In my dreams, I was concocting the most exquisite collection of words used to describe a most pure elegant madness. A description of a beautiful mind unraveling in a manner so-simple-it-was complex and so complex-it-was-simple sort of delivery. An explanation so delirously dreamy of a tortured soul finally learning to indulge without inhibitions, approaching the climax of the century. But I wouldn’t wake in time to salvage the hysterics and rose late enough that no pen was nearby my disposition. It came in a language only granted access through a faraway consciousness unknown to anyone aware of their pitiful mortality.

Bust:34. Waist:27. Hips:36. So read the measuring tape around my rapidly shrinking body in the alterations department of yet another bridal store. My friends keep getting married, fatter and loose hoo-has from poppin babies. I keep getting thinner and enjoying my singleness. We're growing worlds apart, but I still visit them. It usually involves bridesmaid dresses or gifts for sore nipples and cleaning spit. So, I can't describe my excitement when I found a friend from elementary school who is unmarried and chasing ass. It'll be fun sharing good times/possibly tongue now that I look/feel better than 3rd grade.

Here’s some shrink material to ingest! What would cause a perfectly sane girl, who’s been keeping it together for quite some time, to wake up trembling, watching over her shoulder so violently?

There’s nothing wrong with me is there?
Nothing!

Soooo… jumping out of bed, lucid none whatsoever, and rushing to pound down animal-free confectionary sweets (with sufficient control to read ingredient labels and chug post-damage emergency laxatives) until my esophagus exploded … is normal?

Munch on that!
you overpaid, condescending lab coat dick.

Maybe it was you making me sick while I tried finding peace in my dreams.

Oh dear! I’ve lost my prettiness again.

Those moments you walk past a mirror and retrack back to see OM-MY-GOD…
sweetness and attractiveness!

Who would’ve thought a gray day could make eyes sparkle and skin glow?
And hey, angles favor your unique physique and delicate silhouette.

Yes. It escaped along with my shadow and I haven’t seen her for days. I miss it so much I could post lost signs and offer a reward for compliments to bring her back. The description would read that she might have a little wear in her demeanor, but still a sight to see!!!

Everybody makes mistakes. Why couldn’t you let me make mine in peace? Let me enjoy this fuck up I’m entitled, and the next one to come, because it’s inevitable. The same way your perfect world is now crumbling down. The same way you’re realizing you genetic material didn’t inherit perfection through miraculous evolution. The same way I will not rape your dignity just because it’s become quite the spectacle to watch you picking up the pieces of your tragedy and try to make them whole. We are all broken and defective in one way or another. Let me err too.

Those pills I took, I fear, might have been expired! The whole ritual of unwrapping the capsules from the foil with my shaky fingertips, throwing them back with tepid water, and feeling them bump their way down the food pipe, contaminating the walls of my clean stomach lining, was disgusting. Just as I’ve always known they’re something wrong with eating dead flesh, there’s something wrong with taking certain drugs. But what to do when a fever is forcing you to cry hysterically and say things you don’t really mean? It won’t stop the madness, but it may cure temporary insanity.

She’s behind me, rocking and swaying to my song, even when I pluck the wrong notes and contort my posture from the nasty sound. She doesn’t hear the dissonant notes. She only perceives the muscles and tendons in my hands as they contract and loosen to input emotion to the melody that is supposed to be playing. She reaches into the music box playing inside my heart and selects to exalt only the intention of articulation and melodious dynamics. For that, I’m grateful and will play ever so considerably light or forceful on the keys to interpret my profound expressions.

Hard partying has lost its meaning in life. This, not counting my relationship stint (cause that really was crazy-fun). I'm only giving merit to the times I have sincerely let go of all the shit and scheduled the hangover nursing. However, I do need more late nights, except there are less available friends to sign up for bar hopping and downtowns. My immediate friends want lights out by 11PM, rent PG-13 movies and talk about family planning. So, where are all the beautiful, intelligent singles that know how to paint a town red and still be balanced and loyal companions?

It'd be courteous to email him, requesting he change his password. It'd be a consideration to him and a temptation less for me. Otherwise, I can't help it. I must keep checking it, snooping, reading the emails he kept from me, the friendship forwards, and the hand-holding otter video that was "us". It would spare me having to see his new flat-faced girlfriend go trigger-happy on Facebook tagging pictures of "them". I am, though, grateful finding she is bland like stale vanilla pudding. Ungrateful that she is taller.

But this must stop!

His fault for choose such a brainless password.

This city that is always blaring with signs of life and nearing death – traffic and ambulances, pedestrians and children – seems devoid of physical interaction to prove intelligent inhabitants. Sometimes I see the people, I hear the people talking amongst themselves, but they’re just soulless shells. It seems they resort mainly to communication through faceless internet crowds, where it’s easy to be invisible and yet remain a presence. I know they wake up and go to work and come back and dine in the evening, but still I find them all separated from the real world. It’s affecting my conversational skills.

