jo

it’s 8:35pm and the smell of garlic keeps drifting through our living room windows. right before this it was some kind of bread baking, the smell of fullness and hearth, but now i can taste the broth of something rich practically sitting on my tongue. it makes me warm; knowing someone is feeding and being fed.

it’s 8:37pm and i’m feeling the heaviness of summer give way into the possibility of night air. i’ve always loved the extremes of summer– the breaking of dawn, sun hesitantly peeking over cracks and crevices, a chill still trying to linger at your doorway. the perfect stillness of nighttime, when the bugs hum a happy tune and you spend all of your wishes on this moment, right here, right now, i wish it could be like this forever.

it’s 8:40pm and i’m pretending that i am good and righteous and that i can love without hesitation. if i pretend hard enough, i’ll believe it. i want someone to show me the roadmap, the explicit right and wrongs, i want there to be a black and a white to my life. most of all, i want chlorine to burn at my eyes and a girl to burn at my mouth.

it’s 8:42pm and i know that if we only had black and white, we would never see the inky blue of a summer night’s sky. stars mottled with swirling. i’m looking up. i’m smelling the food we’ve prepared. i’m ready to eat, to gather, to be full.

today i am twenty two. there is no reconciliation that lives on my tongue, no forgiveness i am ready to beg. the romantics can come later– today, i am twenty-two.

are you coming here

my fingers itch and scrabble for the loose pull of your sweatshirt

are you coming to me

i wish you were here i think about seven million times a day

you, to me? for me?

we belong to each other in my head

me, for you. always.

and sometimes i think you think i am yours and you are mine

come home please and thank you

home is the leather of your passenger seat. home feels like the rubber stitching on worn, sun-cracked leather.

can i join you?

home sounds like an aux cord passed back and forth, a phone pressed into my palm with trust that i will fill you with the right noise

i'm glad you're here

we're friends, and the sky is bright blue. the sun has finally come out to say hello. the rain gives way to colors dancing in your side mirrors.

call me when you're home

friends friends friends friends friends the word thrums happily in my chest friends

my goodreads is sometimesjordyn and yes, i want to be your friend :) <3

i hate zoom meetings. what happened to when your boss says something particularly out of touch and we lock eyes and you're biting the inside of your lip trying not to smile and i have to pretend to drink my lukewarm coffee because i'll laugh if you laugh and margaret behind us has been sketching portraits of her dog from memory to make patrick laugh and yeah we've all got notepads in front of us but the real acknowledgment of work is knowing that we're breathing the same sterile air and making it human again. zoom offers none of that i hate it here

i push her to the back of my mind. if i touch the bruise, it hurts.

i can't tell you when it happened– if it was junior or senior year of high school– but i can tell you that i am different after sobbing in my bathtub for two hours when i found out that i am my own unreliable narrator. love has to be earned. keep everyone a breath away. don't let them in, but let them think they're a card carrying member to the club of you and all of your glittering personalities. i'm sorry i want to murmur so often under my breath but someone taught me when i was fourteen that sorry is the song of the weak so i bite my tongue and forget it.

they're all right; you don't forget your first heartbreak. but when everyone has the love songs and the hallmark movies to get over it, i am lost in a swirling hurricane of fury and lost girlhood to a person who i swore to love until the day i take my last breath. friendship is a sour taste in my throat so i pretend i'm in love with everyone and pray to forget the first best friend i've ever had. i miss you, if you're reading this. i'm mad at you too, if you're reading this. please let me follow you, if you're reading this. please tell me you're okay, if you're reading this.

and the final story goes like this: at the last concert i saw, i left swearing that i was going to trick the drummer into falling in love with me. my friend watched me with amusing eyes. why do you always have someone you're in love with? she asked. i frowned. aren't you always looking for your next romantic spiral? i asked.

what's an insecurity called if it was once a habit that you loved? what's a habit called when it's something i do to keep her close after she's walked away?

i am 20 years old. why does it feel like time is running out. my skin still looks like dew and sunshine in the morning, my knees still scab over when i trip and fall, my heart still looks for the best in everyone i meet. why does the sand keep falling from the hourglass. why do i feel like wasted potential and words that have already been written. i am 20 years old. why am i so tired.

"make peace with your unlived lives" actually i will not. i am so full of sound and fury and the need to crawl out of my own skin and into the millions of others that exist. sylvia plath wrote of a fig tree, one with never-ending branches heavy with potential, and i will devour. i am hungry for the hundreds of myself that exist only within the confines of my mind, and i will spend my entire life chasing after them. i am ravenous to the point of madness. rage, rage against the dying of the light. i have never been gentle. satiated is not in my diet.

sometimes i feel so so dumb. 

my thoughts are primarily not my own- they are a product of being raised on the internet, my public school education, a dash of my friend’s beliefs and wishes. i am easily coerced into changing my mind, or my thoughts will mold to the words of others and stubbornly cling there. my mind is putty in the hands of the world, and sometimes i wonder if individuality is a hoax, a seed planted by the hands of another.