phone. An acquaintance needed my help but he fell asleep. I’m turning into a savior again and I don’t want to do that anymore. I let my mom know that I’m taking a cab so she doesn’t worry. No one else has said anything. Everyone’s disappeared, too.

I am momentarily 19 again. 

Heart-racing panic every time I see him. Think I’m a joke. Nothing ever changes. Useless. Same pattern playing out on repeat. This is my fault. Everything is too much. The heat wraps itself tight around me, I am saran-wrapped in my own misery. Why am I like this? This isn’t how life is supposed to be.

And then I’m not.

In the theater behind me, I watched a movie by myself. It was miserable and lonely. In the movie, things moved slowly and hesitantly, except for when one character punched another character out of nowhere. Except for when another character shot the main character, even though it was supposed to be a knife fight. I knew he was going to shoot him. The film didn't feel real, either. A copy of reality. Just like my life. He brought a gun to a knife fight.

In the movie, anger and violence moved quickly, unable to be restrained. Change, on the other hand, was immobile and incapacitated. I try to think about my own anger but I can’t. I can't access my anger, and violence doesn't pass through my hands like it used to. It's like the cold has numbed any heat inside my body. Blood runs cool, my heart goes still, the night stretches into infinity, and I'm still not real. But the cab will be here in three minutes. 

I was more interested in the sadness that drifted around in every character's eyes. It was if they all knew they were doomed to repeat themselves, but they would still gently try to escape their fate at least once a year. But even when they tried to change, they always returned to who they were, the reflexive rubber band snapping harsher with each attempt. Change was futile; predictability won each time. 

But I have no past now so do I go back to who I was? Or does that person not exist anymore, and therefore neither do I? I guess I’m real in all the ways I am not, and I'm not real in all the ways that you are. 
I stand on the grass. I’ve been here before, I accept that, at some point in the past. I think about it. Beyond five seconds. I see echoes of the past come into view. Traces of it start seeping in. Oh no, I don’t like that. That’s not supposed to happen. My body’s already at home. I’ll be there soon to catch up to it? 

A car drives toward me and I think it’s mine but it drives past me instead. The perimeter outside the Sheepshead Bay Regal is a liminal space and I have been stuck here for as long as I can remember.

103

in

i.

i am enamored not with the intimacy of a first kiss but with the intimacy of the hundredth and third one. by this kiss, lips are familiar territory: their grooves and cracks are canyon ridges i’ve traversed and laid claim to; their flimsy pieces of dead skin that peel off like decade-old paint, sometimes blood-soaked, get crushed between my teeth. 

“hey,” i pull back, concerned. “you’re bleeding.” 

“huh,” he licks his bottom lip a few times, “i guess am.”

there’s a pause, a recalibration. he stares at me. i stare at him. i watch his chest rise and fall like a looping wave. i wiggle my fingers as if i’m moving air, as if i’m modulating time. he presses his lips together, deciding if he’s going to cut through time instead but temptation’s beaten him to it. a Cheshire cat smile appears on his face and my “oh, you’re no-“ is cut short because he kisses me again. i gasp. the sudden crush of metal reverberates in my mouth. 

ii.

we’re heading home from a birthday party, weaving through the downtown throng of ghosts. our bodies separate and meet again with the innate fluidness of two souls who have been pulled apart in many lifetimes only to come together in the following ones. i wonder what number lifetime this is. 

november is non-existent, detached from all other months. everyone becomes a ghost, even me. tonight, the sky is a long stretch of dark blue with pin-prick stars splattered across it. if i reach up, i’ll cut my finger on one of them. so i don’t reach up, i stare ahead. the glowing yellow-orange streetlights crane their necks when we approach them, rushing to cast their phosphorescence onto us. we slow down. the air flattens against me. it’s cold. but i always like this type of cold because it’s like a second skin.

