Tag: shortread

fix me or conflict me

Have you ever been very cold and someone gives you a hot drink? You know, the sensation of warming up from the inside. It feels like it starts like a lit firework in your chest, sharp and hot and burning as the liquid makes its way down. While it travels it doesn’t hurt nearly as much or feel nearly as warm.

I can’t even take a deep breath when I think about it, I am treading shallow air and my fingertips cannot get warm no matter how many times I sit on my hands or tuck them between my thighs. I have purple fingertips, when I think about it.

I thought I was supposed to feel like the monarch girl in that story I wrote over a year ago. There are no wings in this story though, are there?

I have baked this lovely cake to only discover that, yet again, it is composed entirely of crunchy cockroaches. And I didn’t even look properly before I bit in so now I’m just left with this taste in my mouth. And I’m humiliated that I thought I could bake in the first place. The worst part is the bits and bobs in my teeth.

multitasking

Being a girl is sitting in the salon chair every two weeks crisscrossing your arms for the fill and hoping that the movement from the massage chair doesn’t move the drill and burn your nail beds while trying not to kick the nail tech scrubbing the soles of your feet with a pumice that tickles and hoping you picked the right color.

It’s wanting an iced americano but without sugar so you can be skinny and thinking about when you’ll squeeze in 45 minutes of cardio before your plans tonight and how your concealer is running out so you can only put on makeup after the gym but before plans and you need to wash your hair today and style it and you really just want to stay in and read a book and not go out at all.

But that guy you almost went on a date with but ended up being actually still married even though he’s 25 is going to be there tonight so you want to go out so he sees you even though you won’t date him because ew and either way you don’t want to date anyone but maybe one person but that’s complicated for no real reason except for some very real reasons involving the future and time and space.

Being a girl is exhausting and full of multitasking and caring about everything and never feeling like you’re caring about the right things but not being able to make yourself care any less anyway.

thick as thieves

I want to convince you to design a smile just for me. Yes, I do want to be your friend. I want to be your best friend in the entire world.

Unravel Me

It feels like cold water around my ankles, and I am playing the violin and hoping I do not notice the cold anymore when it envelops me. That I am not shocked.

Not to make a love metaphor out of the whole titanic incident, we are not that big. We are something very small.

I wish I had the type of self control to be a pusher awayer but I am self indulgent when it comes to making myself happy.

I wish I knew it wasn’t going to hurt so much when you leave, sooner or later. Because you will, and it will suck and I will miss you and I wish I could flick a switch that makes me not care about you at all. I care enough that I will happily spend whatever time you will be around, being your friend and enjoying it all, even when it’s boring.

I want to be able to put it into words to explain to you how I feel but I can’t yet, not well. Not perfectly.

All I know is you make me happy in this unique way, and that I am not ready to let go of it. It might develop into something more but it also might never and regardless, it is special.

Is it? Are these pandemic thoughts? Do I see you through pandemic eyes? Am I seeing myself through pandy eyes?

I kind of want to stop talking to you for a week just to see if I make it. If I could do it. I don’t think I could.

the girl with one (1) cold shoulder

I am best friends with the block button and the read receipt. One of my shoulders is always cold.

I feel like it’s a self-preservation thing instead of a confidence thing, because when someone I don’t care about does something I don’t like I almost always immediately fling them to the depths of The Blocked. Ex: the first week I got a Twitter I blocked Chrissy Teigen. It felt good.

When someone I do care about does something (not small) that I don’t like I have to activate my logical checks and balances system and go down my Checklist To Keep People In My Life & Not Be Dramatic. Ex: I have been known to temporarily ground my best friends from my life. One of my friends kept repeatedly saying something I didn’t like and I asked him many times to stop and on the fourth time I didn’t talk to him or interact for four months. It felt fair to me. It was dramatic.

The checklist includes:

  • How do I feel? How should I feel?
  • What do I want to do? What should I do?
  • What can I do? What are my options?
  • What will I do?

