so excited to be working on a dance piece about trauma and gender featuring sounds from Ixixán and I Am a Spiral by the amazing eskimeaux. body movement is incredible and terrifying art.

ever long daze

this blog is my blog's best friend, and I took this lil portrait of its owner

brooklyn, pdx • color film

brooklyn and portland • december 2013 - january 2014

processed with help and guidance from lori rodriguez at ever long daze

Blue

skim the surface, find the feeling

there's enough ocean in me

full of water over under

i don't care about the sea

you're a buoy and a moor

you're an anchor and an oar

pull you inside me

i need wind behind me

leave you in the sea

storm and stars, black warnings

port and hearth, heart's warming

drift apart

go home

go home

drift apart

skipping heart, fleeing sinking

slick the stone, felt and flying

leave you in the sea

i need wind behind me

pull you inside of me

i need wind behind me

you're an anchor and an oar

you're a buoy and a moor

i don't care about the sea

there's enough ocean in me

pull you inside of me

i need wind behind me

Pan

A rabbit noses silently among the grasses of the pioneer
cemetery, its black and tan hide softening into shadows at the base
of a lone pine. It is calm for a feral animal.

Having lived with rabbits, Pan knows from the build that it is
female. She is a young creature.

Pan is worried that she is lost.

Pan approaches the animal softly, slowly.
The rabbit looks Pan directly in the eye.

yours are the only ears

susannah. this just stopped my heart.

http://yoursaretheonlyears.bandcamp.com/

we were just children 
holding hands to hang on 
& our bodies are destructive 
but isolation 
feels wrong 
although our room is a closet 
we feel like we belong 

but i am not yours 
& you are not mine 
i'm sorry i forget that sometimes 

i can feel your guilt 
fill your temper 
i know that we both can 
persuade the other 
but when you blow too hard 
i become nothing 
but the silence is a scar 
from before i heard you sing 

but i am not yours 
& you are not mine 
i'm sorry i forget that sometimes 

i'll put away my last breath 
before you come home 
& if it's not too late i'll tell you 
that i'm happy & you're not alone

SELECTIONS FROM AN UNFINISHED STORY BY LAGO LUCIA -- by Jack Ferencz

jack @ selfienation made this work from my piece [in progress]. thank you jack!!

________________________________________________________________

selected from lago lucia's blog, sorted alphabetically

'accessible but hidden'

'almost mechanically'

'arcing'

'belly'

'blood swims'

'blurry-eyed'

'brown ooze'

'calluses'

'camouflages'

'clenched'

'conifers'

'dangling filaments'

'dark'

'destroyed spider'

'drunk'

'felt'

'fuck'

'idly'

'maze'

'nesting material'

'orchard'

'oversize'

'panicking'

'pear trees'

'powerful adulthood'

'rattle'

'reddish'

'red-framed'

'scabs'

'scooped'

'scrabbling'

'shimmies'

'shiny'

'shit'

'small trench'

'successfully leap'

'sure'

'sweat'

'tacky mixture'

'tarpaper'

'tensile'

'terrarium'

'time wasted'

'tincture'

'they hope'

'thick curtains'

'unmarked'

'unusually noisy'

'wads'

I've been working on a compilation of the greats from the last 7 years of my work, tentatively titled "mystery collection." it's been coming together with the enormous sartorial help of jack ferencz at selfienation. i'm excited to share it with you all! traffic has gone up kind of a crazy amount in the last month, which feels extremely great. i feel like i owe this to jack and also our web team at the epoch, who have been making sure that a rising tide lifts all boats. it feels good to be here <3

lago

Lost like a Snakeskin in High Grass: Queerness, Trauma, and Accountability

tw: sexual assault

When I opened my laptop to start this piece, "Where is My Mind?" by the Pixies started playing in the bar I am writing at in Portland, OR. Coincidence, sadness, and the importance of place all mark the intersection of my queerness and my mental health, so this feels like an incredibly fitting start. Appropriately enough, since my task in this essay is looking back at myself, I was at the Gemini Lounge. 

