sitting in a darkened room while the sun still rests her eyes. taking a pencil in hand, pulling a fresh sheet of thick ivory-coloured paper out of the drawer and running fingers over it slowly, savouring texture. turning the paper slightly, a hand rests loosely on it while a few deep elongated breaths are heard. in complete silence, fingers grasp the pencil, spinning it a bit, getting a good feel. and in slow motion, the tip of graphite hits the page.

it is just barely audible, the sound of cursive rubbing against emotion rubbing against unlined paper. seven seconds and the hand pulls up, brushing the pad of a thumb over the salutation. a smile appears slowly and the wheels are spinning. words start to come and fingers wiggle and twist the pencil in anticipate. with slow, premeditated strokes, the hand slidingly moves right, across the width of the paper, leaving a trail of flowing phrases. head looks up and out a window, another smile, a distant one. eyes concentrating on the windowsill as if the end of the world lay just past it.

an idea: to tell the stranger, the lover, about the sun. she was just waking now, her streams of orange and faint crimson spread like thin watercolour paint behind a horizon of building facades and industrial graveyards. the hand moved again, sentences blossoming from the dark grey sharpened tip of a #2 pencil. fingers grasped it a little tighter now; hand moved with more determination; mind flew from sand dunes to ocean and back again.

private thoughts were sewn into paragraphs and stitched with a lining of breathtaking language. proclamations of love, thoughts of death and blinking eyes, an expressed need to find the addressee. the addressee. a stranger. a soul that the hand had never touched. a set of eyes that have not yet been seen by the ones scanning the pages. there were two and a half of them now--pages, that is--all filled with lines of penciled love. hands reached to them, folded them in thirds, and tied them with a navy blue ribbon. done.

still wiping sleep from her eyes and greeting the morning, she unlocked the door and shuffled down stairs stocking footed. breath caught in her chest, a clear sharp inhalation. she gazed at the folded masterpiece, tied in navy, able to fit comfortably in her palm. tacked up by her lovely stranger/lover. unfastening it with great delicacy and bringing it up to her face, she inhaled the scent of freshly crafted beauty. up the stairs, shut the door, and sitting in the chair. she loosened the ribbon, unfolding the three thick pages and seeing familiar script. her lungs tumbled with a warm air and even as she read the date and greeting, it crawled up her throat, on her tongue, warming her flesh from the inside out. the warm breath cozied itself up in the back of her mouth, some settling on her tongue, some slowly spinning. and as her eyes scanned sentence after gorgeous sentece, her mouth opened slightly; the convivial breath escaped, leaving a bit of liquid humidity as evidence on her lips.

the words were only indirectly hers but still she cradled them in her hands and drank them down like hot chocolate. a hand to her mouth unconsciously. fingers tracing lips, tracing a smile. and after all three pages had been hungrily read, she clutched the paper and let out a long sigh. she clung to the words that would haunt her at night and breathed in and out for the phantom object of her affection. she had been taken into that same pencil-grasp and contorted into word by a will that was not her own. her eyelids lowered and lashes tangled together. she blinked twice and knew she was enchanted. and sitting, she reciprocated with quietly sung fairytale lovesongs in thick, black ink.

when i look at my right hand, i can almost see the hundreds or maybe thousands of words that have been written there for one reason or another, only to be washed off slowly, smudged out by soap, and forgotten. there are words conceived in the womb of my mouth every day. words that are premature, fetal, unfinished. words that cannot sustain themselves. words that are only living through me, as a part of me, the syllables only continuing to pulse and beat dry against my tongue through the arteries that connect them to the core of me like wires.

seldom are they born, born into the air, full of weight and emotion, still bloody and not quite ready for anyone else's ears. when i give birth to words that way, i feel as if they're escaping, as if i should swallow them whole, as if i should have a verbal abortion and let the remains leak from my fingertips instead. because on paper, my words are always emphatic. like songs, they flit between lines of blue and red. i imagine if they were songs, they'd be played in d minor because it is the saddest key. they would seep from my pen, swollen and pregnant with melancholy, just waiting for their opening chord, and then they would sing the song of me, pale and raw without revision.

i dreamed about you last night. i found you on a street corner downtown, dizzy and listless from all the running. your mouth was dry, chapped, crusted around the edges with saliva and old blood. the shirt you were wearing could only have been given to you, or found on an abandoned rack in a salvation army. well, anyway, it clung to your shoulders, thick and dense like static. there was a hole in it just above the waist of your jeans and on your side. through it, i could see your flesh, pale and perfect, and all i wanted was to touch it. to heal you. to find those sins inside of you, tangible or no, and wash them away with my kisses thick like cough syrup: rough, abrasive, and medicinal. so i linked my arms underneath your shoulders, lifted you from the place you lay, and i dragged you away. your eyes, grey and washed away, found mine in something that wasn't quite contact and you said, "quit trying to save me. i'm already gone."

