Poker love

We're all just out here trading pieces of love. Everyone has a pile of chips. We can trade or we can give away. When we give away, it shows we have faith that we’ll get some back somewhere along the line. We hope someone is feeling generous. We’re all trying to make good trades. We all want to be left with something to hold onto.

It’s a wonderful feeling to be given with no condition that you must give back – but if you’re kind enough, you want to. Or if you're me, you want to dump the whole bunch of chips into someone’s arms. TAKE THEM ALL TAKE ALL THE LOVE, you need it you need it – not thinking for a second what that means for you.

Some people have the hardest time giving any away. Some people aren’t the gambling type. Others have a hard time accepting any chips at all. Some are tapping the table repeatedly, hit me. Hit me again. Be careful, I think. You’ll bust open with all that love.

I’m the unabomber with cheap sunglasses on. I am the identity you all told me I wasn’t, but I’m mistaken to think this world can’t read me. I’m not as intimidating as I think I look. I wear my love like a shirt on inside out. And if you’re cold, I’ll give you that too.

Everyone I’ve ever loved got up from the table. Now it’s just me and the dealer. She’s looking at the few chips I have left in front of me. Nothing about me is by the book. “All in” I say without hesitation.

Sometimes you bet on the wrong people. Sometimes you lose and you have to leave the table.

Sometimes you’re walking down the street and a stranger hands you a chip to keep you in the game. Just when you thought it was over, you’ve made it one more day. And you’re glad you have.

There are other tables. You can sit down at a new one and look up and see someone you thought you lost. Sometimes I imagine seeing you.

Then there are times when you think you’re bluffing, you think you’ve got nothing. And you take another look at your cards – just before you get up. And you realize you don’t care what they say. You only care about the person sitting across from you. And you’ve got all the love you need right here. You’re not bluffing anymore. And you realize you’ve won.

It's only for a few months

Some days have no sweetness to them. You can douse them in honey and they will still be black coffee and raw kale. The days you put the TV on mute in the background just so everything doesn't feel so static.

Some nights there is only unrest. Only tossing between ache and numbness. Ricocheting between stillness and hysteria. They bolted my balcony door shut and tell me it’s only for a few months. I have nightmares about what would happen if there was a fire – how could I jump if I needed to? They say that type of situation is unlikely, but they don’t know how flammable my life is.

The girl on my shoulder, I let her have the floor for a minute and immediately regret it. She starts shrieking in my ear for all the times I stayed level-headed when I could have detonated. She tells me she shot herself in the foot each time I swallowed my anger – she can’t wear shoes anymore. She tells me I almost killed her turning the scraps into gifts and handing them back to people like an offering. I try to interrupt her and she goes into a fit. Stop making excuses for treating everyone else with more humanity than yourself.

I want to throw myself into the puddle right here in this pothole. Strip down my wet clothes in the middle of the street, drop them at your feet, and walk away. I could hang sheets and shirts from windowsills and watch the storms shred them. I need a road trip where I can stop in diners to dump the crumbs of myself on empty plates. The crumbs that collected in a messy pile in the back of the toaster tray. The bits of me that I forgot about, lost track of time with, and let char.

When the mailman walks by, I want to slip my notebooks in his bag and let him deliver them to strangers. I hope he delivers one to you, and if you don’t cry, I will. I want to put my hands on a plane and crash them into the side of a mountain. I want to leave my skin out to dry and half-heartedly go back to check on it and then pretend to be surprised when it’s gone. I want to sit in the back corner of a coffee shop and put my life on time-lapse. I want the moment you come in and sit down at the table to slip by in a blur of espresso and almond milk.

These are all metaphors for the ways I don’t want you to know me anymore.

Sometimes you want something to make sense so desperately that you trip a switch in your brain. Sometimes you can lose yourself trying not to be unlosable. Sometimes you need to run away from where you think the answer is to find out there is no answer.

