6:20 a.m. on christmas

i am wide awake with the faint whir of my space heater and the occasional drop of water colliding with the steel sink, accompanying my steady breaths.

it's christmas morning and all i can think of is how badly i want an in n out burger and how terrible it is that i could be half-hoping someone was flipping double-doubles on christmas morning. animal style. i'm holding out for nana's waffles, anyways- challenging the hollowness of my stomach which has only been saturated in 3 cups of coffee and 4 pints of beer in the past 15 hours...

sometimes i feel like the kind of person who lives in a shitty studio apartment (the kind that's more like a closet with a toilet) in a big city; the kind of person you see wearing pajama pants and some peacoat missing a button they threw on in a flurry, racing out into the madness; the kind of person with their hair piled on top of their head, held together by some mystery of gravity, writing feverishly in a coffeeshop, chewing on a pencil and chain-smoking between half-thoughts.

it's moments like these that make me feel bigger than my body. bigger than this room. i've been devouring this book tonight- letting every word linger before consuming it. there's ten pages left and i put it down because i'm so damn in love with it that i don't want it to end. and there's nothing that makes you want to write more than reading someone else's great writing. it's having new eyes- unhinging sight and enabling perception.

the dust that rose in the corner of my eye began to buzz like a fly. and the white noise has become the heartbeat of my room. and my stomach churning reminds me i'm alive and of fullness. my numbing fingers scream that i feel- sensation, sensationally. and how much i miss her hand in mine, nervously sweaty or not. then, i realize how beautiful it is to have someone that can make me nervous and that i hold my breath and tilt my head every time i imagine kissing her perfect lips.

this is the second christmas in a row in which i haven't slept. i remember last year, frazzled and tear-stained, feeling, for the first time in my entire life, the child of a divorce. my brother and i were searching for home and in the disfunction of that day, ended up spooning in my car, covered in two enormous blankets that were stained with sand and dirt and wine, listening to fionn regan. and maybe we were (attempting to be) asleep in a driveway, freezing cold, but there was something peaceful about that moment we laid and in the next morning when my dad lifted the garage to see his two grown children huddled together in my tiny civic.

as this pale blue bleeds into the sky, backlighting the tangle of trees outside my window, i can't help but smile. i woke up at 2:04 in the morning with my arms wrapped around a bottle of allagash black and i couldn't help but laugh. i read a book for 4 hours that rattled me. i'm in love, whether it's convenient or not. i'm not perfect, by any means, but i'm really stinkin' happy. it's different than waking up to an empty glass of milk and cookie crumbs, but happy none-the-less.

Steel gray

Those eyes were steel gray
That day in the coffeeshop
It wasn't the cloudless sky behind her
It wasn't the cold, cement floor beneath her
That chilled me
It was those words
She was and wasn't saying
The songs that we weren't playing
The risks we wouldn't be taking
Those eyes once still lakes at sunrise
Were frozen over with a brittle layer of ice
Too thin to tread
Too thick to penetrate
My clumsy words dripping from my lips
Became icicles before reaching her ears
Jutting from my mouth
And crashing at her feet

Dancing on a volcano

I said I loved this dance
On the top of the volcano
It's dormant and I'm patient
I'm excited because I trust what follows
Dancing because I'm embracing this...
Potential: building, bulging, breaking ground

But I'm careful; I know the danger of this
Like ballroom dancing on broken glass
Making love on a tightrope
Holding my breath a moment too long
Falling asleep in the rain with my mouth agape

This energy is bubbling up of
Hot and smothering love
Prevented from flowing out
Turning hard, becoming molten
Sitting in my stomach,
Punctured with the tiny explosions of emotions
I must hold inside

Building trenches of void
By tearing out my insides
Swallow by swallow, these words held under my breath
Traveling down my throat, my chest, my belly
Become the veins in the soil
Pulsing blood to this longing

Like a ticking time bomb, I wait
Tiptoeing the frail edges of this beast
Peeking over to see the bubbles rise up and boil down
Kicking a pebble over to test the depths: my dare, my question?
To see what erupts first:
This feeling
Or me

