[x]

numbit is two o' clock in the morning and i can't sleep. or i sleep too much. one of the two, and the pills make three. they stew and burn the back of my throat; the chemicals dissolve and form words.

the medical literature didn't say anything about that. or the numbness in my arms and legs. the tingling has crept up my right leg for the past week, weaving itself between my toes and nipping at the back of my knee. maybe it's a side effect, or maybe it's diabetes. or a blood clot. maybe my foot will need to be amputated, and i will have to hobble down the aisle for our wedding.

he coughs beside me, still fast asleep, and i touch one of his eyebr

throwing rocks.so i want to grow up and get a job and make happy, make money, make forget. i can't though, i'm too concerned with windchimes. i mean, fuck windchimes, right? i lie awake at night and listen to rigs on the rumble strip and the windchimes, (mostly the trucks), but damn, the tinkling is enough to keep me awake all night. but sometimes not, and then i dream i drown or maybe i marry a serial killer who props up corpses in rocking chairs or sometimes i dream about my ex-boyfriend's little sister because why not. then i wake up and it's taxes and credit cards and grades and people dying and shit.

and windchimes.

i don't know what is wrong with me

Thank You, Slater.I used to go to the nearby campus coffee shop in the early evenings, armed with a pen, a blank notebook, and writer's block. The sense of loneliness was unspoken but well accounted for.

I always shared coffee-counterspace with the same boy, who never smiled or talked and who had a penchant for bedhead and argyle sweaters. He liked to lean back on his stool, balancing precariously as he read novels, and I liked to pretend I wasn't watching him watch me. We coexisted in quiet companionship, thrived quietly under fluorescent lighting which sometimes caught his thick-framed glasses.

His novels changed while my notebook remained the same; his do

the perfect strangershe misses colin the most at night, when, waking from nightmares, her hand reaches out into the darkness for someone who is no longer there.

-

an unexpected message flares briefly on her screen, long enough for her heart to drop into her stomach in surprise—her ex-boyfriend's little sister's ex-boyfriend? sighing, she types a hello and strains her memory to recall what she knows of this boy from their one brief meeting. his name is aaron. tall. shaggy bed-head hair. sleepy hazel eyes. she lightly touches the keyboard, entertaining the notion that other people might feel as lonely at night as she does.

"tell me a secret," she types to

no one warned the little girlssometimes you will fall in love with
the hands or with the jawline, not with
the penis. watch out for boys whose eyes
are rougher than their voices. little girls
love hard and fast, and it is a lie to say
that words will never hurt you.

kissing in the rain is not romantic. it's cold
and wet, and your nipples will be like pebbles
digging into his skin. he'll wipe water from your
lashes, and, if he is polite, he'll pretend
not to notice his thumb blackened by mascara.
later as he sleeps you will watch his lips,
unable to feel anything except your hair
curled damply against your skin.

when you were young, sex was strange
an

waiting.he has been there for so long that the girl sometimes wonders if he is part of the beach, if the seaweed and shells fuse themselves to his ankles at night and grow over his browned legs like ivy. he is always still, so still, eyes focused on something distant in the waves that the girl can't quite see, though she tries. the man has a face like a creased paper bag and she finds herself wishing that she could see inside his head.

she watches him all day from the corner of her eye but no one ever joins him in his vigil. he is alone in casting shadows that grow longer and longer as the sun sets. the girl wonders what it is like to be so alone an

NPR three minute story submission She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. That low rumble had been Tom's temperamental engine; she was sure of it. The sound had tattooed itself on the inside of Anna's ears ages ago. Maybe he was sitting in the front seat of his car, trying to work up the courage to knock. Maybe his brows would knit together and his mouth would quirk and he would say, "I missed you, Sunshine," though he had never once called her by that nickname. Maybe she could apologize, and he would kiss the insides of her wrists, the back of her neck, her eyelids.
Yes, she could hear a car door opening. If she listened

The Cartographer's DaughterEvery night, he would fold her into his arms before she slept. Creases grew into her, turning brown with wear, and she loved them. When she woke up in the night, dreaming of darkness, he would take her to his desk and draw for her a map of her face, turning it into another world. Tracing the contours of her smile, he would scrawl a warning, "Here be monsters", whispering to her that she was a dragon when angry.