I think I've felt crazy for as long as I've felt queer and sexual. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I began having intense dreams and hallucinations about my missing penis, fucking someone who had tits and a cock, losing my own breasts, and being/becoming a boy. I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror. During this period of time I vividly remember staring at anonymous, often elderly men and women on the subway and feeling so emotionally dead that I could be attracted to anyone. I felt so depressed and scared, by some of these feelings but mostly in general, that I entered counseling. I started taking Zoloft and was put on a high-ethisterone birth control (an early testosterone analog) because my cycle was extremely irregular and infrequent. I had my first genital lesion as a result of Beçet's syndrome, my autoimmune disorder. I frequently vocalized feeling bad, wrong, and incomplete as a girl or with a "girl" body.

However I was also definitely confused and secretive about my sexuality. Unfortunately for me, there was nobody around to hear and respond to my confusion in a way that helped me make sense of those feelings. I was obsessed with the L word (with Shane), obsessed with my best friend Violet [name has been changed], who I fell in love with, obsessed with myself and with the power that older androgynous women and men around me seemed to hold. It was a confusing time during which I generally left decisions about my identity to the people who encountered me.

I felt this vague about myself in the next year, 2007, as well. Beginning around June I started hanging out exclusively with a group of 20 year old straight men and Violet. Drawn there because Violet was being pursued by a few of them, I was the youngest person in the group. I realized quickly that if I was to hold my own with everyone I had perform straight and vulnerable. And so began one of many processes of sublimation, repression, and confusion of myself. I let my hair grow even longer than before. I did a lot of things I thought a good "bad" girl would do to get attention. And, during it all, I was even more deeply infatuated with Violet. Even at the time, I knew I was performing for these boys because I wanted to be near her. I wanted her to see me as they would if I pleased them: as worthy of attention.

And so, over that summer, I gave up my dream of being or passing as a boy. I hid in a straight community so that I could be near the girl I loved, and along they way I repeatedly either dipped my toe into or was dragged down by the undertow of experimenting with a straight identity.

I can say that my first experience of being "out" as queer -- of outing myself -- came after I was sexually assaulted by a man at the end of that summer. At the time of my assault I was almost seventeen, and the perpetrator was the first anonymous straight man I attempted to pick up as (in my mind at the time) a cis girl. I noticed a boy who had graduated from my high school, age 20 or so, in the same subway car as me and invited him to a house party. I often think about what my life would be like absent that moment of horror and horrible luck; if I hadn't been brave enough to pick up a near stranger on the subway, and if he hadn't decided to rape me.

This assault, which came after my attempt to hack it as a cis woman, suddenly inverted of all my attempts to survive in the straight world. Though I wouldn't realize it for many years, being assaulted after my first confident sexual move as a "woman" exploded the effectiveness of presenting or being female as a strategy for survival in my mind. Flaunting my femininity was suddenly dangerous, and shortly after my assault I shaved my head with the help of my one out lesbian friend. In that moment I gave up worrying about straight male reactions towards my own presentation because I felt like I would never want to be touched by a boy again. In other words, I felt I had nothing to lose by looking gay.

It was a genuine surprise to me when I started feeling interested in a male friend a few weeks later. When he and I started seeing each other the friend who shaved my head accused me of being a faker. Somewhat of a prince in our scene, she used her own social capital to police my presentation, remarking after I ran into her at a show that it was too bad I wasn't actually gay, because with my short hair I finally looked like someone she'd want to fuck. This is the place where the narrative of my assault, my feelings about gender and sexuality, and my experience of what I would later come to call mental illness first coalesced--outside the Knitting Factory in NYC, being harassed for somehow inauthentically performing my own queerness.

Her jab confused me. It was no secret that in 2006 I'd fallen frighteningly in love with Violet, that she'd stopped talking to me in part because of it, and that we'd had sex a few times. I think that Violet stopped speaking to me then, and even feared me, because I wanted to be her. Or perhaps more accurately, I wanted to be what I thought she was -- someone capable of living outside of gender, outside of the oppression and power of the binary, and of getting away with it.

Despite having no exposure to a self-proclaimed queer community, both Violet and I chafed at the social expectations levied upon us as women. The difference between me and Violet was that -- in my eyes at least -- she had the kind of body and the kind of confidence that could carry androgeny, whereas I did not. She was able to move fluidly between male and female worlds and aesthetics, but especially as her shorter, younger, and heavier sidekick I felt exiled to inexorably failing at being female. Since I was in love with her, and specially if I had failed at being a boy as well, how could I not be a gay woman?

