I sit with one hand on my keyboard, the other holding a drink I can't really stomach. But I sip at it anyway, taking as much of it at a time as I can, hoping that at some point I will have it all. This liquid burns my tongue and throat as it goes down, wanting to be consumed but punishing me for wanting it so badly. I can't help it. I want it not for the taste or the appearance, but for the result. If I can persevere to the bottom of the glass, it won't burn anymore and there'll be no rumble of protest from my stomach. It will go to my head and warm the backs of my eyelids, steady my breathing, envelope my limbs like a blanket. It will raise the volume of my voice and peel away a few inhibitions, or it would if I wanted to speak or mingle. Or at least that is what I hope. It could turn out like most others of its kind and disappoint, either by not being strong or to little of a good thing. It could want to free itself from me, no, I'm sure it does. This one is different, one I'm afraid I won't finish. Or it could be one that is worth the struggle to the last drop.

I've resigned myself to reading and pretending I'm not waiting for a call that I suspect won't come.

TEN:
10. You're creepy. Creepier to me than I think you are in reality.
9. I think about you a lot.
8. I feel like you're fighting the urge to leave more than this town when you go.
7. I totally understand how you feel, but even if I'd known that we felt the same way a long time ago, I still wouldn't have approached you, you're annoying.
6. You guys fucked me over a lot this year and if it happens again next year, I will use any opportunity I have to let you know, contrary to my character.
5. You made me this way and not a day goes by that I wouldn't love to berate you for it.
4. Please make me feel like I matter to you. You don't realize how little it takes for you to show me that I'm not wasting my time on you.
3. I'm fucking terrified of the next few years. Mostly because I don't know what's going to happen to us.
2. Get better social skills.
1. You don't know me at all.

The days are growing longer now, and soon I will sit on my porch-swing and watch the sun set. A book in hand, a cigarette, a lover. We'll watch, or I'll watch, our hands twisted like the tangles of thorns that grow wild on that land we went to. I'd like to go again, fish in a pond that doesn't belong to me just to see what my hook will bring up. We'll watch the days inch by the way lazy summer days do and we'll murmur things about 'love' like the time to leave this all behind will never come. We'll lay in the grass or in our beds with our heads together, the soft comfort of each other's hair between two skulls whose minds won't ever dwell on the same thing at moments like these. I'll always be wrapped up in the moment and the intoxication of it all, and he'll always be off somewhere rifling through countless thoughts that exist anywhere but the present moment. But that seems to be how men are. I'll grow my hair long and the sun will fade the spectrum of reds in it to pleasant golds and I'll go to school and work and come home to the pinks and purples and cicada songs of an evening in a Texas summer. This is the time for me to collect my memories, to start living a little more, to soak in the warmth of a time that is ending all too soon. I'm coming out of the loneliest winter, the bleakest spring, and when the days grow short again and the ochre tinge of autumn creeps in the horizon I want to be able to say that I lived the summer. I was a part its soft breezes, its glowing green days, part of the wide open bright blue of its sky. I floated by on its clouds and I danced along rocks in its creeks. I drove down a beautiful back-road with my windows down and my music up so I could feel alive again, so I could let the wind coming through my windows tear away at my old shell, a cleansing rush to remove all the stress and pain and hurt from seasons less kind.