As she grew older, she populated his maps with creatures and peoples from the books she read, or her own creations. He taught her to draw, and to write with an old inkpen, in a cursive script her teacher could make neither head nor ta

It is not enough to writeIt is not enough to put the words on page
or to align them like cocaine lines
in neat rows of cornstalk paragraphs
fertile enough to bear reviews.

No. One must bleed each period,
each dot-dot-dot like morse code mythology
the Gallic cry at the end of the telegraph age.
It must become an ocean in you, these voices
swelling to tidal highs, and quiet - never.
You the new folkteller, urban prophet
who can call to battle anyone with eyes.
Ooze it like sap spilling down the bark.

It is not enough to write.
One must expire with each keystroke,
endlessly. It must come from the bowels.
Purge it as infection leaking out of skin;
lance

neverlandi'm giving myself ten minutes to grow up,
and with every minute that passes i am remembering
balloons and party hats and streamers
and the second star to the right,
straight on 'til morning.

every year i write myself a poem for my birthday,
but this year i think i'll write a poem about
peter pan and he'll die in the end and everyone
will be sad. i'll be the saddest though,
because there comes a point in your life
when you realize that you're not peter pan,
or wendy, or even a lost boy.

(how sad, i think, to be lost but not a lost boy.
it doesn't matter though, because neverland isn't
real and now look, i'm another year

fresh baguettes and used cigarettes ~a sestina~Scene setting: the Paris Hotel, as I fold
the corner of a page from my Brit Lit
textbook -- story of a boy with French
lips & a Japanese heart.  god, how I miss
his Spanish smile; each dimple, a match-
ing tattoo.   Twice,  he touched my hand

with his heaven-sewn skin.  On the other hand,
my bare body lay on a hotel bed.  Alone.  I fold
my mannequin skeleton like origami   to match
the paper cranes swimming in his Neon eyes, lit
like European stars—Oh, Nostalgia.  how I miss
getting Lost in those foreign eyes during French

class. &

for a friendThe sky is captured in his eyes, clear and blue.
The weather etched smile is honest.
The slender face says sixty; it lies.
It is that and half again.

Knobby hands sun baked and brown
peek out from ragged gloves.
They seem part of the old split locust post
where they are resting;
one of the row of soldiers
that keep watch on their field and its occupants.

The smile broadens as I approach.
I help stretch the wire.
His archaic dialect fills the road
with cows and snow and the yankees
that his grandparents saw marching.
The hours pass pulled by the mule
he plowed with as a boy.

He mentions his wife
they'd been marri

Runner's Death
   December twenty-fifth.
   Christmas time.
   In other words, the time of the year my parents put their everything's-alright smiles on and Anabelle fills the toilet with puke so that she can pretend to be filling her stomach with food when all our relatives come over--the time of the year we all pretend to be normal.
   It's also the anniversary of Runner's death.  But, like they always do, my family has covered the events of December twenty-fifth, one year ago, the same way they did the cracks in our living room wall--in a layer of brig

encephalitis.she asks, "is it weird to have one day where you really intensely, for no good reason, think of a dead person?"

-

the intercom was the one to announce that his body had finally given up. i don't remember what i was wearing that day, or how my hair looked, or what noises fell out of my mouth. death has dulled the sharp edges within me. this is what i do know: some people burst into tears and some people sat frozen and pale and some people simply got up and left the room.

"are you okay?" someone asked me, and i found that i was lying on the floor, though i couldn't understand how i'd gotten there. the overhead lights were buzzing and humming

i have you bookmarked -vii. Sometimes breakfast, lunch and dinner were like art; food was flung from each corner, creating a futile canvas on every wall. I played a scale of musical doors as they slammed one by one. I'm sure I broke a few vocal chords too. He was always right beside me, yet so far.

But we mingled together. When his hand gripped mine with his feathery touch, it seemed okay to pretend. Maybe my mind still needed to develop, needed watering. Or maybe together we just made feelings obsolete.

iv. And we did.

We sat on park benches blowing smoke kisses and watched movies, that only seemed good because everything else on TV was crap.