My infatuation spiked again after a reunion in the early months of 2007, but not too long after I was assaulted Violet insisted on another period of separation from me. Strangely, at the time of our falling out in 2007 the pain of failing to mirror the person I was in love with (and, in my mind, losing their love as a result) felt fresher than what I conceptualized at the time as a negative and painful one night stand. In many ways, separating from Violet was actually emotionally harder than surviving rape. On a social level, being assaulted seemed to take away a power I'd been toying with, but unsure of; losing Violet felt like forever being cut off from the source of my identity.

What I didn't count on in my process of self-care and surviving was the extent to which my brain was affected by my rapist's attack. In the six months that followed I would become increasingly uncritical about the straightness of my appearance, but this confidence was accompanied by an accelerated descent into another psychological world, one which I now recognize as being marked by persistent and severe dissociation. My memories of that time feel underwater, hazy, and like they're saved in a different file than all the others in my brain. I was doing a lot of drugs in the winter of 2007, but I also remember distinctly and consistently feeling as though a part of me was lost. I felt like a new, ruined person, capable of anything and nothing. That was the first time I started actively seeking out self-identifying queer people as sexual partners.

∞

I'm 23 now. In the last seven years I've spent a huge amount of time working on surviving my assault and managing the PTSD it left me with. In my freshman and sophomore years of college I experienced my first PTSD symptoms, and they were accompanied by a wild resurgence of femme and female pride. For the first time in my life I had something in common with a lot of other women and girls: I had been sexually violated. I made art around this, organized around it, and constructed a spirituality based upon it. I began identifying as a feminist. I spoke the birth monologue when my college's feminist student union performed the Vagina Monologues.

But, slowly, queerness came back again. It took me almost three more years to understand, finally, that I could be a queer, genderqueer survivor of sexual assault. That my assault didn't mark me as woman. My body, my mental health, and my experience of gender had been so shaped by an instance of gendered sexual violence that I didn't stop feeling like a(n increasingly uncomfortably failing) girl until I accepted and acknowledged how huge a role having sexual trauma played in my self-identification as female. Now that I know definitively that I don't have to be female to have a legitimate experience as a survivor of assault, I feel much, much more able to articulate my identity and my needs.

The arc of my story could end here, but I keep coming back to the year before my assault, 2006: when I first started feeling queer and also when I first started feeling like something was wrong with me. I have asked myself what happened to make me feel so depressed countless times.

I believe that part of it was being raised with an anemic attitude towards the discussion of personal boundaries. My parents didn't inquire about my sex life or my gender; they also didn't inquire about my reaction to the increasingly scary emotional outbursts of my little brother, the person in my family whose problems are easiest to see. In my home during the middle of high school, I felt like plastic bag in a windstorm: neglibigle, manipulable, disappearable. I felt like it didn't matter where I landed, who used me for what, or if I ended up carrying dogshit or diamonds inside me. My parents were too worried about dumbing down the wind. I was openly in love with Violet, dressing like a boy, and coming downstairs from my room with hickies on my neck from another girl, and my parents said nothing. We only talked about my sexuality when a different friend punched me in the face. My parents asked me if I was dating her. We had one conversation that I can remember about my decision to enter therapy, and it ended once they ascertained I wasn't an immediate threat to myself.

In my current work around mental health, I'm concerned that because of this neglect and the neglect inherent in my assault, I tacitly permit myself to disrespect the boundaries of other queer people. Though I've positively identified as a survivor and a feminist for years, I've had some friends tell me that my behavior in certain spaces fits a worrying pattern. They see that I enter scenarios where I feel disempowered by other queer friends, and react by attempting to dominate and disempower them.

I can't leave this part of the story out. I own the fact that my assault, my confusion about my gender, my neglect: these do not excuse ways in which I am negligent, harmful, and confusing. I am extremely grateful to my community for pointing out this behavior because, at this point in my life especially, I yearn to be recognized as a whole, healthy, and (most importantly) safe person. I can't be that until I know who I am; until I know that I am. This is the first time I've had a queer community to respond to my failures, my bad decisions, my unaccountability, my attempts to hide the dark parts of me. Thank you for your consenting contributions to my process of integration as an out, proud genderqueer person who hopes to be cusping on sane.