I think about the time I ran away from home on the coldest night of the year. It was too cold to cry and the only way my muscles wouldn’t freeze was to keep running. I could feel my pulse everywhere. I made it 3 miles before my dad picked me up in the car. I think about that every time it starts getting colder out. Except now it’s your heartbeat that I feel in my feet. You told me to write about that. I don’t think this is what you meant.

Meeting points at 2am

7 seconds goes by in a blink
and I say something to explain so you don't have to worry
I'm drinking water like it's going to stop me
from waking up with a hangover heart

The heavy fog sits on the bridge of your nose
and the back of your hand is pressed against my cheek
I'm looking up into your eyes between kisses and I'm seeing unfamiliarity
I know it’s you but it's still enough to make me look again

I've tried to write this poem 7 different ways and it will never be enough
I've even tried to not write it
but that doesn't work either
So the best I can do is this:

The universe hands me a diner mint from the pocket of my coat
and it tastes different
The kind of different that surprises you
The kind that tastes like your lips in a parking lot at 2am

I run my finger across the condensation on the inside of the car window
and I’m afraid I’ll tear the centre console from your mother’s car
Just to get to the heart of you
Droplets of rain sit on the outside of the glass and I want to drink them in
I want to wear them like crystals in my hair

There might be more oxygen among the blinking lights and falling coins
but I’m fairly certain you are the only reason I’m breathing easier

It's diner mint different
and I'm convinced I could live off this
I'm convinced if I hold tight enough
your arms will come searching for my hands
because they don't want to walk across the asphalt of life without them

Because every parking lot you walk through without my hands
will make your arms ache
Every casino you visit you’ll imagine looking up
and seeing me across the room next to the penny slots
Every headlight shone on a rainy windshield
you'll see a flash of me in the passenger seat with my boots off

Don't think you shoulder this alone
While this is happening to you
Know that I won't be able to get on a highway ramp
without seeing your goodbye arm out the window

My pockets will be full of empty diner mint wrappers until I see you again

My love tries to sell you a mixtape

I got a head start on my loving young. 10-year-old me left notes on desks in pink gel pen. 13-year-old me refused to send a messenger to ask a boy to dance, she could do it herself. After all, it’d be harder for him to say no to someone’s face right. Wrong, apparently. He left his dancing shoes at home.

16-year-old me unhooks trailers from cars in the pouring rain and drives them without her license just to talk to boys who don’t really want to talk at all. 21-year-old me drives way too fast and way too far at midnight only to be misunderstood. 22-year-old me pretends she has tickets to invite a boy to a thing and plans to buy them if he says yes. 23-year-old me pretends this too (because it worked so well the first time). 22-year-old me and 23-year-old me never bought them. 24-year-old me acknowledges they were indeed boys, not men, and she should have bought the tickets and gone herself.

But what can I say, I like to climb out on limbs. I never learned when my brother fell out of a tree, that maybe it’s dangerous, that you might break your arm – or worse. Maybe I just have a little too much confidence in my climbing. Maybe I’m not afraid of breaking something because I know, or I’m pretty sure, I’ll heal. Or maybe I’m terrified, but I still think vulnerability is necessary.

The romantic in me never wants to die. She can live without sunlight for months and survives on the little water that comes only from the tears that don’t make it out the ducts.

I really should be more careful though. I’d be wise to stop taking the hits without asking questions. There’s metaphorical callouses on my heart’s hands from holding on so tight to things that never wanted to stay. Why do we never want to let go of anything?

We can’t keep being this weak for each other. I need to take a hiatus from you the way I do with peanut butter sometimes. Go cold turkey just in time for thanksgiving.

I gotta clear my head. Go for a run. It’s a good time of year for it. It feels constructive, even though I’m dripping bad thoughts like oil and leaving a trail of decay around the city. I know it’s getting dark and hard to follow, but don’t worry I’ve run with my terrors before. Still, trail or not, you’ll never know where I’ve been.

