I Needed You

This kind of desperate inspiration
is like fingernails scraping
the walls of my empty room.
The last time I left
you were right there, right
where you're supposed to be
& then you were walking away,
you didn't see me put my hand
against the window to wave goodbye.

I figure this much:
Tonight I owe you something
I can't put down on a page
For kissing the tears right out of my eyes.
You'd be amazed at
how easy it is for me
to get over the things that hurt
when you put your arms around me.

Baby, your name lives on my lips
You're the kind of think I thought
I could only dream about.
But imagination got the best of me.

I always thought I wanted something real
When in fact I wanted something true.

I needed you.

Dead Horses

Sometimes I hate reading things I've written in the past. 

When I found of all of these bits of writing on archive.org the other day, when I was looking for some of the old things I've written, I found a lot that might have been better left UNFOUND.

Sometimes nostalgia gets you. It's just beating a dead horse, and the horse is old and rotted and stinky. 

Sometimes it hurts more because you know you don't NEED the reminder of things right in your face, because they are always there in your head anyway. This is from 2002:

Even now, he is every pair of deep brown eyes I look into, every man I laugh to tears with. He is every comforting voice on the telephone, every pair of converse sneakers, painfully familiar.

Some things don't ever change.

The Hannah Sketches

Three weeks ago I signed up for my first Indie Ink Writing Challenge and I dare say that it's changed my life. Why? How? Let me tell you a little story...

Many years ago, but not enough years ago to dull the aches and pains, I was in love with a man who didn't love me back. Our relationship, which had at that point spanned nine years of all sorts of ups and downs and togethers and aparts, had always been a strange and tenuous one. The thing of it is, I knew from the beginning that I was doomed. I always knew I'd lose him someday, and I was acutely aware that I was putting myself in a position to be hurt by someone I never really trusted to begin with. 

I've been thinking a lot about him lately. It's been over three years since I've seen or talked to him last, and I think that every once in a while at this point an entire day will go by without me thinking of him at all. On the one hand, that's exactly what I've been wanting to happen, but on the other hand, I am afraid that time will wash away memories that I desperately, desperately want to hold on to. 

One of these memories is of a morning I woke up at his house. I don't know what we had been doing the night before, I don't remember that day, I don't remember anything other than the fact that I woke up on a morning in the middle of winter, I could see snow falling outside of the window, and the room had that soft blue morning glow that only comes on the coldest and dreariest of days - and he was gone. He wasn't in the bed when I woke up, but had been there when I'd fallen asleep. There was a moment upon waking that I panicked - he was gone! But it was just a moment before I found reason. He'd gone downstairs for breakfast, he was in the bathroom, he was watching TV - there were a hundred reasonable things he could have been doing that made him not there at that point in time. But see? I'd imagined the worst. I'd imagined that he was just gone. 

I think I was twenty-one at the time, maybe twenty-two. Regardless, it was about that time that I started getting little ideas in my head about a story of losing the person you love - because I knew that it would happen to me someday, remember? I knew that I would lose him. 

But this story was bigger than that, I knew even then. The story I wanted to write wasn't just about losing a person, it was about what was left behind when that person was gone. It was about all of the possibilities that came along with the ending of a life - like a new life, and a new love. It was about that mysterious and unknown place where things go where they disappear, whether it be a person, or a lost sock, or the snow when it melts in the springtime. The story is about always wondering what might have been, and never forgetting what was. In short, I knew at twenty-two that THIS is the story I want to write, more than any other. If I ever make a name for myself, this is the one that I want the world to see, this is the story that I want people to hold in their hands and feel the pages rough on their fingers as they turn them. 

I never wrote that story. I never even tried. Not until now.

If you have read the three sketches I've submitted to Indie Ink, and that's what I believe they are, just sketches, just little pieces and snippets of something that in my mind is nearly infinite - you would know that in the story, it's the girl who disappears and the man who is left behind. What you wouldn't know is that two days before I submitted that piece, the situation was reversed. It was the girl left behind. It was Evan who was the ghost. 

In my mind and in my dreams, that was never the way it was. It was always him who disappeared. But I read it and read it and re-read it again, and then I thought - no way. This girl's been through enough. Why shouldn't the man suffer the consequences now?

Everyone who writes, I believe, writes with one specific person in mind. They cater to that one person who they want to please and impress above all others, they write their stories as gifts or curses. 

This is my gift. This is my curse. 

I don't want to lose, or be lost, or be left behind anymore. I'm giving up my ghost so I can give it all to you.

The Hannah Sketches, so far: Hannah, Speculation , Deceitful, The Descent, and A Case of Mistaken Identity. Future sketches can be found on the category page: The Hannah Sketches

Ever tried, ever failed + You're Gone

Eighteen straight days of blogging ended because I went on a date, was irrationally let down by the date, and then I wallowed in a stupor of weepiness and melancholy with Alisha for the last two days. 