So Yr Born on the Cusp

"So you're born on the cusp / or it's a run of bad luck / yeah it's bigger than us / it's bigger than love / it's underhanded / and you never feel it... so you never look back / yeah you never look back."

The American Analog Set's Born on the Cusp, a breathy song about love lost to bad stars, has stuck with me for years. I always want to put it on mixtapes for people to remind them of me, but then quickly remember that the song is actually about walking away from a cusp-born sweetheart who is just too confused and fucked to get their shit together and pick a self--or a someone--to stick with. It's sad, but I could listen forever.

As a tween and a teenager my confusion about being born on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius was much sharper than the ambivalence expressed by AAS' drizzly aesthetic. My feelings about astrology were marked by perpetual crisis best characterized by the question: "am I or aren't I?", and much of my life being a "scorpittarius" -- born on the cusp of revolution -- was a turbulent experience. It was scary to feel like I wasn't placed in any order; like I could swing both ways but never come to rest in either.

I would tell people that I was technically a Sagittarius, but that it was close enough to be a coin toss as to what I really was. This flexibility provided a mutable security for me for a while, but as soon as I hit puberty I longed to be secure in the knowledge of myself as being only, purely, and truly a Scorpio.

The sexual politics of middle school were definitely where my obsession with the "status" of my sign began. Now that I know more about astrology feeling secure as a Scorpio sounds like an oxymoron, but as a naive kiddo the Scorpio ethos oozed cool. I resented my four-hours-shy birthtime (yes, I looked it up) almost as much as the dowdy sportswear and precautions against gossiping too loudly that were leveled weekly at Saggitarians who read Teen Vogue in the early 00's.
I wanted to be sexy!

By 12 I recognized (like many of my peers) that sex appeal is power. I pined for the watery mystery and turgid hotness of the Scorpio thing. I wanted that vibe, really badly. So I just told everybody I was one. After all, a couple of magazines did say that I squeaked in on the last day. It was weird to realize that I could lie about something so (seemingly)significant to my identity and get away with it. Trying to suss out the cusp thing was probably one of my earliest attempts at both drag and self-deception.

While I did care about astrology in middle school, I was more interested in it for fashion than philosophy; my either/or anxiety surrounding astrology-as-ontology really ramped up in high school. I became best friends with a really intense Scorpio I from Upstate New York and the Lower East Side, and a lot of our relationship was based on what she and I saw as our shared Scorpio pathos and displacement. Of course half the time I was freaking out about being an impostor, but for a while I managed to channel this anxiety by learning as much as I could about Scorpio and scorpions in order to effectively cross over to the water side of my hybrid existence. Did you know that scorpions fuck for 24 hours, glow under UV radiation, and taste and smell with six nerve bundles that grow out of their stomachs? Or that Scorpio actually has three manifestations--scorpion, serpent, and eagle--that represent the sign's often ignored narrative of transcendence?

More than anything Scorpio seemed to be an almost Nietzschean sign: dark as fuck but hell-bent on self-improvement no matter (and here's the unfortunate Scorpio cross to bear) how self-destructive the means might be. As someone who was pretty much obsessed with the idea of the übermensch in high school, it's not surprising that this sign was my golden ideal. So I worked really hard (no matter the means) at perfecting what I saw as the perfect Scorpio persona: critical, dramatic, scathing, Machiavellian, and uncompromising. Fortunately I didn't know anything about Ayn Rand yet.
For the most part my hardball Scorpio self was sustainable, except that I noticed myself becoming less and less happy the more I tried to avoid what I characterized as, well, happiness; without totally realizing it, I had linked feeling satisfied firmly with a Sagittarius point of view. So, for a couple years at least, I stuck with the hard road of the Scorpio process. I made and lost a lot of friends.

Looking back, I think my troubled experience with cuspiness acted as a placeholder for deeper anxieties and questions I had about how the outer world shaped and marked me as a human being. My concern about which sign I was mirrored questions I was starting to ask concerning deeper facets of my identity. As I grew I started to wonder: had something really bad happened to me in childhood or not? If so, what the f was it? Did I have depression or anxiety? Could I have both? Was I gay or straight; what even the fuck was up with bisexuality? At the time of my preoccupation, the answers to these questions (that I liked) all seemed to be given explanation with a Scorpio personality. As a Scorpio I could be unhappy, but ok. It seemed like a Sagittarius identity came with the necessary caveat of total(ly embarrassing) self-confidence.