Most of the time it’s always better to underreact. I can always ramp up the reaction later but honestly, it usually just makes me feel bad and I’m in the business of making myself feel great and not bad.

Count to ten, drink a glass of water, whatever it takes to not strike the match that ignites my fiery little heart.

pink incense

I am still learning how to find a balance in everything I do and love. I gave myself a schedule and am working towards discipline instead of the free fall that I seem to always be in.

I want to read, write, work, laugh, exercise, eat healthy, kiss, sleep well, prepare myself to apply for grad school and take on more responsibility at work, laugh more, kiss more, talk, listen, get stronger, and take care of myself.

I have been writing so much lately, about everything. The spin classes I found on YouTube with the instructor who plays Taylor Swift. The way I relate to Patroclus now. The pink incense I bought that smells like roses and something I can’t identify.

I have had the same bed frame since before I was born. I am finally ready for a new one. And couches.

I also need to save money for my master’s degree.

I find myself daydreaming often about small love-filled comforts like laying next to someone and reading a book with our shoulders touching. Going grocery shopping and splitting up to cover the store; knowing smiles when we spot each other across an aisle. Little little little things that seem so out of my reach currently.

Tomorrow is a full moon in Libra. I’m a Libra. I wonder what that means for me? I like to pick and choose what symbols affect me, and I want this one to mean something in the same way that sunflowers and the rain do.

Maybe something good will happen. I feel like it has to. I have been so good lately, to others and myself. I hope there is something that will come out of that, for me and for others.

‘Experience’ by Ludovico Einaudi type of shit

I can remember so much about the people I care(d) about and yet so little about myself. I think my favorite color is red, but my brain is more worried with trying to retain all of the favorite colors of all of the best friends I’ve ever had.

I am so selfish sometimes and I don’t know why I feel entitled to know everything about someone else while giving up barely anything about me.

At the same time I want someone to know me the way I know them. I want someone to just completely and totally understand me yet I actively push against it. The times I do share I feel like I’m saying too too too much and maybe I am afraid that if the someone I wanted to, really knew me, they wouldn’t find me that great.

I am named after a flower. I think I take too long to bloom and who wants to wait to see that when there are other much brighter and prettier flowers unfurling their petals faster?

But I hope one day I will bloom and there will be someone who is patient enough to catch the slow unraveling of each of my anxious petals and believe the final result was worth the wait.

on being tired but for good reasons

I’m too tired to make a great big entry to this post but I have a list of good reasons to be tired that make you feel good:

  • Working for over 12 hours and getting great work done that you’re proud of and going to bed without any more things you have to do
  • Staying up too late talking to your favorite person even though your eyelids can’t possibly be open for much longer, you keep them open just to hear them talk
  • Figuring out how to play a song that isn’t tabbed anywhere and even though you won’t play it for anyone because they wouldn’t know it, you remembered all the words and got all the notes right just for you
  • Finishing the last season of the best show ever and taking time to figure it all out
  • Thinking a little too much about someone and wondering what they meant when they said that thing that made you smile so big that you felt it all day and all night
  • Not moving from your spot on the couch because your little animal is asleep and you just can’t bear to wake it up because it’s just so cute and you’re so happy that your pet is your small house guardian
  • Reading a really good book and not realizing that you’d spent hours and hours reading but it was so worth it for the ending and the story and you get to take part of that story with you into your own
  • Going on an epic Wikipedia or YouTube dive and learning a bunch of new things that you wouldn’t have if you hadn’t happened upon them
  • Still taking off your makeup and putting your hair in a ponytail so it doesn’t get messed up with you sleep even though you could dive under the blankets now, but you prevented the messed up hair and the zit that always pops up when you don’t wash your face
  • Looking forward to something so much that you can’t sleep like you’re a kid going to Disneyland for the first time ever but you’re not a kid so you have to relish these moments because they’re so few and far between

And that’s it, a lot of run on sentences later. I’m happy and happy to be happy for many many reasons but these are a few good ones.

genius only comes along in storms of fabled foreign tongues

It feels like taking melatonin and getting slowly sleepier and sleepier except I don’t feel like going to sleep I just feel comfort and like I am testing my own patience like a rubber band.

