chasethoseseconds

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ROOT

I.

Amanda and I sit in front of sitcom reruns, endure the changing of the seasons, as Netflix asks are you still there? to a cell phone that does not belong to us, as if we could answer it in the first place with our half-assed hellos and whispered goodbyes; the messy house, the mouldy Kraft Dinner in the fridge, yet another reason for Nic to bitch, his tears tumbling into my arms on a drunken Friday night before I can stop him to talk about the date I just left and the boy I just kissed on the 99 B-line, though I know he doesn’t want to hear it because we hate men in this house: we write pro/con lists about crushes riddled with what-ifs, self-doubt crowding in like sardines inside our home at a Christmas party, anxiety attacks sprouting in the cold December snow as you silently reconsider every time you said no, hesitate, edit the list of cons and pros about people you will hardly even ever know underneath their dating profiles.

II.

“Am I your girlfriend?”

“Aren’t we just having fun like this?”

“People keep asking me if we’re officially dating.” “We are officially dating. The question is, are we officially A Thing?”

“Do you want us to be?” “Do you want us to be?”

“I don’t know.”

                  (conversation inside a residence building)

III.

Blood stains your yellow childhood sheets and you call me dude and baby in the same shallow breath and I cannot pause to inhale when I yell at you over pizza toppings because everything is so much different than I thought it would be. You tell me to split my sentences. Beg me to use a full stop. Whisper the morning after that no one likes the girl who uses two semicolons and eighty-four commas in a single sentence. Compare me to whoever in your English lecture. Tell me my poetry lacks grammatical structure. You don’t even realize I’m writing about you every time. We laugh at things I said when I was fourteen and you pretend not to remember the things you said when you were drunk. I sleep for two hours. You stir in bed when I try to leave.

IV.

brain as a machine

arousal to attraction

a pseudo-girlfriend

                   (haiku written during a psychology midterm)

V.

The iPhone screen, set to minimal brightness in the back of the dim auditorium, comes to life as a text message silently arrives, whispering: We’re… This is for sure a relationship of some sort.

                  (text message received from a boy in CLST 111)

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oh doesn’t he know I want everything at once I want to be spinning in trees I want the wire to break I want the moment before the moment that I fall—

— Anne Barngrover, from “Show-Me State,” Brazen Creature

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Bastille - Warmth

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sext: let’s show each other our favorite songs and listen to them together

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VEGETABLE

“I saw him…His beanstalk frame & fragile bicycle. & I knew: we would be so terribly happy.”

                   (Chen Chen, “Summer Was Forever”)

Your beanstalk bones and overactive imagination leave me a sad and lonely squash in awe. No one has ever read you poetry, boy, and so I skip the lines about falling in love because I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. We promised to keep things fun and easy and you text me I miss you three hours after I leave every Thursday so I don’t think you have the same concerns as I do. Maybe you’re not a beanstalk but a baked potato, all crisp skin and fluffy interior waiting for someone to stab you with a fork, expose your delicacy. I skip the lines about falling in love like I skip the lines about me in your journal, and instead choose to read your thoughts on Kafka, and your three o’clock angsts, and the grocery list that mirrors the one you keep of every time you’ve seen me since February second. I maybe find myself becoming an artichoke, budding into something inconsumable, something I hate, something you put on your pizza last week. I skip the lines about falling in love because I don’t want to give myself the wrong idea, our root vegetable legs tangled together between the pair of stolen lounge chairs. And maybe that Chen Chen poem was right, you’re just a beanstalk boy, and we would be so terribly happy.

We could be so terribly happy.

+

“Because who knows what will happen, but I want to, baby, want to believe it’s always possible”

                  (Chen Chen, “Song of the Anti-Sisyphus”)

You haven’t texted me in eighteen hours and I want to listen to “Goodbye Earl” by the Dixie Chicks with my mother because it’s about killing men who hurt you, not emotionally but physically, and I know you haven’t physically done anything (besides jumpstart my period by two days and grab the roll of fat I’m most insecure about and call it cute), but I’m still pissed. Maybe this is how you treat every girl you lose your virginity to, forget to text her for two days but follow her roommate on Instagram. Maybe this is how I treat every person I have a crush on: overthink every action they make and convince myself this is fake. I know you’re my boyfriend and we said we didn’t want to be that type of couple, but I can’t help but think something is wrong with me every time you so much as frown in my direction.

Neither of us has uttered a word of this to our parents. I don’t know if your feelings are real. I’m afraid they aren’t, but I might be more afraid that they are.

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trying to be consistent with my journal.

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BLOOM

“Whenever I get sad, I just stop feeling sad.”

“Are you human?”

                  (overheard quote from an engineering student on the first floor)

It took me four years to tell my best friend that I have been so depressed I couldn’t leave my bed; you learned in less than three months. My therapist(s) don’t even fully know that information, because I lie to them about being normal, which really should be expected of someone whose brain isn’t normal. Go figure. I think I get it from my brother, his childhood years spent in doctor’s offices for every physical and mental problem imaginable. His medical records are longer than any book I’ve ever read, with strange little redacted bits we’re not supposed to acknowledge about lung cancer scares and alcohol abuse and suicidal tendencies running in the family.

Some things are easier to inherit than others:

A problem with trusting medical professionals

Anger at the world for putting you in shitty situations

The tendency to drink too much coffee

An inability to cry unless it’s at the most inconvenient time

The lack of a sunny disposition

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“No one can sleep forever, but I’m barely able to sleep at all.”

                  (stolen from somewhere in my boyfriend’s journal, 3 a.m.)

Our family trees are opposites in both colour and cadence. I hear it in the way you speak to your father, so unlike the words I whisper to mine. You tell him about your favourite rapper and the anxiety you’ve been feeling as I sit in silence somewhere in the background. It’s not normal for me to be normal, but even with that knowledge, expectation seeps into your dorm room tonight – your long fingers shake in mine and I have to be someone I have not been for four years, swallow my pride and problems to make room for you.

“When we first spent the night, nothing else would ever feel that way / In my room, it all changed.”

                   (Rex Orange County, “Nothing”)

It’s not as difficult as I imaged it would be; this is not the bedroom I share with Amanda – there is space here for something to blossom, even though the mattress is microscopic, the space between it and the wall growing smaller by the minute. Everything seems to shrink with each murmured word, distances depleting as you tell me everything that makes you cry. The list is longer than mine, fits in with the list of anxieties you pen into your journal when you think I’m asleep. You don’t realize that I have the same issues as you, tossing over ourselves in a shared twin sized mattress until someone eventually shuts their eyes for good. The morning you told me, “the only time I’ve slept the whole night was the last time you stayed over.” My initial laughter subsides when I realize it’s not a joke, not a coincidence when you’re awake every time I get up to pee and see three texts from you.

I don’t know why this confessional has become a love letter, why everything I write to you becomes one, despite my stuttering tongue and shaking palms. Despite the voice in my head screaming you’ll get hurt, the self-doubt that matches yours, that (for some reason unknown to us) can only be communicated through text messages. Even despite the insecurity gnawing in my overly sensitive stomach. Maybe it’s the ache deep in my chest when you look at me the same way a Lorde song sounds.

I guess I just feel safe with you.

[chasethoseseconds]

The Draw // Bastille