remember, two summers ago, lying on that gravel road next to each other, both sets of our eyes locked on the sky laid out above us? we could see the big dipper, in between clouds and powerlines. you grabbed my hand while we laid there, your left entwined with my right. i remember thinking that for a summer night, your palm was cold. i slid my fingers along the length of yours and tried to warm you up. when we got up, our fingers fell away from each other and the loneliness seeped back into me. our backs were covered with gravel and ground. we headed home, walking south along the railroad tracks. that was my favourite night with you.

i've wanted to write to you for awhile, now. i don't often, but the weather changed and all these thoughts of transition make me fearful, and fear makes me think of you. you're one of the few boys to whom i write, and i have a hard time doing it because i can't quite put my finger on who you are. what i know for sure is that you make me feel safe and i love that about you. you are the most fearful boy i know. you're so scared of growing up, but somehow, you're okay being alone. what's that ani lyric? "the difference between you and me is i get fucked up when i'm alone" ? it's true. i hate the quiet. there must always be another voice, music, the soft swish swish of my pen moving, something.

you are so slow to speak, to make any noise at all. your words are soft and full of strength at the same time. how is it that you're so scared and you still manage to make me feel safe? when you say things, they sound different. it's like you're not afraid of being misunderstood. i, well, i live to define things...to analyze and overanalyze, to mull things over until i know exactly what is what. you told me that i make things complicated because i like it that way, and you're right. but simple isn't always better, and at least i'm not afraid to write what i mean, or mean what i write. you remember that poem i showed you? you didn't know it then, but it was about you. that stanza, "you let me in, let me see the places where fear is your adhesive, pulling flesh and making everything so tight that without it, you'd just fall apart," i cried when i wrote that, partly because i was sad for you, but mostly because i was jealous. i don't even have fear to hold me together. i have been in pieces for awhile now.

i know it's the end of summer, but i swear it's the winter of my discontent, the seasonal interpretation of my self-loathing at its worst. and if i could remedy my own ache by going back and erasing yours, i would. i would plunge my fingers into my chest, between my ribs and all those precious ventral muscles. i would find the place where arteries articulate my heart to the lost organ of you, the misplaced pulsebeat of the shit you put me through, and then i'd pull.

detached and disconnected, irregular and eternally injured, i'd offer the pumping mass to you, not so much a heart anymore, just a bloody mess of my own emotional inadequacy. and all the good memories would vanish with the bad, my pulse slowing in a way that all feeling would be reduced to a drowsy numbness. a kind of stale grey where nothing is ever quite real. all those promises i thought were worth repeating would disappear, blending into the line of my breath effortlessly like the soft, soundless concavity of a goodbye kiss.

i would find myself blank like static toward you, not quite remembering your name, searching for the reason that your smell still feels like home to my senses. and you'd feel the same way when you saw me, that flicker of remembrance no longer ringing your irises with green. no, your look toward me would be vacant, empty, and, at best, half-heartedly caring about what did or didn't happen between us.

i'm restless here. i need to find a place, cut open a vein where a fiercer me pulses through; i need more of the same, only intensified. i'm alone with my thoughts too much now. it's beginning to get the best of me. thinking and rethinking situations that may or may not be my own fabricated memories. i want a tattoo of a heart over my heart to show how much it bleeds. i do not know who i am. i am more confused and mystified by myself than i'll ever admit. i think about myself, who i've made myself into through the actions i've taken and my mouth goes dry. i bite my lips until they bleed.

i can't quit thinking, today, of cigarettes on cement steps and the way smoke exhalation echoes and vibrates softly in those tiny holes of the speaker on a cordless phone. goosebumped and shivering, i sat, clad in fragments of favourite t-shirts too holey to wear during daylight, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, bare feet. my teeth clicked and chattered involuntarily while i spoke, a hollow bone-on-bone sound, the enamel pushing against a mirror image of itself in an attempt to find some hidden warmth deep inside my lungs. i can't smoke on the steps at night, now. it makes me sad in a way that is indefinable. small but all-consuming is the melancholy, at the lack of that tiny black cordless phone pressed between my chin and shoulder. but it's not really the absence of the phone i miss, just the voice held inside of it, now trapped somewhere in the tangled mess of wires and crossed T's of telephone poles. the laugh i knew so well, that little-girl giggle with a hint of north dakota warmth..it's lost to me, traveling instead, on a different route, through different electrical veins inside the body of a big city instead of my tiny town. it has new ears to fall upon. the thought alone makes me sad enough to smoke.

