out of here, out of here, the words i sang at the end when strumming to my own feelings, but never gave much weight to.

cat power finds me again, later in the season than before, and eight years later, and sings about how there's always something better, because you know there always is, and she's right, but i'm not sad for once, and maybe not sad not for the first time, but in some way that hits but not heavy.

i can tell.

the boys i would've given anything to be loved by are still around, older, but i wouldn't give anything to be loved anymore. i wouldn't've given anything for a while now. not that love's not worth it, but i don't feel like i have to give anything for something that is free when it's free.
sometimes i find that i have love to give, and it surprises me, but sometimes i think it's just the particular day when i've made peace with things.

i test my stories and questions and see what sticks. sometimes i find fish, and sometimes i find something that makes me feel something.

it's almost my birthday. i want to tell future selves, that things will be okay, that all things will be ok, and that nothing is as serious or dire or as singular and as only as you feel it is. feelings are such liars and so fickle, but yeah, when that wave of good feeling hits, yeah, it's a feeling, and you are riding on it like i am. happiness happens in strange moments, but sometimes you can see it happening, and you just edge it on.

not all days will be clear like this, but that is ok. you get through everything even if you don't believe you will. you were never a believer anyway, so belief's got nothing to do with what happens.

the art director tagged my name in silver on my favorite midnight street; so young, so young, all the bars & streets are adventures when the city is a ghost town on a gorgeous night at 3something. we kept it consistent, tully neats, many, because the rise of the other irish whiskeys, is just a decade's worth of subway marketing coming to fruition. when we are old, they will say that only old men drink jamesons, because the young will be drinking something else.

i've got a silver ring on a black thread. what's it signify? a silvery fancy that caught my eye on a saturday afternoon. i've got my third tungsten replacement sitting in the bottom of my book bag. a pretty aging thing wore too many diamonds, dangling from two symmetrical holes in her lobes, a tiara, because all gold-diggers are princesses, a cuff, a collar, and so many rings, except for the commitment ones. she mostly ignored her slightly sleazy, ugly, beta-y, significantly older date. i bet she tells him that she's old-fashioned and likes to be treated like lady, and is wide-eyed & girlish at all compressed carbons.

as a child, when patrons came in, and i'd be doodling or doing my math homework or sometimes reading the paper, because intelligent children occasionally like to read expensive rags, i'd suggest the pink ones, because regular ones were boring. when did shiny cut & polished crystals begin to signify love?

love is a poem. love is fiction. love is creativity. love is not roses, but a bouquet that i deconstructed, into a richly-colored blossom, left on every lonely parking meter, or bench, or closed shop door, for the first stranger to claim it.