almost

The truth is

happiness feels chemical and sadness feels dull, and the in-betweens feel like a doctor’s waiting room. The high is a five hundred dollar shopping spree and the low is a bathtub of quickly cooling soapy water that stings my eyes. If you asked me who my first love was I couldn’t tell you, because every one feels like the first and they all feel the same, love is the same wherever you feel it. Friends are like limbs. Or skin cells. Sometimes I look at my face and imagine the skin to be gone, just cartilage and bone and fat deposits and whatever else is under there, because it’s all there all the time after all. Friends are like trampolines. Lovers are like barbecues. I’ve always wanted to have a reoccurring dream, like they do in movies, and be a tortured but creative individual, waking in the night and calling their ex to say sorry about a thing that happened in the past that the latter has probably forgotten and the former will never forget. Regret. Six years have passed, can you believe it? I’m in love with the way skin looks in moonlight, pale and almost blue, almost two dimensional, almost real, almost mine. The truth is, I don’t really know how to be a real person, how to look after a house, how to save money or plan for the future or see things from a greater perspective than the magnified importance I give to those issues so small in hindsight but so intoxicatingly large in the present. Sometimes I feel trapped in a fleeting moment that was never designed to linger, but something within me has slammed down the breaks and I hover in that moment for eternity, or so it feels, until I turn everything rotten. I’m trapped in a late September morning, holding my shoes, dusty soles skipping cracks in the pavement thinking about sadness and being saddened by thinking, falling in love again and not wanting to because resisting is safer, leaving is easier. The truth is I don’t know how to turn any of this into poetry.