i'm wearing your wristband today, but you don't know it. i'm thinking about you, scribbling your name in purple sharpie on scratch paper, but you don't know it. i'm half wishing you'd walk through the door, your shaggy hair in your eyes. i saw a boy with the same hair as you yesterday. i probably stared at him a little too long, but it was only because i was waiting for you to somehow appear from behind him, for his mouth to turn into yours. not that i would've known what to do; when you grabbed me, hugged me that day, i sunk inside myself. i could feel the giddyness swell inside my stomach, mixing with the nerves that already resided there. i miss you in a way that is comforting. i never know when i'll see you next. each time the phone rings, i pick it up, half-wondering if your voice will be cradled by the receiver on the other end. i think of you and my cheeks flush. i think of you and my heartbeat trips over itself, eager to impress. i think of you and i smile wide, biting my lip in an unconscious effort to disguise my emotion.

my dreams, as of late, are like tiny movies filled with fractured images of an inviolate me who knows exactly what she wants. this dream-me unhinges herself each morning from an amazing bone and muscle hammock that offers endless protection from the elements, incessant assuagement from harm. her mouth is always slack and satiated; she wants for nothing. her skin is pink and ruddy with a level of contentment i can't even bear to imagine. not once during the dreams does she falter, in fact with each passing second she seems to become more sure of what she has, more unswerving in her commitment to it. the commitment itself is staggering as it comes so naturally; it's almost an involuntary action. with every inhalation, she stitches herself deeper into this blanket of stability that seems to be holding everything together.

i wake up from the dreams feeling panicked, as if i've lost something i wasn’t even aware i had. i search my jacket pockets, i check the coffee table for some trace of it--a scrap of paper, a book of matches, a strand of hair that isn't mine. of course, there's nothing. i'm only left with my real situation to think about, my body literally suspended in this unproductive limbo, this emotional purgatory where resolutions don't exist.

so i'm sitting here in my pajamas, eating macaroni & cheese, and thinking of you.
the opening chords of "lioness" just filtered through my headphones and i had to take a moment, i had to breathe. i forget to do that, sometimes. i just get caught up in the enormousness of everything; i can only inhale by concentrating on things tiny and mundane: the scratch on the left lens of my glasses, the scar on the back of my right hand, the incessant dripping of the faucet.

i think the reason i don't write fiction anymore is that i'm horrible at endings. i can write a fantastic beginning; i'll fill the preface with everything you could possibly need to know. and i love the in between bits- pages and pages of excessive descriptives, a place to stow away all those things i've been meaning to say. it's the endings that get me every time. i do not know how--or am not capable of--tying up loose ends. i leave doors open indefinitely, just to make sure no one is left out in the cold. i can't seem to draw the line between the end of one story and the beginning of another; i can't separate them and they bleed into each other. some colours aren't meant to be mixed. the past and future seeping into each other isn't pretty; it's an ambiguous shade of brown.

anyhow, i digress. when i try to write this story, it's the ending that has me stumped. if i think about it for too long, the manacle in my chest tightens and i'm once again unable [or unwilling?] to breathe. the only thing i know for sure is that you'll be there, tied into the heart of everything somehow. you keep me in line even when you're not around, like the undertone in a symphony, like the violin you never hear.

and you're it this time.

you've been tiptoeing around in my dreams lately. last night, you drug me around to a bunch of adult places where i didn't really feel i belonged, but i stayed quiet because you had me by the hand. in a room crowded with strangers you leaned over and whispered sentences against my neck and into my ear. at the time, they were so profound but i woke up with no memory of them, just the image of you there, soft eyes glancing, slanted, through a curtain of coffee-coloured hair, a glass of red wine suspended in your hand, a playful smile curling across your mouth.

the dream jumped curiously to a new scene, and this time it was i leading you along by the hand, showing you the forgotten corners of this city, the places where dust has begun to gather. we walked along the waterfront, underneath a sky that was dim, tightfisted, and as grey as mop water.

i opened my eyes late this morning, and with sleep still curling through my lashes, i thought of you. i'm never quite sure how to categorize our relationship. we've slowly become peers, but we're not just regular friends. it's something more or less than that, i'm not sure which. something in between, something different. it's almost like conversing with a character i've created, or one i've admired. it's like falling in love with the leading lady in that romantic literary way. and so, when i woke up in such a state, i had the urge to pick up the paperback, to finish the story that had started spinning while i slept, the story you'd told me on that murky beach with a veil of clouds above us, the story of you.

care to reiterate?

it was your complex architecture, your smooth aesthetics that initially made me write about you. before i knew you, i studied your form, i dissected your structure, the intricacies of your anatomy. your body was made entirely of hard curves and sharp angles, an elaborate maze of lines that weaved and tangled together at your joints. your skin veiled everything like a thin, milky film and i wanted to peel it back, to deconstruct you, to reveal the mechanics underneath.