Saturday morning, Elise and I were sitting at the kitchen counter stools and she tried to slide her stool closer to mine but just ended up smashing one of the legs down onto my right middle toe. The pain was brief but intense, and shocking. Tears instantly welled in my eyes the moment it happened, and from there the floodgates were opened and I was in deep trouble. 

I could barely stop crying the rest of the day.

Thankfully I have a friend who will take me as I am, or at least as she knows me to be, and help me. Just by being there and being her.

If it weren't already so late at night, I would have more new words for you. Instead, for now, this:

You're Gone

I decided months ago that I never wanted
to write another poem about you again,
but when I woke up this afternoon I realized
it was you I had been dreaming about
and I woke up recalling the exact caramel color
of your skin, each meticulously placed freckle,
the way you and gravity worked so hard to
make your hair fall just so over your forehead -
I was dreaming of all these details
burned into my memory after all these years
when I woke up I knew you were the only thing familiar
and for an hour all I wanted was you.

I went outside, stood in two inches of snow,
tried to warm myself and melt away your image
But my mind held on, reached deeper, and
remembered one club night in New York
when I was dancing with you, and in once instant
you were gone. I turned around
expecting to fall into your open arms and
you were nowhere to be found.
For the next hour I searched for you -
Searched men in black shirts and pants,
searched hundreds of brown eyes that weren't yours,
reached for hands that didn't know mine -
I lost you.
But just as I was giving up, resigning to
go back to the dance floor and hope
that you'd find me, you did -
Wrapped silk arms around me, and led me home.

You will never lead me home again, what's more is
I will never wrap my eggshell skin around you again.
I will never get close enough to let you crush me.
I'll never again look into your eyes
and say 'I love you,'
I'll remind myself every day that
you don't deserve me anymore.
I'll remind myself every day that
It's over, and
you're gone.

Promising.

I went on a date last night, a promising first date. Promising because we liked each other, clearly, as we are going out again tomorrow night. He even texted me (before ten in the morning!) to tell me that he enjoyed last night and was looking forward to seeing me again. Promising. 

But I can't lie - not to you, not to myself.

I didn't feel the sparks. I didn't feel giddy or swoony or light in my heart. I didn't look at him and think "Yes." I looked at him and thought, tentatively, "Maybe." 

It's not him, it's me.

I think there comes a point in every perpetually single girl's life where she thinks she is never going to find someone - and for me, that point came and went a long time ago. Worse, it's not that I didn't think I would ever find anyone, it's that I DID find someone. I had someone.

I had him, and I lost him. 

It's been so long now since I've seen him, you'd think I would have forgotten things about him, but no.

It's been three years, five months, and twenty-two days, and I haven't forgotton a thing, and I know now something that I wasn't so sure of yesterday:

I am not over him. 

I think to myself, Yeah. Maybe I'm going to be one of those women living alone with her books and her cats and hopefully my daughter will visit me often when I'm old, because certainly I'll be alone. Because who else could I possibly be with? 

But then I think: This is it. I've made my bed - I did this. And now I have to lay in it. I have to live in it. 

I could be one of those women who drown themselves in vodka and bury themselves into the arms of men they do not know or love - or I could find love. Real love. The kind where they love you back so hard, they don't let you walk away. 

So I did this.

I met him at Paul's Pasta and we had dinner. We had a great time and decided to carry on our date at Azu in Mystic. We probably had too many drinks, we had great desserts, and we talked until my mouth was dry and my cheeks were sore from smiling. I couldn't stop smiling. 

It's promising to laugh with someone. It's promising when you have simple things in common, like favorite books, and movies, and basic human morals. The date lasted five and a half hours, and the whole time we didn't really talk about anything serious, and that was a sweet relief. 

It's promising to know that I can do this now, that I can put myself out there, that I can be the one to say Let's just go out, let's not waste time talking online for weeks, I have no time to waste. 

It's promising to know that I have the strength and the will to try, even though I don't want to have to try, because I still just want him. 

But we're going out again tomorrow night, and I promise - I'm going to give him a chance. 

Sad But True

To everyone else I will insist
It's as if time did not exist before you
But now you've proven I mean nothing
And I've run myself into the ground
Trying to prove you wrong.

Where I am is underneath
li(n)es, poems, songs.
What this is
Is sad but true
To little too late
And a whole list of phrases
That will leave us in pieces
And find me paralyzed
Without another word to say.

You know, with you I could have
Walked a million miles
And it wouldn't have seemed very far
And let me tell you,
With you around
The skies never looked so blue,
And the night never looked so black.
Now I can't tell if the days
Come and go too slow, or too fast.

With you I was nothing
But without you I am even less.

~ circa 2003

Tomorrow, I am fulfilling a lifelong dream. There will be a very quick iUpdate - and then Wednesday... I will blow your mind.