What To Do With All This Love

I know I haven't posted in forever, but that's cause it seems like I have run out of words. I'm still taking a lot of pictures though!! and you can follow my adventures on my instagram. I'll post here again eventually :)

At the end of that eternal summer, I found myself back where everything began: lying on the wooden pew, staring out the window at that violaceous pink streaking the palm tree laden skies. There in the darkening cathedral, I was reminded of the poetry of your hipbone, slipping into the hollows between your ribs, my lips against your skin in silent prayer. Some things were easier to worship – though I didn’t know it back then. 

“Addiction is tricky. For example: a man who quit smoking for 11 years spent 15 seconds in an elevator with a man smoking a cigarette. He gave in. What I’m trying to say is, I think I love you again.”

West Coast

I spent most of August wandering along the coast of California, when everything was bone dry and hazy dust filling imaginary cracks in my skin. Still, it was better than lying on the bedroom floor watching clouds and wondering if boredom (or heartbreak) could make your heart stop beating.

It Doesn’t Have To Be Beautiful

All the boys I ever loved liked me better with long hair because it was the easiest part of me to own. So I grew it out in hopes that it would strangle me eventually. K always said that September begins with a secret death wish, but that was only half true. Dying is surprisingly easy and secrets are hard to keep. 

That’s why when I found myself lying compulsively again last week, I cobbled together whatever pieces of me were still salvageable and hopped on the first train out of Chicago. I stop charging my phone after the fifteenth missed call and spend an hour listening to the voicemails you left in my mailbox on repeat, wondering why I was always the first one to say “I love you”. Like the theory of galaxies, everything comes together, everything breaks apart. At the end of the day, what are we really? I’m sitting alone in front of my seedy motel waiting for the waxing moon to emerge and end up falling asleep before the sky fades into the dusky purple horizon. You were right, the stars do look brighter in the city.

A Forgotten Journey

Tonight I want to be with you in Guangzhou, hanging off the edge of the balcony of our motel room, smokin’ tokin’ jokin’, blackening our lungs with every inhale and drinking Tieguanyin with Marlboro Reds dangling from our chapped lips. Overhead the moon is full and ripe, like apricots in the summer, while down in the streets, the steady murmur of the crowd is drowned out by the smell of stir fry wafting from the kitchen window, occasionally interrupted by the clink of chopsticks on delicate china. I’m absentmindedly picking at mosquito bites on my legs, only half-listening to the radio, playing a staticky mix of K-pop and Amy Winehouse. 

Earlier that day I bought a lucky rabbit’s foot from the toothless grandma around the corner and I’m wondering if that means things will change from now on. Maybe I’ll stop being so sad all the time and you’ll remember to eat on Saturday afternoons and we’ll forget what it feels like to be lonely. July always did seem like the longest month of the year. Eventually, we fall asleep under the hazy red night sky and when we wake up at noon tomorrow, we’ll do it all over again.

Art Is Casual Lovemaking

I stopped dreaming again in late May, when the square root of two was closer to a whole number and breathing started to matter less. Everytime I blink an hour passes by, and suddenly, I’m staring at teabags littering the desk along with half-developed polaroids and hastily scribbled goodbye notes, stuck between morning eggs. You wear Sativa like it’s your favorite perfume and it reminds me of rainy days and warm, hazy evenings underneath the rumble of the El, the scent of coffee dregs caught in your collarbones. 

I keep thinking about the end of summer and when did you fall in love with me anyways?

The Warmest Shade Of Blue

Last night, I dreamt about your sleepy-soft open mouth kisses along the ridge of my collarbone; and woke up shaking so hard I thought my skin would split at the seams, all the unspoken words and secrets spilling out of my body like black tar and accusations (I never pretended to be an honest person). But it’s 3 AM and I can’t sleep. You always smell like aniseed & bad decisions & it makes me feel so damn alive sometimes. 

Kiss me harder. Devour my bones. Make me forget the feeling of your long piano fingers tapping Chopin into my skin. It’s not love, but it’s a lot closer to that than hate.

This is a story about the winter I descended into a deep depression and learned that I couldn’t love you without wanting to kill myself. Infatuation and death are not so mutually exclusive. Why else would Romeo have drank the poison? Everything I am. Everything I was. It could all be distilled down to cravings and bad habits. And all I wanted to do was to be closer to you than God.

Never Let Me Go

Last Monday they told me that they scattered your ashes into the Ganga, the sacred river of your motherland. And in my head, I’m counting the number of steps to India and wondering if I’ll see you in the stars tonight

You can’t fall in love with every place you stay, the same way you can’t fall in love with every beautiful stranger on the street, even when they somehow become a part of you without you meaning for it to happen. I had this bad habit of breaking my heart, so I looked for Brahms to fill up the empty spaces, the same way I looked for you in the barren woods on all those restless winter evenings. Chasing, always chasing after that elusive feeling, the sound of your fingers at 4 AM catching on the edge of the guitar strings, leaving track marks and dissonance in my dreams. It must have been then, in that strange, unsettling sort of way, I began wondering what you were like in the early mornings – hair touseled, voice still rough and fucked-out raspy – or how you liked your coffee – watery with no sugar. I never minded any of it though. I’ve always thought that the warmest place in this city is where you sleep at night.

Kill Your Darlings

I spent last Sunday night staring out the window, watching the eastern sky shift pale and purple against the backdrop of glowing streetlights. Lying there in the deafening silence, paralyzed by the chasm between our still bodies, my own cowardice that brought me here in the first place, I wondered when it all started falling apart at the seams. The butterflies turned into maggots – the illusion dispersed in the early winter chill – the wave of suffocating unreality. 

You are asleep (or faking sleep) and I am watching the rise and fall of your uneven breathing. Sometime between the fleeting touches and speaking glances from last night, something had changed and maybe become irreparably broken. Then, it becomes a simple matter of learning how to deconstruct yourself, so that when you put the parts back together, you are practically unrecognizable. Yesterday I tried to drown myself in the lake. Because I can still feel the burn of your fingertips along the ridge of my hipbone running down to the space behind my knees. Because I cut those pieces out and buried the scars, so I could pretend to feel whole again.

Not About Strangers

I used to count the days by the passage of ladybugs underneath the stairwell. Like beads on a rosary, they never failed to keep me calm, even when the rain started falling, turning the dusty ground into mudpits. I wasn’t always afraid of the rain you know, it just became something that reminded me of you and the way your blood spilled onto the kitchen floor after the knife slipped. Without flinching, you bent down to clean up the mess (I still haven’t forgiven you for ruining my favorite tea towel). The plink of water dripping from the sink, like little April showers, would haunt me for days afterwards. 

That was years ago though, before I made the mistake of memorizing the slow, steady pulse on the edge of your wrist – the only place I think you could ever be vulnerable. The scar is still there and sometimes, I catch you running your fingers over its raised landscape. And sometimes, when I am sitting next to you on the bus, I wonder how you stop yourself from burning through your skin. Ashes to ashes, we all fall down.