Danny turns around next to a restaurant window just as i keep walking. so i walk into his chest. i don’t go through him, not this time at least — because i’m good at that: becoming a phantom. i don’t pull back either. instead, i slowly look up, wishing i could stretch this moment out as far as time will let me. i do that a lot with him: try to take small moments and throw their starts and ends to opposite sides of the room. 

he leans in, enough that the tips of our noses brush against each other, enough that i can feel his warm breath prickling my lips, enough that i can almost taste the watermelon lozenge tucked beneath his tongue (i want to steal it) but not enough that i am tasting him yet. i rarely remember a single word that is said during these kisses because the sleepy haze i operate from pulls all the words away from my view like windshield wipers. my lips swipe past the corners of his lips, leaving a faint pink lipstick stain there; my fingers slide down his cheeks, grazing peach fuzz and the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow. i’m trying to work my way up but i’m sinking instead. Danny caresses my face with one hand and holds my body up with the other. he looks at me with a sense of wonder in his eyes, the wet glisten of someone in love. and then, as i start to smile at him, he leans in and kisses me. for a brief moment, i feel the subtle pressure of his smiling lips; the familiar grooves and outlines collide with mine and stay there like a promise. the moment unfolds mechanically; our lips start moving against each other in a delicate tread until more seconds pass and my fingers start digging into his arms and his breathing gets ragged and fervent friction gives way to immediate need. as i swipe the lozenge from his mouth into mine, the cloud of watermelon drifts up my nostrils and fogs up my vision. i lose my grip on reality. 

and then we are back home on the living room couch, three a.m. tapping on the front door, moonlight cascading over the windowsill, white lace curtains swimming in the breeze. everything around us is awake and moving but there’s a stillness to all of it. something intricate and thousand-layered in every motion, from the crinkling low-hum static of the fairy lights in our bedroom to the bouncing thump of the couch adjusting to our weight. 

the slow creep of moonlight possesses Danny, enveloping him in its cool silver glow. i see my shadow on the wall behind him outlining him as if i was his own shadow. i push his hair away from his face, tucking several strands behind his ears. he looks up at me with twinkling eyes and slightly parted lips, gentle curiosity painted in watercolor over his face — i use everything within me to not crumble. i catch my breath and focus on moving. i glide my fingers slowly through his hair and back again. i brush my thumb along the arch of his eyebrow. i sink past his cheekbones, along the curve of his jaw. i cup his face in the cradle that is my hands, the beauty of his youth spread bare beneath my fingers: the smooth slope of his nose; the two pencil-mark moles, one beneath his right eyebrow, the other above his lip; his lips, the color of a quiet rose, curve upward in a slow-motion smile (it’s dazzling); his eyes, warm, dark brown, finite; his cheeks, in modest bloom for me. 

i trace my finger down the bridge of his nose and let it fall onto the valley above his lips. i keep my finger there, slowly meandering like a lost tenant. he waits and watches. i never know what he’s going to do in these in-betweens but i’m never scared because i know i’ll be caught in safe arms. he grabs my finger in his right hand, clutching it tight, holding it against his lips, studying my face for a reaction. i press my lips together and smile shyly. he gives my finger a little love bite and i giggle. even when i didn’t know him, i think i’ve loved him my whole life. 

he sits up and flattens his hands against my back, pushing my body towards him. i brace for a kiss that never comes because Danny stops himself centimeters away from my lips. i inch forward to close the gap —  a slow crawl to the finish line — but he moves back instead. i wait, unsure of where to go or what to do next. he leans up, his nose skimming along the underside of my jaw, and i let him take the lead. i live in anticipation of him slowly dragging his lips across my neck, his search for that tender spot to sink into that makes my knees give way (my body, possessed). feverish heat, flushed face; fraught breaths, frenzied limbs. youthful suppleness plump against taut skin, over and over again. he kisses that spot, he does, and my knees begin to shake. i grab his shoulders to steady myself, and his sweet laugh echoes around my head. “i got you,” he tells me. he does, but that doesn’t mean i won’t unravel before then. his hands slip beneath my sweater and settle around my rib cage. the pads of his fingers glide up and down over each crest and valley in a hypnotizing sequence. my body is cool but his hands are warm against my bare skin. i take a deep breath in, the aftertaste of watermelon still lingering. 

my skin is an illusion. his fingers disappear into my body, in between my ribs. he slinks across them like an acrobat, looking to find my heart. when he does, he wraps his hand around it and squeezes it twice. it knocks the wind right out of me. suddenly, breathing isn’t so easy. i gasp for air. there’s a weightlessness to my bones and limbs, as if i’m floating, but survival instincts have kicked in as well and i find myself clawing at his shirt, twisting the soft material between my fingers and pulling him towards me. i get his face close to mine, my eyes darting frantically trying to find something in his. “just wait,” he says. so i listen. i wait while he presses his thumb against my heart and she sputters a little blood over him. i wait while his lips teasingly sweep mine and do nothing more than that. i wait while my knees dig into his thighs and i feel so heavy that i could fall through the earth, yet i feel so light that i could also float out of this room if he were to let go of me. i wait and i wait because i’ve become so good at waiting my whole life that, even as my eyes begin to flutter and a headlessness takes over, i am still waiting. 

this is when he finally loosens his grip on my heart.

this is when he finally kisses me.

i open my mouth and inhale.

