I'm the crack in the window that reminds you not to play too hard indoors, watching you in your bed and keeping count of the notches you won't recall.

She's sitting at the counter and she's dragging out the last of her twelfth cigarette that evening. He approaches, trying not to even consider how many she's had through out the extent of the day. He sits down and extends a hand, asking what she's doing in such a crummy place. She says she's trying to get lost and thinks that she wishes he would do the same. He cocks his head to the side and glances at her shaking hands, smirking at her coffee as she gets her fourth refill and suggesting that perhaps there's better ways of relaxing. She rolls her eyes, says she knows his game. Now he's interested, and he asks what it is. She says he's nothing but a skipping heart or bitterandbroken, and watches as his shoulders sag when she continues on to state that she's not in the business of butterflies any longer, and has zero method of making him feel better than he did when he woke up that morning to the cold pillow next to him. He warns her about assumptions and she warns him about talking to strangers. He says he always was a rebel and she said it's a pity, because his eyes were an awful lovely shade of blue when he finally looked a little scared. Fears for the weak, he mocks her statement out of resentment at her wit. Rolling her eyes yet again, she says that it's time to roll out and that she hopes his evening goes well. He asks what she'll do for the rest of it, and she begins to unwrap a brand new pack of cigarettes, shrugging her shoulders despite knowing the answer. Her night will be spent sitting within her window seal, and she will watch geometrical flights of birds pass her by as she continues to chug back the coffee, wondering whether a heart attack or cancer will reach her first, and wondering when, and wondering what happened to the little girl that used to claim she'd fly home every winter because spring would be spent exploring. She'd lost her appetite for exploring right around the time that she'd lost her appetite for regular diets, but she didn't lose hope and certainty that the world was still as beautiful as the catalogs tucked beneath her bed.

Loved and lost or loved and feared or loved and worked through it all?

Freckledfaced boy moved from the big city, and he said that nature was the most intimidating thing that he'd ever had to experience. When he finally got his license, he couldn't help but swerve so that he could hit the birds that didn't fly away too soon. He said that he always lost a part of his heart when he heard the crunch, but he couldn't deny the fact that controlling such an infinite kind of end to something gave him a feeling of power that he'd lost in the move. Sometimes people tell him that respect through fear isn't respect worth having, but he throws their bibles in their face and tells them to readminister their faith instead. They tell him that it's about loving, not fearing. He scoffs that love with fear is no kind of true love, and a romantic from the crowd screams that if you're not scared of losing the person that you love then you're a joke to anyone that's ever been in love. Freckledface has been laughing for the past ten years, and cobwebs are growing on his heart. There would be woven webs of bitter goodbyes, but no one ever got close enough to carve any sort of impact. Freckledface drives around, running over birds that don't fly away soon enough. He used to do it for power, but now he says that he's putting them out of their misery.

our hearts race too fast for our schedules to match, but i'm yours every step of the way.

there's this special kind of silent that you can only find on a sunday morning when you're sharing a bed with the love of your life. it's the faint light on the carpet because the curtain's blocking the sun and the outline of their spine when they're checking the clock. it's the way that you hear birds chirping and you hear them let out a grunt of groggyness and you hear a door in the distance close and you hear the sound of your bodies moving around in the bed, but you hear absolutely nothing. nothing but their heartbeat, marching in time with yours and escalating when your eyes meet. nothing but their eyelashes batting as they blink. nothing but the perfect sound of their silent breath somehow meeting your eyes, just because you're attached enough to every moment. nothing. but it's everything. it's everything.

silence is absolutely unnerving.
unless it's sunday morning and you're sharing a bed with the love of your life.
and then silence is everything.
it's the most prominent sound in the whole world, and i'm in love with that kind of silence.
perfect, unattainable, and yet reasonable.

my (least) favorite scene in titanic is the one where the woman tucks her kids in to bed while the boat sinks and reads them a bedtime story.

there's this guy who lives three blocks down and remodeled his house for all the cats that he owns. he claims to know what they want. and when you ask him why he'd do all of that for cats, he says it's because he's always been in it for the underdogs. and when you ask him why he'd root for the loser before the game has even started, he says it's because they're the only ones worth getting behind. and it makes me think of all the people sitting in leather chairs in the top floor of their office building in the biggest cities in the world, and where they started out. and i wonder if they were underdogs that were worth getting behind, or if daddy bought their way. and i wonder who they slept with to get there or who they slept with for love and those that haven't even had a legpopping kind of kiss yet. i wonder who's smart enough to get what they want, and who's manipulative enough, and who has the right kind of connections, and how we differientate from the two.

sometimes i wonder if being on top could ever be worth it, when all the ones with souls are only getting behind the underdogs. maybe bottomandout is the only way to live and the only way to appreciate, because guys like the man who lives three doors down and that you'll never speak to will be rooting for you from the sidelines.

i feel bad for people who don't possess any sort of competitive spirit or willingness to scrape, because i'm not sure that i believe in success based merely on good deeds anymore. no matter what happens, though, i think the guy who remodeled his house for his cats is the only one of us that's ever really felt like number one. and in a way that no one can take from him. what's it like to win something that can't ever be taken? a title that's a way of life and not a stepping stone to something bigger? a success that utilizes your full potential for both loving and producing?

two can win at this game.

