I too suffer from continental divides. Even the earth wears a mask. Beneath her practiced peace, un refined, unaffected bubbles thousands of degrees of molten rock, elements fused, boundaries shifted, unformed ground slides and shoves and conquers and slowly slips away defeated. Raw but not in the predictable way we have come to expect from the earth but raw in a way that is vicious and unpredictable like flames or the reactions of children.  

oh archaic smile you have been so distorted become so malicious and unsettling a shifting feeling trapped in an unyielding medium so that the universe might rip from the contrast.

The tiniest reflection of the turmoil within is reflected in the angry constellations tracing my cheeks, where you traced them but tenderly like you were caring for an animal. All I am to you is an animal.

I thought we might grow wispy and quiet in the italian countryside, subsisting through art and each other but I see now only the forest for me. I tried. I sought to become delicate and yielding, to bend to your curvature, warm and vine-ripened but I am no such idyllic being. I belong in moonstriped forests between the dark contours of rivers, quick black glass where I might blend effortessly and my transgressions will make no ripples among darkness. In sunlight my shadow casts differently and I can see it as I walk alongside you.  

I cannot think of a single part of me that is not falling away. I always had faith in being faithless and now the eternal regress has reared up in front of me as startling and solid as a wall, a rusty red brick wall I took pictures against when I was unsociable and hidden and untouched by you in the first summer of guilt.

I understand now this collective longing for innocence because it is like a beautiful scarlet fever that takes away your eyes and replaces them with the tales of your sister telling you of sunsets with a thousand kings and molten gold fountains when it is truly night and has always been night and will always be night until man has gone and there is no one left to care if the sun will dare to rise like we all have those beautiful fabricated memories of.  We are the reflections of failed dreams.

the most terrible moment of my life was not one of those I tell laughing head tossing hair swinging of humiliation or exclusion but that of the day I realized I am not a good person and no matter how many children I feed or wounds I clean I will eternally be pit against myself the fact that inside me is the bad person our parents had always tried to steer us away from, not realizing we are born, not made. I like violence and destruction and am cold steel cold logic ice that dares not cannot melt no matter the fires of hell you condemn me to or the burning compassion you dose me with I am a thing and my highest hope is that I might one day aid a good person in something wonderful in something really great and worthy that will be forgotten by everyone. and maybe by then I will discover that I am more than these atoms and that atoms and energy are just like the science of old and of the alchemy and incense and although I am going to some hell those noble and kind and good will not fade to dust both in memory and in their singular bodies

and be so scared of loving anyone that you assault them with words and the constant barrage of thoughts, thoughts you couldn’t bare to have scratching the walls of your soul any longer. this kind of thinking even makes me think I have a soul which is all at once ridiculous and the most mesmerizingly beautiful idea I have ever fabricated I am trying to poison myself sometimes but I haven’t gotten up the nerve to yet. little steps little steps- that would be my Indian name. 

I know there is god like I know there is color, like I know you are mine

all I want to do is write

Mixed feelings and not exactly regrets but tinges of regrets that I missed out on my ‘growing-up experience’: graduation privileges the parties and the moments but sitting solitary in the spanish sun i realize faint callings of tradition and nostalgia for something i have never experienced in black and white and flashings are a thousand times better, more comforting, than 5 months of stagnation, of the actual harsh reality i had been trying to escape for my entire life. Central america is still calling. The fertile vegas of Italy and the jagged smiles of coastlines I have yet to explore. Maybe I missed something, but there is always something to miss, and these are not important. The only thing one can take solace in what one has experienced: the future is uncertain, and the present is already gone. The past is all I have.

This was not meant to be so melancholy. I’m happy. I am excited, for one of the first times in my life, for my immediate future. Not scared nor worried nor, as usual, depressed. Happy. I know it could be gone in a moment but my mind is not constantly filled by this thought. Present yet not overwhelming. 

Holiday in Libya, anyone?