I'm a Stranger in a Wasteland

in

California is burning through me. I’m a stranger in a wasteland, going everywhere but nowhere in particular, punching holes in the linings of my sneakers, drenching tank tops in Black Opium-scented sweat, melting small slivers of my body off my body and leaving them as keepsakes on the sidewalks. I was here once. I existed. 

The air always hangs low, a centimeter above my body, a mild yet persistent suffocation. Like being wrapped in saran wrap. I lean against the balcony railing, rolling the cigarette back and forth in between my fingers like a mini-skateboard. The orange embers at the end are a brighter, hotter version of tonight’s sky. It’s nearly six p.m. and all the baby blue has dispersed, leaving behind a stretch of smokey, mellow orange. 

There’s a rather intense game of chicken going on below. The water splashes outside the outline of the pool, leaving the grey stone covered in amorphous spots of water and the blue-and-white striped lounge chairs soaking wet. The scent of chlorine swims up my nose and awakens my sleepy body. Mhm. I close my eyes, leaning further against the railing. A supercut of chlorine-coated memories is about to start playing inside of me when I hear a steady two-tap knock at the door. “It’s open!” I shout behind me.

Colin walks in, two cups of coffee in hand, and sets them on the dresser. “I realized that I didn’t ask you if you drink coffee. I just assumed.”

I don’t drink coffee, but every time I go to a new state, I find myself wanting to become a different person. Maybe here I smoke and drink coffee and introduce myself to strangers like Colin.

“I don’t drink coffee, but thank you anyway.”

Or maybe I don’t do those things.

“Sorry,” he blushes, a warm red flush spreading from his cheeks down his neck. He’s about two weeks post-buzzcut and his blond hair has grown in fast. 

He’s beautiful, like most other people in Los Angeles, but what I have found most beautiful about him has been his shyness — and his sincerity. The way he allows silence to permeate a room and makes no attempts to push her away; instead, he lets her take up more and more space if she so wants. Or, the way his fingers will tentatively graze mine, testing the waters, before he wraps his pinky around my pinky — and then he’ll steal a glance to see if I’m feeling how he’s feeling, but by the time I catch it, he’s already looking down at his feet as if he’s been caught red-handed, a smile spreading wide across his face. Or, the way he’ll doodle on napkins when we’re at breakfast and lunch, and when I ask him what he’s drawing he won’t show me, but then a day later I’ll find the napkins tucked inside my shorts pocket or at the bottom of my purse. There’s a boyishness to him, an innocence to him. Like he grew up but his view of the world didn’t. 

“I didn’t know you smoked. You don’t strike me as the type.”

The type. What type am I? Suddenly I want to know what I am inside of his body. Am I a tropical rain shower flowing through his veins or a blistering snowstorm? Does his stomach leap into his chest when I smile or is my smile nothing more than an everyday occurrence to him? Am I the first person he wants to call when something good happens or the last person when something bad happens? What am I to him? Who am I to him?

“I don’t smoke,” I grin.

He’s confused, but a curious smile grows on his face. He’s trying to place me. I like watching people try to figure me out, but especially him. I like watching the real-time Tetris in their eyes. I offer him the cigarette, “But you can have it.”

“Oh, no, I’m good,” he waves his hands in front of him and moves towards me, pulling me into a hug. I burrow my face into his neck. He tells me, “I don’t smoke either,” but the faint trace of smoke trapped in his t-shirt says otherwise. 

I smile. “What a coincidence.”

A Meditation on Time Travel

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Can I tell you a not-so-secret-secret? I float between worlds — and years, too. 

The years ‘bit’ is a recent revelation. I’ve become a past-tense psychic. Last Friday, when I stepped outside my building, it was the summer of 2015. The morning was crisp, vulnerably bright but cautiously on edge. It didn’t know what could happen but it had that innate optimism working in overdrive to try to make something good happen. That was me in 2015: full of fervor, and unshakeable, overwhelming hunger, but endlessly guarded. I had safety locks in places that, back then, even I didn’t know about. 