Being a cusp sign is something that only began to sit well with me once I learned more about how brains--and mine in particular--grow and develop. In college I learned that trauma can cause brains to literally split into two--albeit very differently sized--areas of function: one where trauma is stored on ice, and one where normal brain function still occurs. It's like staying in a hotel that you realize, after one too many wrong turns late at night, has a huge secret meatlocker full of creepy stuff that might not be as frozen--or trapped--as you think. In other words, when something really bad happens to you it's pretty normal to feel like you're constantly trying to solve a huge and high-stakes mystery about what's actually inside you. For me, trying to understand my sign often pointed to this process.

However, I don't want to reduce the essence of my feelings and attitudes towards astrology to surviving trauma. Getting over the Scorpio thing definitely did engage and involve something beyond how coming to know and accept that experience changed me. Returning to my fire roots was as much a choice as alienating myself from them. As I grew up, I came to see tremendous value in the flames that used to just turn my murky waters into steam. Instead of ruthlessly discomforting myself in a patriarchal and masochistic attempt at personal growth, these days I put a lot more stock in sticking my nose in the wind and running with the things that excite me. I like striving to meet the goal of being embarrassingly self-confident. I like knowing that being all brash and Jovian and loud has helped tremendously my ability to advocate for myself. I did this work on my own, but it's cool to be able to accept and identify with a sign that advocates for the outward, enthusiastic, unselfconscious and unfettered devotion to the things we love.

Plus, it's nice to just be half-something and not have to change or worry about it. I'm part beast, and it feels good to have heat under my hooves again.

[in progress]

A white unmarked car pulls up to their porch at 8:55 am. Juniper is fast asleep in their bedroom upstairs, but something in their body senses this arrival. Tensile, they stretch and open their eyes. Blackout shades roll tersely over their windows, the beige felt tracking a badlands through their otherwise colorful room. The breaks of the car sigh a little.

Blurry-eyed, Juniper sits up, awakening more fully from a dream of flying, of reckless and saucy aerial feats that cause everyone to fall in love with them. The secret of the dream had been to only attempt flight when they were far from any sort of ledge. This strikes Juniper as wisdom -- the idea not to attempt greatness unless one is safe from danger -- and their hazel eyes cross a little as Juniper's hands rub in small ovals. Idly Juniper think of their partner Jacob's eyes, glad to be spared of an astigmatism.

As the car's engine idles and then cuts out Juniper's squirrel, Mullein, stirs in her terrarium. Juniper found Mullein and her brother on the sidewalk six months ago at the base of a large cedar tree in outside of their favorite book store in Seattle. The city is famous for its large conifers, and this tree was no exception. Juniper had carefully scooped up the babies she'd found crumpled in the tree's shadow and carried them home, cradled in a scarf. Juniper fed them on kitten formula until the sixth week, when Brother didn't make it and Mullein was ready to transition to solid food.

The first night home it seemed like Mullein was going to lose her pulse at any moment, but Brother curled his small and hairless body around her, a gesture that ended up carrying them both through the night. Now when it is time to sleep Juniper has to keep Mullein in a 20-gallon fish tank with a wire top, but sometimes in the middle of the night Juniper will rise and curl their right wrist and arm around Mullein's reddish back, mimicking the hold that once saved her life. Juniper hopes that their witness to this extraordinary moment of sibling support -- so unheard of in Juniper's experience -- will allow them enough insight into Mullein's needs to nurture the young squirrel to powerful adulthood.

Juniper has trained Mullein not to chew or rattle the lid of her terrarium, but this morning she is unusually noisy. The sound of Mullein scrabbling around in her cage almost masks the persistent but quiet knocking coming from the front porch. Hearing this, a light runs up Juniper's spine like a sparkler, and they walk softly and unsteadily to the window to lift the shade.

This is when Juniper sees the car.
Oh god, they think. Oh no. No. No no no nono.

