Get busy living, or get busy dying.

"& everything is easier

than I had guessed everything would

be;even remembering the way who

looked at whom first,anyhow dancing"

Some of you seem to have noticed I haven’t written lately.

I haven’t written lately because time. Because I imagine You reading this and balk. Because I don’t even know who You is anymore. Because continuous streaming and endless scrolling.  Because there is a girl with beautiful lips who’s read the books that make me Me. Because there’s a cog slipping in the machinery and I just. Can’t. Engage. Most of the time I’m playing devil’s advocate to my own arguments before I even realize what my original argument was. Because when I don’t have the energy to wash my socks, I just buy new ones.

Nastia: I hate when you think you have all your ducks in a row and then one of them goes missing. Come back little duck!

Me: My ducks are dead. They're never coming back.

So I’m going to do that thing where I just write and don’t stop because if I stop I’ll never start again. Things I have done this month: I watched four seasons of Mad Men, mostly the parts with my girlfriend Joan in them. I drank all the tequila. I danced with a girl who smelled like cotton candy. I ate tacos. Many, many tacos ranging in quality from roasted mushroom with avocado corn salsa to midnight Jack in the Box. I smoked too many cigarettes, and spent too much money. I slept too little and didn’t write enough.  

I am trying to be brave, but February keeps wearing spring as a mask. I’m afraid winter will never end, just go on forever disguised as something else. Sometimes days get so heavy they swallow your shoes. I told her it feels like barely outrunning something, but really it’s the falling. Like I’m not the hillside, or the trees/rocks/bramble. I’m the avalanche gathering momentum and debris. I’m creating my own gravity; swallowing things without thinking twice about what they’ll do to my insides.

Last night I asked a friend to pinch me until I bruised. You won’t feel it, you’re tequila numb. That should hurt you. You’re tequila numb. Now my arm is purple and blue and I keep touching the hurt to remind myself it’s there. That’s small but important.

This is me saying I'm glad to still have all of my teeth when I wake up every morning. My hands don't look like my hands so much of the time. I don't know how to make them be still when I talk. They tear at themselves like trying to escape a cage, but the cage is my body and the blood makes me sick. I don't know if it was night or the morning when she held my hand and kissed my thumbs, and everything felt easier for a minute.

This is the reaching. This is the leveling out. This is writing the knot out of my throat so I can have a voice again. This is me saying I’m alive, and I love you.

I love you.

-b