The moment I stepped outside, I was washed in a full-body familiarity; it was as if I had stepped through a portal and ended up inside my 19-year-old body again. But how had I managed to truncate eight years of my life into a morsel of time? How had I managed to even go back? Was anyone else seeing this? More importantly, was anyone else feeling this? And why the summer of 2015? What was so special about being 19 years old again? 

The summer of 2015 was divided into two distinct color schemes: 1, a gradient of hazy purples and pinks, and 2, a series of black-and-white photographs. There’s a cloudy layer covering all the events and feelings of that summer, keeping them from erupting and overflowing on everyone. But not well. There was always leakage, always an overshare, always a too-muchness that I couldn’t cover up. 

I always oscillated between being too much and not enough. Balance was a foreign concept, the same way allowing and receiving love was. A single kind word was an instant K.O. I craved love so desperately, yet any time I got close to it, I backed away, tripping over my own feet. Bring me love! But then keep it very far away from me! I know it doesn’t make sense, but neither do I!

I was deeply excitable and easily upset-able; I was rough around all my edges, and soft in all the places the world laughs at. I was constantly teetering on opposite ends of all spectrums but never finding the center that I so desperately craved. Everything was never-ending-ly spilling out of me and I tried doing everything to contain it, but I could never get it right. I was always too much, a little off, kind of wrong, not right, weird. 

Then it happened again today: I went for a walk on the boardwalk and it was the summer of 2016. I looked around, stupefied. Why the summer of 2016? What had become so special about being 20 again? I was dressed for the winter, three layers of pants, a polka-dot scarf wrapped around my neck thrice, but suddenly it was that summer — that beautifully, vibrant summer whose memories are still coated yellow and pink inside my body — and I was wearing a tank top and shorts, with my hair pulled back into a ponytail, inside of a body that loved to run on nothing.

I stood on the boardwalk, but my body had a different texture to it. A different set of colors, a different set of shapes, a different set of energetic identities that comprised it. I was 20 again but way too overqualified to be 20. 

Whenever summers visit me, like a lingering outline, I become tempted to shed my clothes and run into the sky. I wanted to do that today. At the end of the boardwalk, I imagined that the sky’s mouth would open up, its gummy, reddish-pink tongue would unravel like a fruit roll-up for me to step onto, and then it would swallow me up and away. I always want to let go of this corporeal form. It weighs me down sometimes (I’m sorry). 

That’s why I wish someone else could visit my body, pace my hallways, run across my walls, float through my floors, sit on my chairs, sleep in my beds, dance barefooted on my living room carpet, put on my makeup, wear my clothes, and walk around as if they were me. I want someone else to see inside of me and then tell me what they see. What’s it like to be me for a day? Is my body dark and cavernous, a single floorboard wide, a floorboard that’s creaky and rotted? Or is it an endless maze and the exit moves as soon as you get too close to it? Am I all the colors that could possibly exist, undulating in and out of one another? If you answer yes to any of the above, would you still want to be me after a minute or would that be too much for you?

I’m still embarrassed to write about my sensitivity, my ability to feel spectrums of emotions I haven’t seen people put into words yet, because with it comes this undercurrent of ‘too muchness’. I have always been too much, an odd little big thing. There’s so much that I write that is embellished, worded delicately, worded beautifully, because the truth isn’t beautiful. It’s harsh, sharp, pungent, painful. How do you write about being almost murdered without evoking concern? How do you write about a decade of eating disorders without inspiring pity? How do you write about the tragedies of your life in a way that doesn’t change how people see you? Because I just changed how you saw me. I do it with every single sentence.

I used to wonder if tragedy was the best part of me. That’s why I spent most of my time writing about it. How easy it was — and still is — to swim into the pain and drown myself in it over and over just to create something bigger and far more beautiful than I could ever be. I realize now that I was really writing so I could listen to myself. Everything I have ever written, and will ever write, is a love letter to myself, first and foremost. 

It was 2016 today. And it was 2015 last week. And I don’t think I’ll ever be one thing. And I don’t think I’ll never not be too much. And I don’t think I’ll ever stop never-ending-ly spilling out, falling apart to come back together again. I think I am simply endless