Bubblegum. Pot. G

Browse More Like This

Download File
HTML, 3.8 KB more ▶

More from ~estallidos

heart crossed.

"who's that kid?" i ask, pointing at the boy whose hair cannot decide if it is red or gold. he holds a basketball in his small hands, bouncing it, once, twice, before putting it through the hoop in a perfect arc.

"james," the counselor responds, and leans closer. "he's a foster kid, you know."

i don't know.

the boy turns at that moment and catches me watching him. unthinkingly i form my thumbs and index fingers into a heart and flash it at him. he nods to his teammates and leaves the court, climbing the bleachers to where i sit.

"did you see my shot?" he asks.

"yes." pause. "i'm kelsey."

"i know," he says, and runs back to his game.

at

march 24th, 2008.there is a chinese proverb that says your teeth will fall out if you tell lies.

i used to always dream my teeth would crumble from my mouth and lay glittering on the street like coins. i used to dream that the slightest touch jarred them loose, knocked them from my jaw leaving only swells of broken tissue behind. i used to dream of rivulets of blood streaming from the corners of my mouth, of thirty two pieces of myself lying naked on the ground, thirty two tooth fairies that would never come. i used to dream of screaming.

"you know," said my psychology TA, "to dream of losing one's teeth is very common. it typically means that you're concer

the soccer game.the thing is, i need
the deer to mean something.

-

i go to the soccer game and smile
and nod while something furious
inside of me is screaming.
a deer appears while the sun
is setting and it's like a scene
from a movie: green grass and gold rays
that spread out, tingeing our feet
with one last bit of wednesday.
everyone watches the deer and makes
noises of appreciation and i look
around and i think to myself
"okay, this is it, i am happy."

-

the deer is watching me and i try
to decide if it's a metaphor.
i want the deer to be death, see,
to represent fucking or blacking
out or apathy or loneliness.

someone does something

View Gallery

Featured in Groups:

#HumanConditions

#Love-Literature
For The Love Of Literature!

#The-Black-Hole

Details

Submitted: February 27, 2012
File Size: 3.8 KB

Link

Thumb

Statistics

Comments: 391
Favourites: 772 [who?]
Views: 11,706 (5 today)
Downloads: 608 (0 today)

[x]

Riding Bikes

by ~estallidos, Feb 27, 2012, 1:28:29 PM
Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Biography & Memoir / Stories & Vignettes

Going off medication is like riding a bike.

The doctor holds tight to my handlebars and lowers my dosage. The training wheels are off, and oh hey, look at me go! It's like flying but not, and I'm doing so well but then there's a horrible accident and I'm somehow upside down at the bottom of the sea with both wheels still spinning.

"Help," I say, and my doctor pats my head, puts a band-aid on my knee, and writes a note on my chart.

I've balanced by myself for months at a time, but I always end up hitting a fucking tree or falling off a cliff or something equally catastrophic because I am a catastrophic person. Except that is an exaggeration. I am an exaggeration.

I like to compare mental illnesses to mundane physical activities. Also you should know that I am sick but trying to get better.

Sometimes I relapse and then write poems about it.

It's not even the kind of sick where people bring you soup in bed and soothe your fevered brow. It's the kind of sick where I'm late to work because I have to unplug every appliance, double check that they are unplugged, and then push against the locked door twenty-one times while the cat next door gives me the side eye. It's the kind of sick that doesn't go away after some orange juice and ibuprofen.

Mostly it's the kind of sick where my brain is drunk and high and lost a fight at some bar and is maybe suicidal and likes to count things.

Okay, see, the other day I cut off my car and then restarted it for three minutes and thirteen seconds. Some man walked past and craned his neck to see what I was doing, and I waved my hand at him like hello, don't mind me, this is perfectly normal except for the part where it isn't normal at all, and I'm very sorry, also please don't crane your neck like that because it looks very uncomfortable.

So then I waited until he was out of sight and restarted my car again for good measure, because fuck everything.

It's not that I am forgetful. I know I locked the door. I know I put the car in park. I know my house won't catch fire and burn down if I leave my laptop on the bed. So why do I always feel like I am going to throw up if I don't check and count, count and check?

Secretly I wish I were a tree, because trees can't get obsessive compulsive disorder.