In my head I am sending you waves of pink and red and white and in person I am snapping the invisible rubber band against my wrist again to literally snap out of it.

Talking to you feels like lighting a candle and feeling the warmth and smelling something clean and strong like fresh laundry, but from someone else’s house so I can’t pinpoint the exact brand.

You are not soft but constant and bold. I have always hidden my softness and hidden my strength and I worry that you still can’t, will never see either.

I can’t wait to meet you! But I totally can

I was talking to my friend about finding love and they’re impatient about how long it’s going to take them.

I’m off the dating app thing, and I know I won’t go back to them. I hate feeling like people are so easily replaced, and texting back in forth before ever meeting has always ruined things for me. People are never who you build them up to be in your head, and it just becomes a waste of time. It all feels so forced and it just hasn’t worked for me.

I’m so excited for when I get to meet the person I will fall in love with, but I can wait. There’s something comforting about knowing that while I’m making myself into the best person I can be, someone is out there making themself into the best person they can be for me too.

I hope I’ll know when I meet someone special, and I hope I’ll be ready for it. Until then, I’m excited to see what happens during the in-between. I want to travel and write and get to know myself better. There are a lot of things I’d like to accomplish before that, and I will have so many stories to tell my person.

I am excited! I can’t wait to love you with everything I’ve got, but I can also definitely wait. It won’t be wasted time. You’ll be worth the wait.

block ‘em, block ‘em all!!!!

The holidays scare away all the boys who only want to come over after 10:36 p.m. They don’t return until after the yucky cuffing and cuddling season is over, until the fireworks are in the air and it’s a new year so the coast is clear!!! The Women Are Over Their Need To Have A Fulfilling Relationship. We Are Safe Until October.

They’ll be the first to wish you happy new year and the first to swipe up on your selfies and reply on Snapchat. They’ll even send you a DM of your own Instagram picture and tell you how delicious you look (because you do!) but they won’t comment publicly. Of course not.

One will tell you how much he missed you and how busy he was, and you’ll think Really? Busy in the middle of this pandemic, even? Wow gosh gee whiz. How surprising! Except for the part where it isn’t surprising because it never is. This would be the third chance you’ve given him to suddenly fall in love with you and not just use you like a blowup doll. Do you think the third time’s a charm?

One will say he just used this time to really focus on work, and you’ll ask Oh well have you become very successful then? Have you lived up to your big talk about how much money you can make? And he will say this new year looks very promising, very lucrative, and can you send a picture?

One will say he shut everybody out, it’s not just you. He barely talked to his friends, even. He’s so sorry about that. So so sorry, it wasn’t cool. So can he come over? He can’t stop thinking about your body.

What about a personal favorite of mine, he has really grown so much this past year. He’s so thankful for everything, and hopes you are too. He hopes you want to hear about how much he has bettered himself. He knows his path, but he forgot your address, can you send it so he can come in 30 minutes to just hang out and catch up? In bed?

Getting a cute little Snapchat when you’re drinking a glass of wine alone watching a movie that says “ha ha ha ha ha get drunker and send cleavage pics“ should make you throw up in your mouth and hit block. Do it, I dare you. I double dog dare you.

Then hold up your wine tumbler that keeps the rosé cold and cheers to how great your cleavage will look in the face of the actual man who loves you, when that happens. SPOILER ALERT: it will happen, and it will happen so good. Cheers to the dirty dirty dirty sex you’ll have with a man you didn’t give it up to until you were exclusive. And fucking cheers to saying goodbye to these losers and waiting for a little thing called true love, baby!