Their mind crackles out in a silence of static, and in an elegant arcing lunge they grab Mullein in one hand and an armful of clothes in the other. Finding a small orange daypack with flimsy waist straps, Juniper stuffs the clothes and Mullein into the inside pouch, pulling the drawstring shut and buckling the bag's cloth lid. Pulling on shoes without untying the laces, Juniper catches a glimpse of themself in a red-framed mirror, of the curved arch of their back and their brown hair spinning wildly around their face like a swing carousel.

Shit.This is not going to work. I'll look way too much like a girl to them. This is who they'll expect me to be. I can't let myself become a women to them--or to me. Much less to me.

There is time for this. Almost mechanically, Juniper gathers half of their hair in a fist above their left ear and stands in front of the red-framed mirror. Reaching with their other hand for the pair of scissors they always keep accessible but hidden, Juniper works the blades through their clenched hank of hair, a five-year-old trying to shear a Barbie doll. Hair comes tumbling down around their shoulders in thick curtains, pooling on the ground and hanging off the elbows of their sweater like [the dangling filaments of] a destroyed spiderweb. This is how Juniper feels -- how they would feel if they were not panicking. Like a destroyed spider. Like a beaver whose dam has been blown up.

Juniper reaches under their extended left hand to cut off the other side of their hair. They stuff these wads into their pack, realizing that too much left behind might look suspicious.
Besides, Mullein will appreciate the nesting material.

After quietly shutting the door to their bedroom, Juniper shimmies out the eastern window of their apartment. Juniper's house is a maze of hallways, an old square Victorian converted into apartments during the 1960s, and the side windows on Juniper's floor lead to a balcony with a drainpipe that is sturdy and close enough to the ledge for climbing. Juniper often watches moonrises and summer meteor showers from the roof, whose access the pipe permits. They climb the drainpipe fast, muscle memory pulling their body along despite their panic. But their hands do slip a little, the palms are wet with sweat.

When Juniper reaches the roof, their hands are covered in a tacky mixture of rust, saline, and blood. The pipe has cut a small trench between their forefinger and thumb, and it is bleeding steadily. The brown ooze camouflages the scabs and calluses that line Juniper's fingers.

Fuck. Juniper stamps the ground. Fuck this.

They can't remember the date of their last tetanus shot, and for a moment the blood swims before their eyes.

It's ok though. I'm sure Flint will have some tincture or salve for this. Stay focused.

The world comes into focus and Juniper immediately drops to their belly. Shit. That was too close. If the men at the door see them up here then all Juniper's packing and preparing will have been nothing more than time wasted. The tarpaper snags at their tights as they shimmy along the roof's surface, leaving runs. Behind the house there is an abandoned lot. Asian pear trees that lean over from the neighbor's yard have left their seeds for enough years that the yard has become an orchard. Juniper glimpses the trees' dark shiny tops and for a moment remembers the first night they brought Jacob there to gather the windfall fruits. The two came back later to rattle the trees dry, with a bike helmet and two oversize t-shirts.

The trees will catch them. Juniper watched their housemate Mirah successfully leap from the roof to the orchard on the fourth of July. She was drunk, and taller than Juniper, but it seems safe as anything else right now. The orchard will provide cover, and lets out onto an alley that Juniper will take, they hope, to safety.

2005,6 (written 2012)

i remember writing an entry in my journal when i was 15 about how i felt like i was growing up in spurts that were so dizzying. i felt like i was competing in a bicycle race weeks after learning how to ride one. i think that it was recently after the 'cool kids' in high school started talking to me like i had a pulse, like i might be as alive as they seemed, and i had started my band with violet and we were getting noticed and photographed on the street all the time, which was weird because there was no music on our myspace yet. we didn't even have any songs back then, but we would hang out in union square all day covered in shiny beads and scarves, singing at the top of our lungs (mostly janis joplin and that one song from rent), arms wound around each other's waists. people thought we were sisters or dating, and i think back then we were both. we felt so invincible, but i was incredibly fragile. i remember writing in my journal, "four months ago i didn't even know what a hipster was" and this was back in '05 when that word wasn't an insult yet and it was really all we wanted, a craving like the taste of salt on our hungry tongues.

i used to sit on the corner of east houston and eldridge in a red and white striped dress, no shoes on, back shoved up against the glass windows of the 24-hour pool hall. this was "the spot." one of many, but the best one because it was just outside of "territory," the rectangle we all used to walk that stretched from avenue B to the Bowery, but close to silver spurs too, where violet and i split grilled cheeses with bacon (extra crispy) and always had to go to the bathroom at exactly the same time. their milkshakes were thick as cement.

