Young Writers Society

july 13th. one last trek up the hill, side by side, just like the first time, but this time i am full of words unspoken and desperation. let's hang out in the fall, yeah? i say as if my life doesn't depend on your affirmation. a hug and euro-kiss at the top of the stairs. i inhale your cologne and pray this isn't the last time i see you. as i tried to pack, all i could do was start missing you.

two days, three airports, and a serpentine customs line later, i am home. my mother asks how the trip was and i tell her how they made fun of me, said i talked to much. she said i do talk too much. all i could do was sleep and feel even more alone.

i watched them from a laptop screen, bragging about the best summer ever. i uploaded pictures, straining to find ones where i looked okay, not like the odd girl out, the fat one who can be cropped out of existence. i tried revenge, posting their sloppy drunk thursday photos, but they ate it up. all i could do was ponder the lies i'd have to tell about this summer.

day in, day out. i hide from the sun because it mocks me. i am slow and sleepy as my old laptop uploading the photos. i decide i should have drowned the day the waves almost took me. maybe they would've felt bad for how they broke me then (they wouldn't have, you were just a beached balena to them). all i could do was hate myself for everything i am, because i don't know how to make myself palatable to anyone.

between tears and regrets and ugly facebook comments, all i could do was count down the days until school started, because you'd be there, and in that late summer half-asleep haze, your memory was my lifeline, my distraction from the pain.

Once I considered myself
a master of the pen,
an expert in this
exquisite bizarre art form
they call poetry.

I have since been humbled
by reading true master pieces
and realizing that I had not
their dedication to this craft.

I fell into a different world
filled with numbers equations
and experiments.
Art became a passing fad,
my poems a symbol
of my dead delusions of grandeur.

But now I lie here
after many months of
silence, again attempting
to express my heart
in a few short stanzas.

For you see, my dear,
I have found new inspiration
in the way my heart soars
as it looks upon you.

Oh, but again I see
how I lacked before,
how easily I fall into
tired cliches. of love

For thousands have sung
of piercing blue eyes
and hearts that ache
and smiles that light up the world.

For while you, my dear,
do indeed have those eyes
and that smile that does
such maddening t and my heart
does indeed hurt when you are gone.
I should not write
you deserve something
far more original than that.

No puedo creer en ti para siempre,
pero sí puedo creer en ti ahora.*

For once upon a summer night,
when my soul had been
defeated, weakened by words
so cruel, I found you, and suddenly
my soul felt less alone.

And here I am, struggling to
make our story seem somehow
poetic and graceful, when I
(as you know well) am the
complete opposite.

Cuando suspiramos,
estamos enamorados.**

Tonight, I sigh for you.

*I can't believe in you forever,
but I can believe in you now.

**When we sigh, we are in love. I am 90% sure this is a quote from something, but Google is not telling me where it's from. I assumed it was something we were reading in class (I was taking Hispanic Literature that semester), but maybe it's just something someone said?

as i read the fragments
of the story i never told,
i discovered what i'd forgotten
about the night i started to love you,
that cursed birthday
where the crowd i invited
only made me feel more lonely.

somewhere on the foreign hills,
i stepped in dog shit
and you said that some guy told you
that was good luck,
and for a moment i felt safe
because if i had nothing else,
i had you.

it's the butterfly effect,
if the butterfly was a dog shitting
somewhere in northern spain
for a drunk girl to step in
and find it noteworthy enough
to write into her plot line.

that glorious detail was forgotten
in the haze of longing and madness
and trying to survive the last ten years,
but looking back, i see
how it translated into that feeling
of "i'm okay, it'll be okay"
and that's what i craved
when i was missing you.

and maybe it was good luck after all,
because it brought me you
and gave me this story to tell.

there were four of them,
each with someone back home
they swore would be forever,
even if some thought
they were too young to know that
(perhaps, but at least two of them
went the distance,
so who am i to judge?)

they were quite lovely
inside and out
and they didn't shame me
for the horrific crime of existing.

but still,
when they would talk about
all the love and sex
that girls like me don't get to have,
it hurt even more
that the one i wanted to hug and kiss and fuck
was literally close enough to touch,
but you might as well have been an ocean away.

we stopped at a souvenir shop
for claddagh rings
because of course they wanted
a souvenir for their true loves.
i played along and got one
in hopes that someday someone
would have the honor
of turning it upside down
(i had to get it cut off
many years later.
it's still in a bag somewhere,
un-repaired and un-turned).

when they went lingerie shopping,
i should have joined you
in the hostel room where you were watching the game,
but instead i wallowed in the room
where one of them had puked the night before,
attempting to read,
but mostly pondering
how i'd look in lingerie
once i lost the weight
and if you'd ever want
to see me in it.