i’m so mad it’s like i’m in love with you

Dear Diary,

This blog has turned into something far removed from what I made it for in the beginning of college, which was like maybe something fun and lax, Buzzfeed-esque. At some point I got annoyed at myself for writing listicles. So then I stopped. And now this is just a place for people who know me and people who have a crush on me, and my mother, to read things. Like a really public finsta. Except this semester I’m trying not to write. I don’t know why because I already feel my brain floating away from my body. Even though I’m happier, Caroline and I agree that I’ve gotten more basic now that I’ve started wearing t-shirts everyday like I did in high school. My life is not a movie. I think that’s the hardest part to un-think. Because I do know why I’m trying not to write. I want to be a better engineer. I want to want to get a job and pay for my ominously impending adult life more than I want to write words that are hard to grasp and do nothing other than add to a growing pile of unread internet angst. George Saunders started off as an engineer and now he’s a writer and maybe it’s a long game. It’s a long game.

Also, I’m a junior now. Last night I played truth or dare and told everyone who I liked and now I’m embarrassed enough to write something.

So. Here’s a string of things I wrote in different places this summer. In a plane towards Peru. In an apartment in Berkeley. On the dinner table of my parents’ house.

Oh, and the photo at the top of this post was taken by a man named Soldado whom I met this summer. Beautiful images made by people who don’t care too much about shutter speed. Creds to him.

i already know
that i like u too much.

SO CHEESY UGHH!!

just a character, alice

————————

i’m so mad it’s like i’m in love with you

I found myself a chair in a tall building in a big city and this is how I began my deep sleep. This way I could do nothing but unprogram myself from the romantic comedy.

and first, a thing to believe:

“Though I am alive now, I do not believe that an old man’s pessimism is truer than a young man’s optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man’s power to recollect. Spring has its sappy wisdom. Lonely teenagers still arrive in San Francisco aboard Greyhound buses.” — Late Victorians, Richard Rodriguez

He’ll remember me forever. I remember thinking this convincingly. I figured that us watching him in pain must have seared the pain feeling and us into a permanent synaptic connection, straight into the base parts of his brain so that whenever he breathed he also felt that we could be next to him, pinching his ears in a tattoo parlor somewhere in Los Angeles between Chinatown and Downtown.

three years pass and,

I closed my eyes and felt mango slime sliding into my mouth, cooling the parts of me that burned. I focused on the ten different places where I could feel my blood beating inside me. Beat beat beat. There were the places that hurt me and the places that kept pushing further inward until they fused onto the soft parts that made me cry. I became a thing with three more pounds of spite next to the kidney bean that was my soul. It stayed this way. Dead sober is what you called it.

There were bird bones stitched in your words that made them fly away when I dreamt. I knew how good of a liar you were, and when my friends asked about you I said you were doing well. Some days I thought you were dead in another state and that made you my best imaginary friend. I believed that with a person’s mercury and the star’s planets and the planet’s stars you could be well without even being.

And, what if you’ve gotten fatter in the time that I’ve gotten skinnier. Is it worth it, imaginary friend, to find the places that I still remember and to squeeze your new face and brush your teeth with my hair. Would you enjoy that very much, watching me writhe in my tight skin.

I only remember the bits that hurt me the most, which is why I remember you.

And in the time that I’ve lied for you, I’ve decided that it’s good to have a purpose. The asphalt’s gotten too hot.

then in a summer i’m already forgetting,

he solved my brother’s Rubik’s cube in the time it took me to eat the watermelon my mother set out for us on the dinner table. My father found the cube the next morning and knew that I was in love with a boy who was in love with me. These revelations didn’t make things better or worse, because I already knew the things that surprised my dad. What dad didn’t know was how my boy talked about how we met while I sat in my mother’s seat and he sat in my father’s seat, our thighs sweat-sticking to my dinner table’s chairs.

I knew you thought I was beautiful from the pictures you took of me in the kitchen of our house.

these were the things I could see from my window,

A man and a woman got on a motorcycle and the man insisted to the woman that she would be high in ten minutes. The tow trucks came in across the street at seven in the morning every morning and the Mexican food truck played the tune of an ice cream truck at noon. I watched half-asleep from my window and thought to

tell the boys who try too hard to not try hard. There’s a half-price sale at Nordstrom where all of your hard-earned money goes instead of drugs. And if that’s too hard to believe, the boys who don’t try hard don’t get to get hard on the soft ways your Nordstrom skin feels hitting against the heel of their hit-hard hands. They’ve got strong hands, they do, with pudgy sausage fingers to match their pudgy sausage _ _ _ _ s that feel strong in your mouth and other soft, wet places. It’s easy to get too soft and wet when thinking about these hard hit boys in these hard hit times and everything is just hard hard hard hard hard. Until you make it easy. Wipe away your wet ones with a dry thing. Don’t feel bad. It’s all in your heart head.

And the entire time I’m wondering if I finally broke your hard heart like I broke mine.

i never thought about the rain storm until i thought about you and,

These orange pink purple blue beats in my heart make me feel like an explosion. Thinking about the greasiness of your 2AM blonde hair with my raspberry hair tie knotted on top of your head, straight up like a mad scientist in a John Hughes movie, that thought makes me explode again because I know at the end of it she kisses him. Or he kisses her. And it’s divine. Because even if I don’t have you now I have these still clips hung like a limp constellation on my bedroom ceiling. Next to the princesses and the teddy bears and the porcelain wind-up my mother gave me when I was thirteen. Beirut plays in the background and I’m twirling out of existence. I can smell the petrichor before I can see the sky. Poof. Poof. Poof.

Too slow too slow.