I'm at home tonight listening to the muted thunder outside my window and wishing it wasn't always so hot in my room. 2 fans and the A/C running and I wake up sweating in the middle of the night.

I have daydreams of a tiny house with the bare minimums, painted a sunny yellow in a kitchen full of wildflowers. Daisies, buttercups, blubonnets, Indian paintbrushes. The kitchen is spring. The den and the hearth are heavy colors dark and warm like harvest foods and soil. The den is winter. The bedroom is inviting and tragically beautiful, old furniture I have given a home and junk made into beautiful things on the walls. A four-poster squats in a corner draped in ochre sheers. The bedroom is autumn. The porch is open and faces west and the sunset and it absorbs the luscious green glow of summer's dusk. The porch is summer.

I also wonder a lot lately about human behaviors. In particular the urge to hold things that hurt us. Not just in a literal sense, but in an emotional sense as well. We seem to have a strange incapacity to move on from things and people and places that bring us that bittersweet melancholy feeling. I don't know why we do this or for what purpose, but I still wonder. And I'd like to stop doing it if I could.

She sits alone, kneeling on a richly stained oak floor. She is facing a mirror, large and round with scalloped and curving details. The mirror hangs in the air silently floating, small threads of glittering tendrils wrapping around it and in every crevice.

Brushing the surface of the floor with her right hand, she pulls a large knife from it. The blade is razor sharp and from within it, a humming metallic buzz whispers. Without ever taking her eyes off her reflection, she grabs a handful of dry and tangled red hair in her left hand. Slowly she raises the knife to the hair and sends it slicing through each strand as if it were made of water. No resistance. She relishes every infinitesimal snap as the follicles of every handful are severed, never taking her eyes from those in her reflection.

When she is through, she is surrounded by the remnants of her hair. A circle of red. She holds up her right hand and where there once was a knife, there now sits a flat circular rock. She breaks her gaze with the mirror to look at the stone. She has a memory of choosing it for a purpose. She remembers the first time she saw it, underneath the small corpse of a bird with yellow and grey feathers. No eyes. She remembered that he'd had no eyes. She had taken the piece of earth from beneath him and thanked him, though she didn't know why. It seemed appropriate at the time.

Shifting from her memory into the present, her eyes return to her reflection. Her shoddy hair, unruly and uneven, and the eyes that stared back into hers so diligently in spite of their dark and heavy lids. A moment or two passes and her eyes begin to lose focus staring through the mirror, seeing but not seeing.

A sharp and unwelcome music pierces the silence and rips its way into my dream.

Jason Reeves 'just wants to write me in a song' at 5:45 AM.

And then I woke up.

The clock is counting down the fifteen minutes until a production meeting for the year's first show. I'm assistant costume designing with another girl. Calling her Hellen would be apropos.

I should be excited about the beginning of my senior year in college, but I'm not. At some point, maybe I was. Maybe I wanted to come back to this obnoxious blue and green room, but a thousand reasons discourage me.

I've been dreaming of blue and yellow flags, long, and forked like the tongues of snakes. They rise on steel flagpoles from a shallow pool of the brightest aquamarine in the middle of a barren and dying pasture under a cold sky. I watch them from a very tall wooden house, an aging structure with whispers of the Tudor fashion in the remaining details. I am perched on the unstable railing of the balcony and the wood bends and groans under the pressure. I'm not afraid of falling.

A fumbled and messy ritual, a long and peaceful silence, the vibration of a phone, the slam of a door and lumbering footsteps across the floor. This is not where I want to be.

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.

Authorial Intent

I swear I saw it. It was there all of a day, in a momentary flash of brilliance the memory came back because of those words. It pinched me, called me to its attention and lingered in my mind. When I'm around you, its there. This tiny foolish thought that persists and tells me what I want and what I don't. This thought doesn't know me or my desires yet it tugs and pulls me toward something that ultimately would destroy me and everything good I have come to surround myself with. To repeat a mistake like this thought at all would be unacceptable.

But that doesn't change the fact that it's there and it knows I want to follow.

Then I think, maybe the thought wasn't meant for me at all. Was it not? Maybe I was reading in between lines that were not mine. Maybe; that would certainly make life easier.

A night out with friends. Well, a night. Out. Not a "Night Out".
Surviving the Circle. Driving in circles in the Circle.
Coffee at a table much too big for the two of us.
That's a bit like you and I, really. Too much between and not really enough at the same time. You're fun though, I enjoyed actually talking to you again. And I can be direct with this since you're the only one that reads this thing.
Taco C has horrible margaritas. The kind you can't really feel until you stand up...and even then, the buzz just whizzes by and leaves you with the faint impression that maybe at some point, you could've been tipsy...

School. Responsibility. Planning. Life.
It all catches up to you.

I think about what I want to do all the time, what I want to be/do with my life...and it isn't a scary thought process until I talk to someone else about it. It is then that I realize how unprepared, how unsure I am. That's an unsettling thought: instability. Even the parts of my life that feel fairly solid are all of a sudden shaky. Weird how the thought of growing up rattles everything else so much. Ugh. Growing up.

Bored with this. It's almost four in the morning....why am I still awake?
Oh yeah. That whole coffee thing.