Frozen Chocolate Banana Slices and Other Grocery Store Thoughts.

Melting and boiling are two very different things. I didn't realize this until I was melting in love and boiling in hate. // My parents always told me the bars on the windows were to keep the robbers out. I think it's to keep the rebels in. // He didn't just look at me, he forced his eyes to mine and read me like I was a scripture signed by God himself. // I have a new favorite snack. Frozen chocolate banana slices. They remind me of you. Cold. Good covered in bad. Left in pieces. // Pens glide so smooth over your name. Almost like they're begging me to think of you. // This paper is burning a hole in my pocket. If only you burned for me like this.

The things I would tell you if I let myself: A growing list

I can't write you off. I can't say that you were just another boy; or another fling. I can't erase the four years and one month that I proudly called you mine... All those years that you claimed me. I can't say that you were just a secret that got out. I can't say any of these things and that bothers me.

At the time of writing this I have been alive for 266 months. You were with me for 49 of them. That is roughly 18.42% of my life.
I learned that in the math class that you didn't see me pass.

Before you came along I slept in the middle of my full size bed. I slept like a rock, which led to there being a hole in the middle of my bed and everyone joked that no one could wake me up once I was out. But then my bed became our bed. We each had a side and we would enter dream comas together. Now you're gone and I still stay on my side of the bed; leaving the other side empty or occupied by the two pillows that were considered yours. I'm no longer a deep sleeper or dreamer, now everyone jokes that they never see me sleep at all.

There are so many things that make me think about you.
Your clothes in a box in my sisters room.
Every restaurant in New York City.
Edison and Perth Amboy, New Jersey.
Six Flags Great Adventure.
The plants that you once bought me as gifts. The plants you helped me pick out for my 20th birthday. The plant nursery.
My ipad, its case and the computer mouse.
The games sitting on my desktop.
Your contact on my phone and all the texts and pictures I won't delete because I am a hoarder of memories both good and bad.
The rings and all the other jewelry you gave me that sits in their boxes in my closet collecting dust.
The dent on the side of my car.
January 11th.
The year 2016.

Throughout our time together I don't want to only remember the good. There was more than enough bad.
The fights we had. The accounts and messages kept hidden. The times we avoided each other.
When you jumped out of my car, when you pushed me off your bed. When I hit you in the balls, when you grabbed me by my wrists. When we had hate in our hearts.

When you left my stomach aches left too.

I don't want you to think that I am better without you. I am different without you. I am cold without you. But I became a fighter without you.

When I see couples get married after a year or two I am so happy for them but I am overwhelmed with fear. I thought we would be the ones everyone looked at and admired. The high school sweethearts that met in middle school and lived happily ever after. I had faith in us. Now I don't believe that I could ever dedicate myself to someone like that again. I hate the idea of marriage. I wanted you for life and look where that got me.

My biggest fear is that I will recover from this breakup, but you won't.
I want this breakup to recover you... make you learn and make you give every great part of you, that you gave me and more to the next girl.
Because at the end of the day all I ever wanted was for you to be happy.

I want to feel something again.

For four years I haven't written.
For four years not a single thing I have written has meant anything to me.
For four years I thought I was happy and I've been told happy writers don't write.
For four years I was with you.

The stress of being a writer.

It is not about the number of pages; or poems; or posts that you write.

It is not about the creative process or what you did to get there.

And it is not about the feelings you are trying to expel or how misplaced you are to begin with.

It comes down to the number of retweets. Or reblogs. To the number of people who tumbled down a internet web and wound up at your page. And the number of people who kept looking once they got there.

Your success can best be measured by how many young mainstream girls quote you on Instagram.

And unlike great authors before us, who only became great after their death.. we will not have this ritual.

Once we die no one will take our crumpled papers from our desks and decipher them. No one will search through our notebooks; looking for sonnets to recite for centuries after.

We will die with our phones held close. Our texts will expire, our cellphone numbers will be recycled.
Every blog we have will be sent further down the black hole of the internet until google no longer recognizes our user name.

To be a writer is to dedicate yourself to the idea of being invisible. You must have to prepare yourself for living in a clock. Every key stroke you make on your Mac is equivalent to just a fraction of a chance. A chance for you to have a physical printed book.

A physical printed book. Not to be confused with a published book. Please remember one you pay for and the other pays you.

Being a writer is being sad. Not sad enough that people want to put you in a pillowy white room, but just sad enough to remind everyone else that they are not robots... and life sucks.

Life doesn't suck because it's short or because it has restrictions, but the feeling of life can be explained by that same deflating feeling you experience as a young child when you outgrow your favorite shoes or pants or when your favorite shirt gets a hole.

