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 guilt, but mostly the metabolization of the night keeps me awake. rain, and soft, wet air, patters on the windowsill & street accompany me.

i carve through the porky dead flesh of recent memory with a scalpel in my mind, looking for a granule of something; clasp a closed hand to my left breast, find a crumpled love note that i want to unfold and flatten on my chest, so i do.

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over work drinks, i tell my colleagues that my best friend is getting married this weekend, and the cheeky one accuses me of being Julia Roberts in some film, secretly in love with my best friend, so i roll my eyes, because cheeky co-workers are like drunk people playing darts at a bar together, and you know how films like that go, if you keep watching.

all the ducks lined up behind a glass window. chickens too. poultry roasted with soy, and they all hang in the windows. as a child, my father would buy a bird, all chopped up, in these elegant horizontal pieces, to add to the dinner my mother prepared. sometimes he would buy a bird, especially when he was feeling guilty, but thought he could get away with whatever it was, because look, he bore a gift.

these birds were delicious. 

after a while, he'd buy the bird, but then leave right after dinner to do whatever it was that he wanted, that he was making a small penance for, with a bird. then he started leaving before dinner was over. then, he started just buying the bird, and leaving, after he made the trip home to deliver it to our table. 

and then my mother got sick, so our parents just asked us to go buy a bird ourselves for dinner, from the local place.

today, i watched a woman standing in the corner of the train. she was old. her hair was badly dyed. she stood in the corner, with her bags around her sneaker covered feet. she had a white plastic take out container in her hand, full of bird, and she ate from it, like it was a plate, like she was hungry the way a child is hungry when eating dinner late at night, unwatched and ignored, and left to his solitary devices to eat. and she ate. she was a gaunt woman. and she liked her food. it tasted good, slipped from the corner of her little rectangle container. she slipped the pieces into her mouth, and chewed, and pulled the little bird bones from her mouth, and cupped them as she ate.

the trains door opened. some more strangers got on, so she stopped eating, and put away her food. then i had nothing else to watch.

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i did a lot of waiting. things don't come. the train does, sometimes.

tired here, and tired there. whiskey is not my friend, it's just a drink poured on ice to have.

more sure every day as the sun comes up and the shower water runs hot and down the mildewing drain. is the heat on? the heat is on, but i don't need it. towels are just fine. i was asking for help in the little ways, but i think love and futures were the questions someone else was asking. we speak in different tongues, and i'd like to know how to carve mine out to make something that will find me something pretty to my heart.

i could sell pages. i could sell color on paper, and mood on paper, and ideas that jar and make you laugh because of your willingness to laugh, like a toll fare paid at a gate that you need to drive through to get to the places you have to be.

i have red in a bottle. i have white too; these color demarcations that do not capture the color, rosy like a post sunset of a storm night put on rare hold, and dew on aging straw. i think of dying. i think of death. i think of how little unrequited love moments break me, but you held me so sweetly, and i don't know if it's enough or not, to apply emotional credit for things i don't know if i have. i can't afford it, and i don't want you paying for things you don't want to pay for.

red in a glass. red in my mouth. i kissed you as real as i could with all the things i had in me, and i wanted you to know that i did, that i loved you, but i didn't know what else there was for me to try to say with my imperfect mouth. my secrets are worthless. i have nothing. the only thing i'm holding onto, is that glance, which is as sweet as all the glances i've ever wanted, and it's all that i've got to go on.

Thursdays, I am most alone.

Somewhere between Sundays and now, the disconnect happens. The separation jars in the little ways. A pound of swiss cheese, yes please. Thank you; and I am alone with myself in the deli as strangers and sellers make their transactions and conversations.

A hesitant stranger behind me on the line tells me that I am pretty, and I smile a thank you, and nod a slight curtsy. I wait for my cheese, which is being wrapped in its fine wax paper, and think about going home to my sheets, which are dark blue & some storm grey. The stranger begins conversation. I carry it to the declination of his line & number. I walk home. The day is beautiful, but it only feels like clouds. This is Sunday. I eat. I don't remember what.

Monday begins promising. There is humor. There is catch up conversation. There is some anger and fights about things I do not want to deal with. My brother sings in a dark-suited choir, and I watch Stabat Mater from the balcony seats of a dark hall. We discuss family & money on the way home. I feed him a sandwich and make myself a quesadilla with last night's leftovers. After he leaves, I go sit in front of a radiator. I have a glass of wine. My roommates do a lot of talking. We all talk, too much; fruitless and impotently, but it's in poor taste to point it out.

The day after is a blur of recap and typing. I have fragments of dreams, and tea & coffee. I put things that smell good, in jars, & drown them in vodka, and then it is already night. My roommate comes home doused in all the highest of liquid spirits. We talk about trips to Asia. He wants to send me on a solo vacation next January, and eats his burgers with hot sauce while excitedly bravado-ing about family and jobs and dinner plans.

Wednesday, the air is lovely. Brooklyn is lovely. I spend the evening in an art studio, but I make nothing except for uninspired pencil marks and and imperfect cuts on paper. My friend that I accompanied, asks personal questions about my exes and my former relationships. I think about the types of olive oil, between floral and near almond, and cardamoms, green in a jar. I think about very dry sake in my cup. I think about the lovely cut of fish, and the sweet & soy tofu skin, and the warm rice. I think about the springtime color of pickled ginger, in the perfectly shallow dish of seasoned sauce. I think about washing my hands, and I do. I think about the bars we pass, the lights, and the beers of twentysomething youth, and some conversation a little more electric and heartfelt. The train takes too long to come. My friend and her co-worker talk. I watch the lights at the ends of the tunnel, for flicker & change, & maybe some new beauty, the way I always have, my entire life, whenever I am on a platform caught in waiting. The city is cold again. I walk home. Strangers and their glances & gazes; I keep moving. I strip down when I am home. I empty the infusions; put them away.

Grey. I woke. The sound of wind without leaves, & thoughts; the chambers in me are empty. Today I am only with myself; something about solitude & the quiet. I think about emptying chambers in hollow spaces. I think about showers in the dark. I think about how coffee makes me too jittery, so I don't want it; the bitterness makes me sick, and the caffeine in tea makes me different, so I don't want it, and I don't want much, and I don't know what I want, except other spaces. Empty is a feeling. The world is lit. I think of how when the night comes, I will feel better. I think about the city at night, and the streets, and the concrete beneath me, and orange streetlamps, and the safety in my soul on these little streets, and all these dark buildings that hold them.