The other day I was babysitting (again) because I relate to children better than I do people my own age. I drew a picture of a tree for the little girl. Then she showed me her picture, which was a page full of neon scribbles.

"Can you tell me about your drawing?" I asked. She looked me in the eye and said that she was pretending that she had a mental disorder when she drew it, which is why it looked crazy.

"Having a mental disorder doesn't necessarily mean you're crazy," I said.

"Yes it does," she said. "Also could you please not use up my blue marker?"

After we finished drawing she asked if we could ride bikes, and I said no because I was writing these words in my head and couldn't tell if I was going crazy or not, like maybe my life had just become one giant joke. We baked muffins instead, and even after she fell asleep I kept going into the kitchen to make sure that I really had cut the oven off.

I had, I knew I had. It didn't matter, though.

I think it's time to go back on medication, because even though they say that once you learn to ride a bike you'll never forget, I've forgotten. Or maybe I never learned in the first place, because I was too busy locking and unlocking my door and drawing pictures of trees.

I just feel like I should be able to ride the bike by now.

Riding Bikesby ~estallidos

Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Biography & Memoir / Stories & Vignettes

a companion piece to "throwing rocks" which can be found here: [link]

-

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-03-21

Riding Bikes is a short, honest piece of nonfiction by ~estallidos. ( Suggested by ~starlight879 and Featured by $wreckling )

~~mad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

~MysticalAngel101 Sep 3, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

~estallidos Sep 4, 2012 Professional Writer

~109-0415 May 30, 2012 Writer

I went off the medication and found out I was somewhat sane. Sometimes it's rather disappointing.

That's kind of the opposite of this piece though.

~ipunchbabies May 28, 2012

I keep your deviations in my box now, for easier access. After four years of being "well" I got sick again. I had to go to the hospital and I just got out a few days ago. Lets stay strong together. <3

~Zorlia May 4, 2012

_{when the pills are gone you think you're fine but everyone else doesn't and threatens to send you away
but they never send you away, they just like to threaten you. if they threaten you maybe it will make you stop. and the doctor says, you need to want to get better if you're gonna get better.
who gives a fuck about being better.

thank you for making me feel normal, i love your poems+stories and how you blend them into one beautiful mess! never stop writing, you have true talent and i wish i could make people feel such potent emotion like you do so effortlessly.}

~estallidos May 4, 2012 Professional Writer

i'm just glad that there are other people out there who know what i feel.

<3

~FriendsWithSpiders May 4, 2012 Hobbyist Traditional Artist

Oh wow this is powerful. I have OCD to a much lesser extent (in that I'm able to just ignore my compulsions now), but when I was younger I had to do these tiny, insignificant rituals or else the fact that I hadn't would tug and nag at the back of my mind until I did it. I really hope you finally learn how to ride that bike.

~estallidos May 4, 2012 Professional Writer

fingers crossed <3

~Reanimated4now Apr 28, 2012 Professional General Artist

but if you are a tree then everybody you know,

leaves.

and your legs

bark.

rough rough rough, rouf.

~xPinkTuxToTheProm Apr 16, 2012 Hobbyist Photographer

unbelievable.
as a person coming from a struggle with mental illness, (not obsessive compulsive disorder, but a tangled web of suicidal depression and anxiety) I know the road is definitely not an easy one.
I'm on medication now myself, and it seems to be working very well (knock on wood). I know these things aren't usually permanent first or second or thirtieth try, but all we have is tries, I guess.
this existence can be a lot more difficult with these sorts of strategies in life's playing field coming into fruition, but we definitely find our ways to get by.
I'm incredibly inspired by your piece here, and the way you tell a story and still write stunning poetry all at once and meld it together seamlessly.
all in all, thank you so much for writing this. I'm sorry for your experiences, but you are very brave and if it helps, this is actually very much a comfort to at least one person out there. it was like my eyes widened in shock as some words came out that I could never say.
thank you.

More from ~estallidos

Featured in Groups:

Details

Statistics

Riding Bikes

Riding Bikesby ~estallidos

Daily Deviation

The Journal Portal

Polls

What is your preferred drawing software?

deviantART [dee·vee·un'nt·ART]

Keep in Touch!

Deviousness

Add Media

Style