Young Writers Society

Sometimes I think if I had higher potential hot girl energy, I could have burned you, been the half-Greek goddess of your dreams. We would have kissed in Dublin properly after you abandoned your cigarette for my Guinness-stained lips. I would have been falling in love instead of turning Irish countryside green with envy.

We would have burned so brightly in the Spanish sea after we crashed into each other like waves at high tide. They might still whisper about me, about us, but even those assholes couldn’t deny the chemistry if you always sat next to me. And if nothing else, I’d know what it’s like to be kissed back.

Would we have made it past summer, into fall, into snow, into spring? Would I have wrapped myself around you when I went proper crazy? If you’d been thinking with your dick, just how long would you have tolerated me zig-zagging the Vickie Mendoza diagonal? I tried to tell the doctors you were all I needed. How would that conversation have gone if you were a real boy in the waiting room and not just my Pinocchio Prince Charming hallucination?

It wouldn’t have been forever. One day we’d see that the gaps between us were comically large, like the scene in 2012 where the earthquake splits John Cusack from his wife in the grocery store. It would have ended in booze and tears and so many regrets, so maybe not that different after all.

But maybe I would have been able to hate you properly in hindisight (and not just for your voting record). I might have still tired to romanticize our matching scars (because even a slightly prettier version of me would still be me), but I wouldn’t be writing odes to your ghost in the pine trees.

You’re still alive, I believe,
But you’ve haunted me since the turn of the millennium,
That fateful fifth grade family tree project. One of your cousins did the legwork and faithfully recorded her aunt June’s children. There were three names. I only knew two.

“Mom, who’s Tom, born 1952?”

You were the oldest, born the same year as the man your sister would marry and have two daughters with (do you even know we exist? Or is the secret kept on all sides?). All she told me is that you went crazy in the 70’s and you were living somewhere on your mother’s money.

The next time she spoke of you, I was fourteen in an Applebee’s and my sister was in the restroom. She still didn’t know, but I guess my mom was tipsy enough to talk, though she begged me to keep my sister innocent. She said you were so smart, memorized the dictionary and you would rock in your seat out of anxiety. They have a word for that these days, not that your folks would have ever used it. The doctors wouldn’t even put that label on your tongue-tied self-taught bookworm niece forty years later (I was a girl born in the 90s, so this is hardly shocking).

I left my questions unspoken, but with every teenage meltdown, I’d cry into the pillow and wonder if this is how it started, if I’d be taken away and hidden from the world like you were. I didn’t have the words for it, but I knew I was born an outsider.

The souvenir keychain from Dublin tells me our ancestors were Scottish poets and mercenaries. If I ever find that family tree again, I’ll have to see if your cousin ever found out which one of them pissed off a fairy. I never knew your father (and I’m sorry you had to), but his unibrow frames my face. I get it waxed away every month.

Thirteen years ago, the world ended and my curse finally got a name. I was twenty, the same age you were when you went to Europe and came back hearing voices. But they say that if I’m a good girl and take the pills I’ll get to live, won’t be like you. I wanted to believe them. Sometimes when my grip on reality fades, I wonder if you could have been saved.

I've been good, so good, not perfect, but better than I ever imagined when I left the psych ward on April Fool's Day. The meds work, mostly. It's not fear and secrets that keep me caged, but my own body weight, my inertia making it hard to meet the sunlight, hard to put myself into the world. I can't save long-lost uncles, or friends, or anyone but myself.

Perhaps it's time to stop mourning secrets and rise out of my self-dug grave.

uh yeah this is really personal, I probably will delete later but this one has been on my mind for a while. Based on a very true story-my mom literally didn't want us to know her older brother even existed. I literally don't know if he's alive (my mom briefly mentioned he was having medical problems a few years ago, but nothing since.)

some context here-so in listening to Tortured Poets Department, of course I had to look up The Starting Line after they got a shout-out in "The Black Dog". Their music sounded vaguely familiar, but I don't think I ever listened to them. But it reminded me of The All American Reject's first album, which I listened to obsessively in 2003. Yes, I know y'all weren't even born yet lol. So then I had to look it up, and man, there was just so much nostalgia. I've listened to it maybe a handful of times in the last decade, but it was like no time has passed when I listen to it.

perhaps it's less that my muse is caged and more that she is bored of trying to write yet another poem about how i want life but am afraid to live it. perhaps she prefers the dirty fanfiction because i may only ever fuck myself (literally and figuratively), but at least my favorite fictional characters can fuck each other. perhaps she only wants to create in a beautiful and clean environment and i can only scowl at trash and act like taking the fucking laundry downstairs is a herculean task. perhaps she is weighed down by the extra pounds that have crept around my waist in my stagnation, but being heavy makes it harder to do the things that would make you less heavy. perhaps i am in denial when i say she is asleep and she has been dead for days, weeks, months, years. perhaps i am the one who is dead, my life taken away due to my failure to live it well. perhaps it is all of these, or none of them. perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

perhaps this started as a silly apology poem about focusing on my smutty fanfic instead of poeming this month and then turned into whatever the heck this is.