Decreasing intervals

The walls in this room are pulsing
Like a failing heart, in and out
At decreasing intervals
The smoke exudes from your mouth as you speak
Choking me
I think, there's supposed to be something sexy
About this drag
But all I can do hold my breath, swallow my tongue
And close my eyes
The cloud above this bed hangs over my head
Isn't love supposed to be as Light
As the foam on a cappuccino, a leaf dancing the breeze?
This Light cuts through my window in two sharp blades,
Piercing the ground
Illuminating the dust fibers caught in its stream-
Stale and dry
I'm cloud-gazing for figures in the crevices of my biscuit
And captivated by the comet of milk in my coffee
Because today, the sky is stripped like a barren mattress
Much less like something to jump into and lose myself in
I'll pour another mug, black, and hide behind this buzz
You call out to me, and I hear nothing
But a dulling echo beckoning
At decreasing intervals

An ode to red wine:

I wish this could be as bottomless as real love
That I could fall forever into your silky layers,
Rich and bold and unrestrained.
I wish your warmth could permeate me
Long after the last drop.
I wish you could flow over me and
I could disappear beneath your rouge eternally.
Instead, I'll hold you in my palm
And savor the small moments
When I'm feeling loose, unbridled...
Drunk.

The Invitation

"The Invitation" by Oriah (Mountain Dreamer)

It doesnt interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your hearts longing.

It doesnt interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesnt interest me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by lifes betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us to
be careful
be realistic
remember the limitations of being human.

It doesnt interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
Yes.

It doesnt interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesnt interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesnt interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

Life in this room

Let us make love here:
I want the whole room bathed in light,
Pouring through our giant paned windows
Which overlook a busy city street;
It can be New York or San Francisco or Paris or Barcelona.
I just want life in this room.
I want life around me,
So colorful and consuming
That I feel insignificant and magnificent at the same time,
To the fullest extent of what that means.
I want love on my mouth
And beneath my surface: in my blood and in my bones.
I want to scream your name because it's the only thing on my mind.
Let us frolick through these winding ways,
Dancing among strangers,
Let us linger too long over just one more glass of wine,
Let us sneak away
And steal a breath from one another's lips
Against a brick wall on some pulsing avenue.
Let us see the box and break it,
Reach the bar and jump it,
Understand reality and bend it,
Create something unimaginable and seemingly impossible:
Euphoric.
Let's transcend words.
Let our love be the light in this room,
Radiating on my imperfect body.
Let you love me because I'm not perfect.
Let me love you because I think you are,
In spite of all the reasons you think I shouldn't
(But, oh, how they make me yearn for you).
Let there be music.
And uncontrollable laughter.
Let us wake up inspired.
Let there be no end.

Magic at 2 AM

This was a day of contradiction: this feeling of warmth curled up inside of a snowflake melting on my outstretched tongue.

It was that day the impossible happened: it snowed in Folsom. And a brother and sister ran barefoot through pools of rainfall, ankle-deep through mud and sodden leaves to the streetlight at the end of the road. Beneath the flurry of flakes, they danced and embraced as if the decade-and-a-half between laughing wildly as a child and now was as insignificant as their lack of shoes.

As frostbite numbed their toes, snowfall clung to their sweaters and their faces dampened, they smiled toothfully because the whole world seemed to be asleep when Nature was screaming, "Wake up, you're alive" or maybe she was whispering her bestkept secret and they were in on it. They smiled because you just never really know what life has in store. And when you think you've drawn them, she'll keep pushing the lines toward the inconceivable and the impossible... and there's something so magical about believing in something that doesn't make sense in this black-and-white world that's so overly defined.

This feeling is what I recall in my sacred moments of life pressed in my mind like a wildflower between my journal pages: the three seconds I superman-ed from the swingset before tumbling into a pile of leaves or when I stood on my dad's shoulders one-thousand-and-one feet tall and swallowed the sky. I encapsulate them in a precious glass bubble in my memory and it's now, as my fingertips defrost and Fionn sings in the background, I see that it's moments like now that shake the capsule and I realize why people love snowglobes so much- the unpredictable whir of frozen clusters dancing their jubilant dance before the calm resounds. Me, personally, though, I like the chaos.

The amazing writing of John Green:

I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I've never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero's errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done.

Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. it's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

Maybe all the strings inside of him broke, maybe all his ships sunk, or maybe we're grass, our roots so interdependent that none us are dead as long as someone is still alive. What I mean is, we don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors. But the one you choose matters because the metaphors have implications.

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment - because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it.

Missing her kept him awake more than coffee.