*gloomy*

Goals for High School

• Become a Junior Marshal.

• Graduate as valedictorian or salutatorian.

• Get accepted to Duke and/or Wake.

• Wrack up those scholarships.

• Graduate with straight A’s.

• Graduate from Beta club.

• Breathe. Breathe.

• Successfully mentor the next business manager in yearbook. They’ve got big shoes to fill. Don’t forget your first year.

• Soften the social anxiety.

• Drink more water.

• Make a bomb senior recognition ad.

• Keep the squad together.

• Forgive the ones who hurt you.

• Accept the losses when they inevitably come,

• And move on.

• Lastly, keep the bangs.

• (They look good on you.)

Drabble #51 – I drink you in (and breathe you out)

I tugged all of my seams loose waiting. I became desperate. I dipped my feet in icy water like you used to when it got too hot. It gave me chills, but not the good kind. I miss when it was ninety degrees outside and you would still make me shiver. Like clouds eclipse over the sun in a concaving blue sky, you always had a way of extinguishing the red in my touch. Sometimes you don’t know something’s broken until you touch it, and feel the empty spaces shift around. Sometimes you don’t know something’s gold until you fit its mold and come away with marks that shimmer.

Drabble #50 – Hot, Top, Flight (Boy I’m out of sight)

My toes are curling against the worn, chapped leather of your soles and I’m wondering what roads you have traveled for them to be so weathered. I’m sure if I walked across the moon, I would feel you in the dust beneath me, breathe you in with the stars like little candied bursts painting the universe on my lungs. Well, I too have been plucked like the strings of a fiddle. I have been strum to the beat of someone else’s heart all along. And we're walking down this path and the treetops are howling and I’m thinking… maybe that’s not so bad.

Drabble #49 – 花様年華

The sun is shining, and maybe I’m just daydreaming but you always seem to have the most beautiful gold flecks glittering just under your skin, like someone crumbled up the moon and sprinkled it across your cheeks. I kind of like that—how you get under my skin and stay there, like you belong. There are two cars parked on the side of the road and you’re resting against one, singing that song I hate. There’s a wrench in your hand that you keep tossing up, letting it spin in the air and glint against the sun, like gold flecks.

"welcome to the monster plaza"

You cannot sleep tonight.

And as your mind, a blur, chases that imaginative, fickle mistress, a voice rings out,

Blessed be the Night! For we are but carcasses to the offering, and I am so thankful… Praise the light into which you were born! Kiss the soft curve of Night’s sweet promise. This is Night, and it is a good night.

If slumber is a gentle caress to the weary traveler, then this is a glimpse at death. And to share such a thing is to lovingly whisper, experience this sliver of eternity with me. I do not want to do it alone.

Give yourself to the slaughter, and it will give itself to you.

Pause, as though you are trying to find the meaning behind your words. Choke on the cadence in your throat.