I'm in the forest and you're the wolf. It's a manhunt and I'm sprinting because I can’t climb fast enough. Trying not to trip over your compliments.

It’s a family reunion of my fears out here – someone calls me sweet pea and I cringe. Sweet peas like grandma serves but cringe like the baked beans my father used to make me choke down before I could leave the table. I wouldn't go near one for a decade after that.

I wonder if that happens with people sometimes. Like something triggers; a traumatic experience, a moment of disgust, and suddenly we’ve sworn off them for good.

What happens next? Yes, I’m talking to myself, girl with resting heart rate through the roof, what else do you have to give? Everyone’s been taking so much lately. Even my tea took the top layer from my tongue.

A handsome stranger – self-professed, but I’ll oblige – gives me more in five minutes than I’ve been able to get from anyone, including myself, all week. He draws me out of the forest. He had me pegged by the boots and I’m reminded yet again that my heart will never not be on my sleeve. I thank him for handing back the hope I dropped and continue with my day.

My love. My love sticks out like a sore thumb. My love jumps from rooftops and spills hot coffee on your shoes. My love has no shame. My love tries to sell you a mixtape on the street corner but looks bashfully at her feet when you take it. My love doesn’t want your money. My love goes to bed on an empty stomach every night. I love my love, I do. It’s just, sometimes I would like to know what it feels like to wake up with some love left in me.

“You, wonder of my seventh world
The weather has been beating at the windows all summer
trying to throw tsunamis on all the burning
The sky that we are under claps
It can’t make up its mind

Me, in the sixth world
I’m walking around the city talking to strangers
asking if they’ve had enough love today
There are metaphors splitting through sidewalks like weeds
Nobody ever asks back

I stay in the car ten more seconds before I go inside
To swallow all the love that went unnoticed today
choke it down with a half empty water bottle
I think it feels like drowning in your apathy
but I am just growing gills”

I am the only girl awake tonight

Tell me, what does it mean to be afraid of your own heart?

I’ve got a friend in sales who tells me she can always tell a call will convert when she asks, “How are you?” and they ask her back. My jaw tightens because these perfect strangers on the phone are asking my friend about her day, and I can only remember all the times you didn’t ask me.  

Teach me how to cut you off at the knees with the same precision that I cut the stems off the sunflowers I bought myself. Yes, I know I’m scary in the way that I’m always one decision away from something you can’t control, but I’m still soft. I’m still human.

Lately I’ve been so human in hopes someone will treat me like one. Lately I’ve been so soft that I rot. Indifference is a foreign concept, but sometimes it shows up and slides in as a placeholder on the days my rot needs to stay in bed.  

I found something I wrote that says, “For apathy, take a good dose of memory and it’ll remind you there are things that you care about.” It’s too easy to mock the mood I must have been in when I wrote this. Perhaps it's half true – but we all know that a good dose of anything can be fatal. And a dose that’s just right is transient. Maybe when someone yells that you are temporary, it takes you about as long to believe them, as it takes you to throw out the pistachio bag of memories in the backseat. For transparency, I let that bag sit there tucked under the passenger seat for much longer than I’d like to admit.

You see, my head is just stuck and I’ve been mumbling Closing Time everyday after work for the past two months. “You don't have to go home but you can't stay here.” I can’t stay here. I know who I want to take me home, and it's not you. It's a blonde girl with a heart the size of the sun and she’s begging me to let her be nice to me. Self-love often feels like an uphill battle.

I have a document I am always adding to that’s titled, “silly things that I felt weren’t silly at the time.” Stupid is probably a more accurate word than silly, but I was trying to be nicer to myself the day I named it. Most of the things on those pages I can smile at now. Some still feel like needles.