With my own eyes, I’ve seen him pack guilt in a box, swallow it, and let it consume him until it traveled back into his consciousness. I’m left wondering, has he stored me away? Is he tortured as he warned would happen if I left? There’s rumors going round: you can’t see the veins on his neck bulging anymore and that he looks meatier. But when I saw him, although his appearance was that of an atoned man, no one ever studied his eyes the way I did. It seemed something was begging to surface, had I not walked away.

Today, I shall think about anything but him!!!!

Buuuuuut... I can’t help thinking back a year: he still hadn’t appeared. That line of remembrance would bring up the anniversary of the day the floating bodies of the cosmos collided and we met. And almost immediately I got what I wanted, like always. And soon after, I lost what I got, like it always does. And that very possibly, another cluster of meteors are scrambling around a distorted magnetic field, trying to oppose each other. Inevitably, this cycle will recycle, so I shan’t worry myself about him.

I got another thing coming.

This fleeting moment, I’ll allow a few wishes. Normally I wouldn’t, but life is taking its course and nothings happening. I’d rather wish than nothing at all. I wish my jeans were a bit thicker, my sandal-exposed toes were bundled in wool socks, my bare neck snuggled by a scarf, and that great hot chocolate was water based. As long as I’m wishing …that milk had no adverse effect on me. That the past had no adverse effect on my future. I wish this lonely sun-lit chill I’m breathing in will turn out a nice memory in years to come.

Someone else should story-tell about the outdoors. It’s more interesting coming from actual blue-collars, dog-walkers and doormen. Not to say my tale is necessarily less interesting, it’s just not as well lit and acoustics bounce around more. I’m tempted to always share what I just saw unraveling out there, but I’m reminded my place is in here. It needn’t always be about this very existential moment. Picking at older events is equally amusing as frolicking in the beach or digging the earth. Yes, because indoors you also have ‘under the sheets’, ‘behind doors’ and ‘raising roofs’. See what I mean?

During a steamy make-out session, whether soft or animalistic, my eye lids eventually flutter open. I get my kicks from watching the chemical reactions displayed on a man. They sense they’re being watched and pull back to inquire on my signature style or try more creative maneuvers, completely clueless they’ve done nothing wrong. It’s no more complicated than I simply like to see their facial muscles in action. I find pleasure in their dazed indulgence and ecstasy. Or maybe I haven’t come across champion kissers, because I do recall a singular night I was rendered blind by a certain someone.

The air would be thick like walking through cement. I would be barely acknowledged background, uninvited. Sniffles and palpable melancholy would set the mood. Their heads would hang low. The floor would make better eye contact that I could provide. My pain would stab at my throat, but I would swallow it. Internally, they’ll cry, “He’s our son! You don’t know our suffering!” They don’t know they partially blame me because it’s easier. Mourning him in their presence may infuriate them. They can’t conceive at one point he was more mine than they ever had him. I miss him too.

The idea of inserting animal products into my body has become grotesque. My psyche has happily adopted and embedded the idea of rejecting anything that has a place in the animal kingdom. I’m not trying to save the world or punish industries that mutilate nature’s natural order. This is for me, although I’ve started to feel a new interesting connection with the wild. Maybe I’m just cuckoo about my new favorite snack: vegan cherry chocolate bars that have the(thee) cutest, cuddliest koala on the cover of the recycled paper it’s wrapped in. 10% of my money goes to him.

I have to continue waiting until my honeymoon for the cherry pop, but I finally engaged in the first of firsts on a different matter. We started a fire and passed it around. After incensing my lungs, which initially resulted painful, it soon lifted me somewhere soothing. As I started to glide through the wormhole, the car began to fly, my hands clapping involuntarily, and the baby got stoned (I asked her), I wondered why I waited so long for this induction into the world where space and time have little relevancy. Everything is easier walking on clouds of haze.

In a bubble:

Love. True Love. Re-birth. Boat Rides. Drunk Fondling. Monogamy. Firsts. His and hers. Oriental dress and heels. Family. Playstation Hangovers. Country club buzz golf. Don Cesar Sunsets. Backseats. Redemption. Cop Bust. Apartments and budgets. Stress, stress, stress. Infidelity. Intolerance. Mis-communication. Resort Pool. Separation and death. Untouched beaches. Weather patterns. Bleed-out. Music Pangs. Research Meds. Ex. Geniuses. Marine. Wine and Cheese. Skinny, Fat, Skinny, Fat, Skinny. 4K. Baby booms. High School. Veganism. Piano Lessons. Mary Jane. Home.

This bubble is about to pop, and nothing but salty tears will burst from it, evaporating immediately as it touches ground.

As the year nears its closing, I take inventory of everything. From January to December. From womb to 24. My chest, although smaller in circumference, the lungs produce powerful little breaths of anxiety. To be completely well rounded, only one month remains to change the course of what next year might bring. My clothes seem to suffocate the cells. Last year’s transition was similar. It was just as horrible, but December turned out wonderful. Six months was enough to hit the fan. Vicious cycles. Gotta step outside for some air, stark naked. My blood is frozen, something time should mimic.