territory was the neighborhood where our high school is and where my and violet's ex boyfriends both lived. we used to walk the streets giddily there, half-hoping we'd see them so we could run away holding hands and laughing. one night we stalked up avenue A at midnight and covered all of his band's stickers with ones of our own. we always joked that each other were the prizes won out of those early attempts at love. i remember when ben and violet used to come down the stairs of his apartment and it was so obvious that they'd just been fucking, and half the time she was crying, but she never ever wanted to let go of his hand. one night he threw a printer at the wall beside her. i remember hearing stories about sex and vaseline, violet's dislocated jaw and seizures. i remember the story about how they finally did it on the floor of her bedroom in a pile of stuffed animals after months of Ben not being able to get it up.

they were my model for what it was like to be an adult. i think that ben was 16, and violet a year older.

i remember when they finally broke up for the last time. there had been twenty-seven ruptures before this one, a number that you can't make up. i forced my way into violet's apartment and held her while she sobbed in jerky breaths. we were both afraid she was going to die, but she didn't. after that night her bed became another spot for us. a place where we sat end exchanged dreams through our open hearts.

one night violet asked me if i thought i was a good person or not. i wasn't sure, but we were determined to figure it out. "i know" she said, smiling. pulling out a piece of paper, she began writing a list of names on it. we were sitting on her bed and i was backlit by a standing lamp that always shone in my eyes. my shadow fell across the page. "write down the name of every relationship you've had that's ended. friends too. cross out the ones where they hurt you. if you have more crossed than uncrossed, you're good. you know what makes you bad." i found a piece of paper of my own and started writing. this girl was complicated and sharp in a way i'd never seen before.

Gala, Claudia, Hannah, Isabel, Celeste, Drew. Shane. Olivia. almost all my names were ones from middle school, mostly friends who'd bullied me and jerked me around until it wasn't really a choice to stop talking to them. By contrast, violet's names were exotic. I could tell from how many boys there were that a lot had to do with dating--sex, in my mind. Leah, Simon. I'd heard of these two. They seemed like fucked-up twins, each with black hair and a scowl. Simon loved violet until he met Leah. and then they all were together, a codependent triangle, for a few months. This was the most glamorous thing I'd ever heard of. violet explained cautiously while she continued writing names on her list. i'd been done for almost ten minutes. Max, she wrote, "but this one's not really over yet."

Eventually we concluded that we were both good people. Out of my eight, I'd hurt three; out of violet's 15, she'd hurt six. it was may of 2006 and we were alone in her bedroom. the walls were painted pale green and her shelves were still lined with horse figurines and children's books. i was supposed to have been home hours ago, but i didn't really care. i'd never known a person who approached her world so systematically, and with so much force. it meant so much to me to be good in the eyes of the world, and in this spring, that's what violet was.

i laid back on her comforter. violet's ceiling was speckled with little black marks from when she and a boy (years ago) had thrown firecrackers at it in the dark--the kind that come in a box full of sawdust and explode when they hit the ground with tiny pops. "i love you," i whispered, and she jumped on top of me. we often sat like this, with her innocently straddling my hips. she'd kissed me once that year, in her sleep, but we hadn't talked about it since. the sky outside her window was black, and i could see our silhouettes reflected in the glass, dark and angular inside a yellow halo. violet replied carefully, so as not to include the "too" that would cancel out our words, a running joke. the pieces of paper slid to the ground.

"i love you."

the process of leaning through sorrow

Everyone misses someone they've never met
and don't even like "in that way."

We know what it means to be touched
and to have invited that touching beforehand

To hold words on our rolling tongues
and cradle the fall air like marbles in our pockets.

We're all nestled cheek to jowl like clusters of black jewels
where each knows winter is upon us.

We're feeling the dark like a fresh death,

living outside time
waking at six o clock every morning,
ignoring strange clusters of pomegranate seeds
ignoring the burr of distraction.

We want to write a hymn
to the dawn that doesn't sound like one,
a hymn that is based on a tender moment
with an Alaskan boy

who gets to live in sunlight for 90 days
and in stars for 100