There are so many kinds of love. There’s the kind you share sitting around a campfire with good friends and a guitar. It’s wonderful, but I don’t know when the night is over if you’re supposed to put out the fire or just let it burn out? Which is less painful? There’s the kind you feel draining from you as you drive away from someone and keep looking in the rearview mirror. There’s the good dangerous kind that takes over your whole body and turns you into a sugary tenderness. The one where the boy knew it, knew you were hungry for love, and under June moonlight he took the tenderness, melted it down and fed it to you in spoonful’s. Then there’s the bad dangerous kind, the one that turns your reflection into a monster. The one that makes you search WebMD for reasons why you’re nauseous all the time. Sometimes, all these kinds of love can be felt simultaneously. 

The other day was a well-timed concurrent nod. The one you exchange when it’s raining and you forgot your umbrella and you walk past someone else who forgot theirs too. The one you give when you’re standing next to someone else in the get-well section of the card aisle. The other day was last Sunday realizing we’re all in the same boat and nobody can figure out how to stop it from sinking. The radio is screaming quit playing games with my heart and I’m looking the other way. Somewhere somebody is shaking their head. Tell me, how do you write yourself into the poem where the girl finally takes her own advice?

“There are some things in life you just can’t put down:
a good book, a good love,
a cute puppy, a cute baby,
your foot, your phone,
a pen, a weapon – if that weapon is a lover’s heart
and everyone is screaming at you to drop it.
Surrender
– but even the white flag reminds you of them.”

A postcard from the back of September

I wonder if you remember that moment the same way I do.
I’m not even sure I know which moment I’m talking about. All of them probably.

Sometimes my memory is a filmstrip of negatives and I’m twelve years old again at my friend’s birthday party at the movie theatre. I’m standing in the projection room running my finger along the timeline. How did I end up here? There’s some beauty in it, but there’s also a lot of oily fingerprints that I’m not sure what to do about.

Like yesterday, you showed up in my peripherals, just for one frame of a moment, and suddenly it’s like the damn sandbags are made of styrofoam peanuts and my care is scattered everywhere. I’m a PEZ dispenser of love and you’re a kid on Halloween. We’re both too old for this and I refuse to dress up as something I’m not, even if it sounds fun. Even if we’re hungry.

The last time we talked, I played a game of dizzy bat on the way home. I woke up disoriented and after that I didn’t think you’d look the same. The next time I saw you though, it was myself I didn’t recognize.

If I were still standing in that projection room, I’d probably take a lighter to the filmstrip. It’s funny how life puts you in certain places that feel like burning, but in some way it’s a form of protection. Sometimes when you think your life is a cross between a satire and a tragedy, it’s really just a little tired from dodging the buses you keep stepping out in front of. You should check the lock on the door and get some sleep tonight. You should help it out a little and wait one more second before you step off the curb.

I keep reminding myself that I’ll never get my synchronistic moments if I never leave my apartment. Life is a little bit of luck sure, but I’ll never see the foggy Boston morning if I don’t take off the cinder block boots and get in the car. I can’t have answers until I ask questions. So I ask them – even if I roll around on the carpet after I hit send. Who cares about the answers – at least I know I did everything I could have done.

So what do you do when the questions you ask are normally a golf tee for failure? But then you ask the guy what’s his favourite kiss with you? And he pauses to think, and then says something like, “That’s easy, the next one.” He says it so matter-of-factly that you want to melt into the pavement like it’s high July even though it’s the back of September. Do you keep asking them? Is it safe now?

Did you outlive limbo and barrel over the edge only to find you weren’t at the peak yet? How long should you rejoice in the downhill before you lose momentum and start climbing again? These are the questions I like to hang like postcards around my room.

So put on your softest white t-shirt and crawl into bed tonight. Pull the sheets over your bare hips because you are all the warmth you need. You can answer the questions in the morning. You asked them, and for that, you can be proud.

Wait, one more thing – you know how you can’t fall asleep if you think you might have left the door unlocked? I just need to answer one of the questions before I close my eyes. I whisper out loud; I know you don’t remember anything like I do.