to be continued...

At least LA has trees, she thought. She still smelled them, even as it crept up on a year since her visit. Limes. She remembered throwing them in the street at a boy she didn't know much about.

It was August in New York. An insufferable humidity had kept her permanently drenched since April. Yet she knew that fall was coming, and then winter - and she knew what that meant. People locked in boxes, refusing to leave their beds. Reality. It terrified her. Could she survive another winter? Did she even want to?

She used to dream about Christmas under a blanket of snow. Now she dreamed of a Christmas at the beach.

black mountain point

I played in thunderstorms,
Up to my ears in the water at
Black Mountain Point.

However tall the sky goes
This is something only you know:
When rain comes, I soar
Yet as the sun arrives I falter
And get a little smaller…

The trailhead told me it would be miles
Until the view resembled
A body, my lake.

I forgot the headaches,
How light hurts the tops of your eyelids.
An imaginary number
Carved into my stomach.

She said girl, we woke up one day
Speaking foreign languages
To bodies we couldn’t see in pure light.

I play in thunderstorms
Up to my ears in the water.

i used to have nerves of steel,
after the heart of glass.
and for years and years and years
i left all that anxiety to pass.

they say i'm still young, i should have life.

and as the years pass i find myself
going back to my high school friends.
because with all the changing
there was something lost
though i know we're getting better
it was at a cost.

I've always known I'm just not built for 9 to 5s. But it's getting harder and harder to survive. Suit up, stay alive? Or fight. Fight.

you took me to the top of some building
watching the political city stretch out with political lights
saying, the tuition is worth it just for the view.

I was ready to move there, thinking of June.
Like, everything would be better if I were older.
Like, you'd love me if I had been a bit bolder.
No. This was not my place.
I was still a child looking for a dream to chase.

You weren't the dream, you were maddening at best.
The shot in the dark, New York City, burned in my chest.

Never mind May, it's nearly June.
I am so tired of this fucking room.
So escape escape escape or don't.

The boy of my dreams is not the man I am seeing.
Remorse hits the back of my head as he grazes my body.
In this changing weather, I just don't know any better.