being alone is playing spotify in your room on a friday night while rocking an ebbing fever and the single vodka-water in an aquamarine martini glass close to midnight, and your feelings are somewhere between fuzzy bluegrass breakup songs and rowdy gypsy jazz with a splash of punk.

The concept is frames.

She asked where I hid it, and I said, "With my art supplies." People know to not touch my instruments.

--

If you gave me the alphabet & the colors, I could tell you how I felt, but without them, I am mute, trapped in the ocean of myself, where I am washed in waves and drifts, and there is only myself & the sky, in the dark colors of a storm, and the ocean, which is more than any storm.

I'm not lost.

I am in an endless ocean which I cannot control. Sometimes I go under, and sometimes I surface, tired & I am afloat, not purely of my own will. The next wave will knock the breath from me, and I will choke on strange water, and drown. I don't expect to come back up, but I don't think about coming back up. The wave hits me, and I am kicking and kicking, but it goes dark and I am drowning.  And then I wake, exhausted and worn. I am like a girl stumbling out of a fever, weak & dizzy, and still fighting, because if I stop, even when there is nothing in me that can, I will be dead.

--

There is a thin paper sheet between death and myself.

I lean against it, the way I'd rest my body on my bed, if it were a hard relief. Soft beds are pleasant, but I could do with smooth, dark stone.
I don't need it to offer me much, just a reliable resting place until I can keep moving. Sometimes I need to kneel, alone, and just take in the quiet. Sometimes I need to curl up, into a fetal ball that needs to hold onto myself for a moment. Sometimes I just need to lay my body down, and shut my eyes.

--

Bodies are okay.

I like them for sex or making love, whatever my mood is. Moods of a woman, people make humor, but we're lucky for the variation. There is a monotony of having only one experience during physical acts. People think they want the same thing over and over, but there is no constancy.

A body is a body, although I prefer healthy, expressive ones. I don't need a body by mine unless it's the right one. I don't need love.

So many strange souls are drawn to me. They want to hold me and carry me. They think, if they do, I will look from their thrown-upon-me safety and love them. There's the ugly flaw in this show. There is no love in force. They have their brash hero narrative, this romanticized evolution of caveman instincts, and I have my awareness. I have nothing for this self-made hero, this self-centered romanticizer. I am not the token object in somebody's amateur fantasy.

My love is pure; it cannot be bought with romance, nor material. It is not the prize, the digital achievement award dished out after trial & victory, in a game. I don't care if it's requited, although I wouldn't mind.

I don't want a bootlegged kind of love.

Love is truth and nakedness. People are stripped down of their aesthetics & identities, and it's not a play at anything. It's just two souls naked together, and both are wholeheartedly, earnestly saying yes.