They think I couldn’t handle a trip. Inducing from my reefer journey, they think I’ll trap myself in my worst nightmare. Alice in Wonderland on crack. Alice in Fucking Wonderland. Alice Fucking in Wonderland. They’re probably right. I’m too paranoid, far too dramatic not to accidentally create a world made to die in. Then again, maybe I’m tripping right now. Cause they’re watching me, myriads of hands coming at me from all directions, and my heart continually falls from its cavity. I’m only here cause my mind hasn’t been unplugged from existence. Think I’ll just stay stamp-free for a while.

Ode to Ipod*

Musical candy! Yes, I gave in to the quasi-subliminal tyranny of mass consumerism. This low blow of surrendering to cutting-edge technology is taking one in the name of music, one of the greater causes. Those gumball earphones so cuddly nestled in my ear are picking up instruments otherwise inaudible. Whispered chords that make complete the melodies I thought had betrayed me. They’re shaking the core of my being I waited so long to hear. I’ll never put it down. I fancy I’ll start seeing quarter notes instead of letters.

*Note: Of the Nano kind; pocket and bite-sized.

There she goes. Those assured steps have no insecurity in their determination to get there. At a very precocious age she started walking. Nobody knows where. She just raised her little undeveloped body as if she had an internal navigation system and set off to conquer something grand. No one knows what. It’s been interesting how today she stops to talk about all her trips, falls and mostly the curiosity she found in unpaved paths. But as far as every new person who crosses that right angle posture and steadfast pace, they never imagine she’s the type become strayed.

We once felt that energy together. Like a desert dream lost somewhere between the smoky sky and an intoxicating haze straight from nature’s flora. Our hearts were beating objects of syncopated percussion beats. I swear we danced, wild with all the vitality from our core extending uncontrollably to our feet and fingertips. It could’ve just been the shadow of us moving together as one, because that is all that remains to haunt me. I’m releasing our ghost to him. So when he turns the lights down on his new newly claimed territory, he stills me swaying sweetly on the walls.

The moods have picked me up again on a gust a wind I barely perceived. I’m light as a feather floating in heaven, never to fall. It so lightly whisked me away, bringing with it words, whispers and music like cotton-cloud oxygen cooling and purifying my insides. Some call it nature’s high, some a chemical imbalance. I’m thinking I was purposefully kidnapped through careful selection in order to write the song that plays in dreamers’ heads but no one can quite give it proper notation. I most definitely will compose these sounds, but the premiere broadcast will be VIP only.

Starbucks has stolen my soul and my four bucks. They’re cult-scented coffee seduces me whether by a passing whiff of bean or the ever-present addiction. I must donate the first fruit of my paycheck to the support the production of their partially recycled cups and the attached cardboard ring. Even with the irritating jolly music they play during the holidays, I must enter to have my Christmas Blend Soy Misto Grande in its festive packaging. For marketing purposes, they should join forces with Jack. Get jacked up on caffeine all day, sip single-barrel whiskey to get knocked out at night.

Buying shit, selling too?
Need a fix or some food?
Maybe sex?
Like to drink?
There's a bar
Need a lift?
Take my car
Stop for every whim
Your heart's desire lets you in

In this city, this scene
At this party you are queen
You're addicted to the lights
To the sounds, the sights
The pleasure, the pain
Hot nights, Cold rain
To the smoke, to the drink
To the buzz, don't think!!!

To danger, to the fear
To the speed, fifth gear
All the time, night or day
You should quit
But where the hell would you go?

For you I’d:

-always refresh my nail polish at the sign of first chipping
-memorize all major league baseball teams, learn some stats
-wake up before morning light to jog
-move to a state miles from the ocean
-light your cigarettes
-wear matching bras and panties, buy more silk
-watch movies without wasting the pause button
-listen to music quietly and wait until the songs finish
-sleep at godly hours
-settling for hanging out if you don’t feel like kissing
-get a hidden, discreet tattoo or a huge henna in a very visible patch of skin
-giggle more than laugh

Forgive me if I offer you consolation and end up buried in your hands. Forgive me if the strength I was to supply reveals itself as weakness. All you need is a little verification from a friend, one that hasn’t been killed, but made stronger. Your shoulders sink and you shiver when he’s gone. As I prepare my lips to reply healing words, I touch you, my mirror image. Your cries sound like my own trembling whimpering. Sorry I can’t hear you, sorry I can’t see you. When he left, he trapped me in a glass casket of my reality.

The dirtier the secret, the better. The adrenaline was grimy, yet hedonistically ecstatic. That is, as long as the blood kept rushing. I let them escape one by one to slow up my heart rate. It dropped so low, so steadily slow, the pounding beats became so faint I didn’t know whether I living or dead. Before I knew my body was in motion, I was back out looking for a sleazy corner to shoot a vein. Suddenly jolted with secrets, I find I’ve grown averse to tainted blood. I had to spill some to achieve sleep. Goodbye sweet rush!