i thought of your kneecaps as gears that clicked and shifted into place when you walked; the striated muscles that lined your calves were sinuous and serpentine, snaking up in between the cogs with each step you took. your mouth was a predatory snarl, a red slash of anger against clean, white skin. your hands were a rough region; calluses invaded your thirsty palms. your fingers looked as if they'd been drawn in thick black ink, each digit interrupted by the knotty scribbles that were your knuckles. there was your jaw, almost mathematic in it's arrangement, the mandible creating the entire framework for your face by curving at just the right degree, pulling your skin taut, composing the foundation for your smile.

then there were my favourite lines, the acute ones, the ones i tried to memorize, to reconstruct in my head: ankles, hips, clavicle, ribs, and the minute but all-encompassing curvature of your wrists. i wrote for pages about that soft bend that connected your forearm to your hand. i tried to reassemble--in text--the abrupt flexure of your clavicle, the way it stretched, threadlike, tenuously between your shoulder blade and your neck. every word i wrote back then seemed to ache with insufficiency, because no matter how detailed i was, no matter how many descriptives i used, i could not put into text the complexity of your architecture, the mechanics of your skeleton. and maybe that's why, again tonight, i find myself trying to beat the odds and finally draw you, in a literary sense. i'm always so worried i'm going to forget about you, forget about what a beautiful, tangled thing you were.

someone at work today mentioned a girl's hands, marveled at how small they were, and all of a sudden i was brought back to that day, in june, when a friend of mine did the same to you. he shook your hand- kissed it even, and said they were tiny and precious, like a doll's. i don't think you replied, because you were too busy trying to hide the fact that you'd been crying up until the moment you answered the door.

you opened it, and in we walked, the two boys and i, expecting to find you all made up in your best indie rock attire. instead, there you stood in pajamas, bare feet against that dirty carpet. you tried not to look at me and focused on the boys instead, laughing at their silly small talk and complimenting the tall one on his haircut. i saw your red eyes and your messy hair. i saw the journal perched on the edge of the couch, a pencil crowned by teeth marks peeking out of the spine. i knew what you had been doing; i knew the sentences you'd been writing. we both pretended like they weren't there in the room with us, out in public, suspended on that floral couch of yours. flustered from the interruption, you declined our invitation and asked me to come back later, when it was darker and the shadows would be more forgiving.

so we left, but not before the boys shook your hands, those tiny precious ones, and you looked at me in a way that said "there is no way to make this less awkward than it has already become. i'm in it with both feet and i don't know what to do next." i waved goodbye and looked away, only to return hours later.

you'd tidied up a bit; the mess had become more linear—it lay in stacks and piles against the walls. i took my shoes off at the door even though the carpet was still dirty. we sat in your room and you picked out records to play, the ones we both liked, and we pretended there was nothing to talk about. i eyed the journal, open on your desk and played with a knot in my hair. i remember watching your index finger circle round and round the filter of your cigarette. you did it so calmly, like holding a cigarette came so naturally, but i could tell that behind your eyes somewhere, synapses were firing and refiring constantly to keep a slow-burning concentration pulsing through you and into that tiny finger.

it was late, and the yawns kept us from saying what we should've. the bizarreness of it all, the fact that mere eye contact was a hard thing to keep between us, made serious conversation almost impossible. so when the phone call came and my friends traipsed in, the snarl of sinew in my chest, the one you and i had created, it tightened, because i knew it was the last time we would have the luxury of silently looking at each other, the last time we could say out loud the things that were too harsh to even put on paper. so i hugged you fiercely, and as i turned to go, our hands entwined quickly. your tiny, precious fingers pressed into my palm, cut through my skin and settled snugly in between tendons so that when i walked away, i took your hand with me. we climbed into the car, your appendage and i, settled in next to the boys and drove six hours away from you, drove back home, for the last time.

i’ve been trying for weeks to figure out why you still take my messages, why you haven’t changed any of your passwords, why you’ve still got that little electronic folder full of my words. i’ve been trying to figure out why you don’t hate me, or why you haven’t forgotten everything. it’d be easier if you’d do that, you know. it’s so unfulfilling for me to write to you and to know you’ve read it, but to receive no response. you said it’d be so hard and yet you’re remarkably good at it. are you trying? does this come naturally? do you still think of me when you hear the word “indeed”? i have so many questions, but i don’t want the answers because i’m not sure what i’d do with them. if you did give them to me, i’d have no choice but to hold them out in front of me. i couldn’t clutch them to my chest nor could i return them, so they would sit, midair, in my cupped palms, seeping one word at a time through the cracks in my fingers. what good would that do? what curiosity would that sate? i need to learn to forget you, don’t i?