i'm like the tide in the deep blue

I'm not going to make excuses for my lack of writing.

I won't stand on stage and spout a whiny soliloquy to empty seats. I won't fill a monologue with writer's block or ugly words or no words. Because I have been writing. Not here, but somewhere; in my brain, on a page, in an essay stuffed somewhere on the bottom shelf of the desk in my small room in my small apartment.

Words have left my pen, my fingers, my mouth and flown to someone else--somewhere else. Letters and phrases jumbled into sentences that mean something or nothing are floating out in the galaxy, or maybe the next one over. (My roommate would want you to know that it's called Andromeda.) But the next one over is supposed to be colliding with this one in some odd billion years and so the words will probably be coming back for more. They will be disappointed when everything is ripped to rubble and a new space time continuum has formed instead. (I don't know if that's actually going to happen. I don't know what a space time continuum even is. I heard it from Futurama.)


(x)

All you really need to know, empty seats, is that I think I'm back for now. That's all.

- S.H.

with these revisions and gaps in history

The words rolled off of her tongue, and I swear it was sugar.

I mean, the complete bliss and giddiness and the things that come in between.

And I realized that I want that.  I want to be consumed by my girlish hormones and impossible fantasies.  Like, I want to create stories and thoughts and visions that fulfill some sort of longing for a boy who I find absolutely ravishing or some gross word like that.  It's whatever.

Because I realize that I don't have that now, even though I probably should.  I don't have that nervousness that captures your throat when you try to speak to him.  I don't have that fear of rejection that's completely irrational because you're pretty sure he really likes you, but, like, what if he doesn't?  Like, you know he's said it, but a lot of words have been said. 

I don't know, I don't think this makes sense.  Like, do you get it?  Am I being too literal here, or not literal enough?

I guess I just really want to know a boy who creates swarms of butterflies with his walk, with the curve of his lips.

And right now, I'm sorry, but that feeling is lacking.

- S.H.

sleep well

Things are different now.

The way we speak,

the way we laugh,

the way we wear our clothes.

I think I feel your heart,

but it's not the one I remember.

You've turned from innocence

to something

dreadful.

And I don't mean you,

but I mean your eyes,

or your hair,

or something inside of you that is not the thing I knew before.

It's just different.

I wonder when they all started making sex jokes.

Or, perhaps, when I started noticing them.

I'm sorry, 

but I've been ripping my brain to shreds.

- S.H.

where i send my thoughts to far off destinations

She was always riddled with ink.  It filled the crevices of her palms and followed the veins down her arm.  It bled into her heart and her heart pumped it out and it reached every nerve ending in her body.  It filled her brain with ideas and she wrote them down:

A girl, alone and misunderstood, but not really sad.

A girl, surrounded by people and really sad.

Music in the bones.

Wars within the head.

Thunderstorms and stars.

A girl, alone and misunderstood and surrounded by people and not sad, but really sad.

An unforgivable heartbreak because there is no one to forgive.

A very, very passive love.

A girl.

A girl.

She wrote them down and told herself she would share them one day.  She would wrap them up in paper and binding and actual printer ink rather than her bloodstream.

When she grew up--not old, but up, but smart, but mature--she would share these things.

Now she's pacing from room to room and sitting in desks and listening to good words and she's trying to grow up.  She's making it.  She's almost there, she's almost there.  Just another three years, three years.

She is growing up.  

And when she is up as words are old, she will open her veins and her heart and her brain.  They won't be ideas and she won't need to write them because they will be written.  And people will read her words all over the world and that's a lot to hope for, but when she grows up . . . ,

- S.H.