21

let me come home,

home is wherever i’m with you

ill wishers, let me be.

late morning before work: stolen cigarettes and hiding in my car listening to cheesy summer hits from the nineties and bracing myself for my dick boss, nine/ten hour shifts without a break, and the variety of people who take out their daily annoyances and insecurities on the girl who hands them their pizza. here’s lookin at you, Friday.

its four thirty-one am and my eyes won’t droop, my mind won’t quiet. these synapses are spitting webs of wondering: because i’m not the girl who’d ever jump and you aren’t the boy who stays. but a year an a half ago, when i crossed the pacific (my feet only ever having tasted atlantic) and woke up a day away and a world apart, your name kissed my lips. i ran through foam, kicking it away like all those broken pieces of my heart and you wrote to me, after those weeks of forced half silence, to make sure i was okay, that the water hadn’t pulled me under. you worried about the floods, but your words pulled me out from under the drowning falls of my tears and brought me closer to home than any word from my parents ever could. a year an a half ago the girl who doesn’t jump held her sister’s hand and, squeezing, fell of a bridge and into the sea. a year and a half ago the boy who doesn’t stay sat in my car in those late night/early morning hours and listened to me ramble about kangaroos and sea foam, xxxx beer and foreign constellations. a year and a half and i haven’t gone more than a handful of days without seeing you; i’ve been wearing you like skin and as autumn approaches i feel the days like an accordion stretching and waning—in a few months you’ll be gone, but only for a while.

but you’ve told me its time for you to stay, and i’m ready to jump right to where you are.

and i said, ‘what about breakfast at tiffany’s?’

scarlet begonias & a hint of the blues

heavy hands and a sick stomach.

“roll down the windows and open our mouths,

taste where we are, play the music loud”