That feeling of giving everything, wanting everything, yet getting nothing.

The epitome of being a writer.

Hydrocodone Broke My Promise.

Hydrocodone. 

Web MD describes it as a magical pill that works in the brain.

Specifically, it changes how your body feels and responds to various amounts of pain. 

What is it used to treat? What conditions?

Pain; with no further explanation accompanied. 

Who is going to sit and pretend they don't know what pain is? 

Who is going to question how much pain must be tolerated before this radical pill is prescribed?

I grew up in a house where narcotics were popped like candy. 

Different colors and sizes. 

Some coated, some crushed. 

All known for being good fun. 

I knew the smell of good kush before I knew the glorious smell of a new car, or "clean sheets air freshener." 

Alcohol was my next door neighbor who would come over to the house quite often. 

By the end of the night there they laid, on my cold kitchen floor. 

They must have been old friends with the cigarettes because they often came together. 

In fact I have memories of all three, holding hands singing children's songs, before deciding to take this fiesta elsewhere. 

Those three were not law abiding citizens. 

And psychiatrists did not believe this to be a healthy friendship. 

Regardless they became a staple in my American household. 

The three musketeers. 

One for all, and all for the high. 

...Yeah that was the saying, right?

Being choked by the smoke filling the house, I promised myself I would never part take. 

You had weed, I had the web. 

You had Molly, I had my puppy Rocky. 

You had a bottle of Georgi's cheap vanilla vodka, and I had an extra tall glass of chocolate milk. 

Young and inexperienced I was, but I knew pain. 

I felt emotions that I didn't know what to do with while I was applying for high schools I didn't want to go to, while trying to figure out ways to get you to stop driving all yours cars into tall structures.... and to stop buying new cars. 

The older I got the pain became physical. 

I fought the blinding nightmares and bellowing voices with my fists. 

Only realizing my body, was fighting itself in an entirely different way. 

When someone asked how I was feeling I was honest and stated I was hurting. 

Nobody did anything. 

My mind started fighting more than voices. 

It fought sleep. 

It fought attention. 

And oh how it protested bright lights. 

My life had become a constant reminder of the pain. 

Chronic pain that although the doctors acknowledged, they completely dismissed. 

For fear of drugging me too young. 

Because society knows opioids fuel abuse. 

Forget about their abilities to diminish pain, clearly stated in hundreds of international clinical trials. 

I was good on my promise till I met alcohol straight on at a wedding. 

No date to accompany me, I agreed to live a little risky for once in my life. 

I did this for me. 

And god it was one of the best dates I ever had. 

Picture this. 

Short, dirty blonde haired, sixteen year old, white girl from New York City visiting the west coast for the first time.  

An ex fat kid, with boobs popping out of tight fit A-line dress. 

Heels so high, yet somehow still able to walk one foot in front of the other. 

She and alcohol took some people's money that night, and took advantage of the alone time deciding to go for a walk. 

She being me obviously.

A forty five minute leisurely stroll up a gravel hill, through a parking lot, crossing a dark road by somehow going through a locked toll bridge that would eventually lead me to signs in the grass pointing me where I needed to go... all while arriving at my hotel room around two in the morning and falling flat on my face the second I get my door open. 

The only thing I remember from this adventure was standing in the middle of a road, moving my hips side to side moving my arms like a dramatic dancer would, from one side to another, up and then back down. 

My eyes focused on the yellow paint parting the directions of the road, all meanwhile some poor driver had to stay honking at me to get me out of his way. 

Did I mention the hotel was a fifteen minute walk from the party venue? 

Alcohol became familiar to me and I began to see myself in a better light when she was around. 

My favorite perfume was one that smelled like Malibu Rum. 

It reminded me of how strong of a women I was. 

How confident I could be, and how beautiful me and my body actually were.

I later met a boy who would become the sun my earth spun around. 

My life, awhile later still is in orbit around him. 

Him joining my life taught me more about myself that I initially expected. 

For instance, love, although bipolar, and marvelous, and most importantly...real; does not have the power to fix everything. 

The pain will not become tolerable just because there is some to tolerate it there with you. 

And this is okay. 

I haven't been visited by alcohol in some time, but temptations have risen since I made my promise. 

Alcohol although being sweet, can be a lot of work to be around. 

There is not much relaxing and breathing, more like experiencing and screaming.

The older I have gotten the more drugs I have become aware of. 

I knew their negatives and viewed the only positive as self destruction in over dramatic cases. 

Rappers write songs with assistance from these drugs, artists feel their paintings, poets read the plaque on their awards, but all this is canceled when one white boy in Ohio crushes too many up and mixes it in with his Bud Light. 