alright, so there's this three year old who ate a little too much sugar at school today. his hands were shaking through out the day, but he chose to marvel instead of inquire. by two his mother was done with work and had picked him from the daycare, and by two fifteen he had managed to finish telling her everything he'd found conversationworthy about his day. when he went inside, he kissed her hand and ran to his room, shutting the door and pulling out his coloring books. he hopped on the bed and tried to reach for the tallest shelf to grab his favorite crayola box, the 200 box. his fingers swiped it but couldn't seem to hold a grip, and the box came tumbling down. the colors spilled out, and the three year old's hands went flying to his mouth. he jumped off of his bed and tried to pick them up off of his carpet, wondering how to explain the tiny dots that had accumulated in some places. he worked through the pinks because he knew that the box was color coordinated, and by the time he'd reached the grey's he knew that the scale was almost over. he was almost done. he looked at the few crayons left, they were all shades that led to the charcoal black he'd already placed in the furthest right corner of the back row of the box. the three year old glanced at the other colors and ran his eyes along them, scanning the difference between pink and red. violet and indigo. slate and sand. he wondered if other people saw the colors in the same way that he did, and he glanced up at the colored piece of paper that was hanging above his bed. he'd done it at pre school a few weeks ago, and had colored one shade of green on to a different shaded green piece of paper. he couldn't quite make out the drawing, just the change in color. somuchgreen, he thought. somuchgreen and such a waste of beauty. imagine all the blues i could've used. and the three year old apologized to the blues. to the greys. to the oranges and yellows and random shades between brown and dark blues and light blacks that people could sometime confuse with one another. he apologized for not taking them seriously enough. he wondered again if people ever saw the colors the same that he did. if his slate was someone else's slate and if there was more than just a label on a crayon. "what if my slate is my dad's purple but this crayon's simply named slate so that either of us who look at it can know?" he wondered what it would like to be color blind. he wondered how anyone ever managed to pick a favorite color.

he finished picking up the box and went downstairs to apologize to his mother for the tiny spots on his carpet. she kissed his forehead and took his hand, but he politely slipped it away from her grasp. "i'm sorry, mom. but i've got to go outside. i've got a lot of apologizing to a lot of awful pretty things to do. do you know how often pretty things are looked over? i'm awful awful sorry."


yeah, do you know how often pretty things are looked over? not new haircuts or lowcut outfits or vehicles or anything else that man has created. not even man itself. do you how often truly beautiful things are looked over? go outside and watch a butterfly land on a rock. does the rock scare it away? no. they are completely seperate and unproductive to one another, and yet they manage to get along. we share entire beliefs and personal philosophies and yet find ways to kill one another. a butterfly can sit on a rock, but we can't even sit next to each other on a bus.

"ps. officer, go home and love your family."

the best writing ever done is with an underlying sense of throwing in the towel. admit it, you love me more when you love me from afar and when you remember how things used to be. but all things grande shall lose their tune; these keys aren't as catchy as they once were.


i'll admit it. i love you more when i love you from afar and with an underlying sense how things used to be. throwing in the towel has never seemed so catchy.

I used to think that coloring inside of the lines was what growing up was all about.

Can you imagine how it feels to still have relentlessly shaking hands? Feel like I planned a thousand things that fell apart at seams I hadn't fully sewn. Thinking a thousand things a second and nothing's seeming productive. Full plate, empty stomach, counterprogressive.

Putting everything on your shoulders and wishing we could dig our way out of loneliness. Know it won't happen 'til you're next to me all the time. Apologizing in my head and unable to form the words. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

The funny part of life is that traveller's know more about home than anyone else.

Backpack your plans across Europe. Call me when you figure out that you're only a hasbeen who never was. I'd be happy to sing you to something like sleep. And when you lose sight of everything you ever wanted, you can drop your prayer book off in Rome. Remember how you said you'd send me a postcard when you found your new home (heart)? Yeah, neither do I.

sat around a campfire and listened to way back when's, wishing i'd live to sit at a campfire and share something seemingly pretty.

"back then, the diner's were the in place," was how he began every story. it was always the later summer and the later of evening and the later of the 90 degrees, but we'd let our legs be eaten up by bugs anyway. he'd tell us everything that came to mind, usually making up things along the way because he forgot a lot of details. like his first love, who he mentioned all the time; her name was always different. i always thought it was cute that despite his obvious senile tendencies, he could still tell you his wife's favorite ice cream toppings and how she hated dishes but she loved laundry because of how it smelled when it was fresh from the dryer. that night was more than a diner, though. that night was more than made up names and altered stories and biased viewpoints.

that night, he told us about the man who was always at the diner on saturdays at noon. he said that he switched between five outfits, and it never failed. everything matched, and there was never a time that he mix matched. he'd take the same ten steps from the door to the counter and order the same strawberry milkshake. he'd spill on the third sip from his second booth by the left window, and never paid attention to the same laughter from the same groups of boys who noticed this action. everything went fine. he'd smile the same smile and give the same seventy five cent tip, waltzing out and feeling proud because seventy five back then was tipping high for teen's at a diner. one saturday, though. he was there at two. he'd never been there at two. he was staring at the third step from the door, at a dime. his change had fallen, and he wasn't quite sure what to do. the nowold man who was an atthetime youngster picked up the dime and handed it to him and patted him on the back. he didn't know what to say because he didn't understand why it was such a huge deal to be one step behind your usual schedule.

the man grabbed his shoulder and pulled him close and whispered, "kiss with your eyes closed."
he took his final three steps, and walked slower than usual down the same street. the nowold man never quite understood, he told us, until he got married.

everything in life becomes a pattern. and whether you have a mental disability or you're simply stuck in a rut, you're going to grow used to every person and action that happens to you regularly. there are a thousand things in life that are mundane, but love shouldn't be one of them. unless your kiss blinds you, cripples you, heightens every sense but the ones that could cause distraction... it's not a kiss, and it's not love. kiss with love; with your eyes closed.

it was the later of summer and the later of night and the later of 90 degrees, and i was sitting by a campfire, listening to what it takes to truly live.