Fatal.

In the weekend that just past the pain became too much. 

My head felt inflated, and my eyes were near to rolling out of their sockets. 

My big toe feels fractured while the top of my foot is numb.

My knuckles strong and sharp now felt immobile. 

When standard pain medicine sold over the counter at Rite Aid failed me, and my doctors teetered on the ethics involving giving a young adult something that would for once rid me of pain, my childhood came through for me. 

Out it came long thin and white, from a bottle labeled "Vitamin D."

They wouldn't tell me it's name till ten minutes after I had taken it. 

It's like Tylenol they said. 

Hydrocodone. 

Twenty minutes later my eyelids drooped while my head laid on the chest of that boy I mentioned earlier. 

Covered in a blanket. 

My first time pain free that I can clearly remember. 

Possibly my first time pain free ever. 

Within six hours the effect had worn off but the thrill still buzzed inside me. 

The broken promise didn't seem to bother me because I asked for another one. 

It's been a couple of days since I've had my first taste. 

Is this a habit I can shake?

Hydrocodone be my date?

The Nightly Ritual

I lay flat on my stomach every night and place my left ear to the pillow. My palms down on the soft sheets, elbows bent at ninety degrees, almost as if I am against a wall being checked by a cop. In a way I am. This ritual is my way of surveying myself at the end of the day.
My eyes stay open because I know if they close my peace of mind will cease to exist. Time passes. As my breathing slows my eyelids flutter and slowly fall. I hear lullabies floating through the air around me and it is at this moment that I remember why I do this. These two to three minutes I spend swaddled in pure nothingness are euphoric enough to make what comes next tolerable. It's when the bubble encasing me from the outside world pops. The sound of a door or a voice outside my window. I am awake but I cannot control my mind. I cannot fully step out of the trance. I cannot keep my blood pressure from rising when I become too aware of myself. Senses heighten when other senses are blocked. No sight, induces a much more sensitive touch. Suddenly the room goes from a dark exoskeleton of walls to just black. As if floating in a sensory deprivation chamber. You have no choice but to feel your body. With my eyes closed I have discovered the lumps of fat hidden under other folds, and I can feel single straggling hairs being moved against the sheets that my mother gave me for Christmas. I become aware of how broad my shoulders are and I feel the knots in my muscles pressing deeper into my back as I place more imaginary weight on it.
It scares me sometimes. The realization that I have become a pack-mule. A slave who is being held to impossible standards, being told to carry monstrous loads, being judged unmercifully.
But the Slave Master is familiar. I get the funny feeling that I am looking into a mirror and that is when I open my eyes.

Call me Normal.

I wake every morning, wanting to be normal. Everyone then always asks me, "then what's normal?." I don't know for sure. When I say normal I don't mean normal like other people. I mean normal, as in stable. Like how a humans normal temperature is 98.6. Stable, a perfect way of living where your body is not to hot, and not to cold. Like how soup should be cooled off 10 minutes before eating, just to make sure you don't burn your tongue. For it to be normal. Like not swimming till 45 minutes after eating, to insure you don't get sick from all the movement. For it to be normal. Like how you're suppose to study and do all your homework to ensure your grades are the best they can be and you can go off to a school and someday learn how to work in a certain career area, so you can get money and not have to worry about needing it, and be able to do fun things on those little days that you're off. For it to be normal. Because normal isn't overrated. Normal was made for a reason, not so people can mess up on purpose and then say they are unique. Unique is being made differently, having a different personality or maybe a different look. Snowflakes are unique aren't they? But they all fall down, and fall down together. They all do the same purpose. One doesn't become fire hot and burn you, one does not turn into a butterfly, they all flutter down from above, beautiful and tiny. They either cluster together, folding and bending cause that's what they were destined to do, or they melt do to the inability to live because even though they are perfect, they are just unlucky. Because it's normal. In conclusion, I guess what I am trying to say is that, normal isn't that hard to reach. But there are a few people who just like snowflakes, can melt. And all too often it's the prettiest one. We are just unlucky. But honey please remember normal isn't the best, normal isn't what I am saying is perfect, because doesn't everybody love dancing in the rain, or in puddles that they find while they are gallivanting around? They do. Because you are normal in away that some wish to be, you are free. And now I sound like a hypocrite but my last and final words....words of my opinion only. I wish to normal, like the first situations I depicted in this passage, not because I think the other one is wrong but because to be normal, is normal. Normal is not sticking out. Normal is doing what the majority does. Normal is content. Normal is untouchable for a puddle like me. But once the water cycle takes place. Normal is a place. Normal is a dream.