Listen: I want you to like me. There is dignity to my person.

My soul, in fact, has capabilities, that even I am not aware of. My mother says I had a fiery, and she will go so far as to even say dynamic, personality. In her bathrobe at 3 in the afternoon, lazy Sunday, spoken in quiet semi-transparent tongues, she relates to me how, even in the womb, she sighs and drags on her cigarette slowly, she remembers how with such complacent and simultaneously determined force I would thrust my small partially formed fist into her abdomen.

Remembering every kiss I've long since lost is painful, but I certainly have references, who will vouch, diagram even, my illustrious past, my uncertain but promising future, undying compassion for all things small and soft and vulnerable, ability to wax philosophically and simultaneously fuck, on key mind you, singing, screaming that jazz rift that, Simon says still leaves him, left him, shaking at dawn. Incredible. My doctors say my emotional instabilities, tendencies towards self destruction, are not only just within the realm of normalcy, but symbolically convey the alienation and promise of the 21st century prototype.

I am your favorite love song.

In some circles, my quirkiness is seen as endearing and even possibly admirable.

Please tell me you also are still swallowing your juvenile delinquencies. Its been years. I've never let them go. Still running, screaming. So. So quiet. Mom said I always liked to play alone. Something I always felt, and then had to learn a second time. Invest in life support systems and friends who wont abandon you even though you will. You were raised to be so. So. We swim in blood and sand and maybe we need these drinks to wash away the wounds that emerge with every newly stolen...I can be hopeful in moments of sunlight, maybe spent with you.

I like your fingers.

Jeans.

I believe in music. I dream in water. I endorse fucking. Matthew said I tasted like summer when he kissed me. Would you like to try? I'm trying to remember the time I last felt I had a pulse, and maybe it was behind the gas station in July when Violet held my hand and cried into my wrists, shaken, startled, breathing her misery with pride, because at least it was her own, and I miss her, him, him, him, me? We were all so... I need. So? Said life needs...punctuation? Never. Ever. Stop. Just hold my head back and body close, and with eyelids turned, breathe soft inconsequntial lies against my skin, because I need to hear them all again....



******



Violet leans forward as she sits on the side of the curb, braless in her wife beater. She takes long, languid drags on her cigarette, dripping ash on wet asphalt.

It is mid-August and summer has lost its charm. If it were still early, Matthew and I could take a trip to the lake where we would listen to the soft hum of crickets, take tentative sips from a bottle of white wine, and gracefully devour one another's secrets and little lies as only best friends could.

(This was before Matthew ran away from home and Mom stopped leaving the house).

Violet keeps twisting that cigarette expertly between two fingers. She rolls her eyes and shakes the sweat out of her hair. The sun spills over us like too much champagne, and Violet doesn't even bother squinting. Just looks dead on though the distance waiting for time to start going again.

I am barefoot, and my toes look odd and artificial wriggling through the grass. I feel small, childish, like I don't know what to do with my hands, and wonder if maybe it still isn't too late to bum a cigarette off Violet, even though I know that it is.

The stagnant air smells like dried sweat and sour milk.

Tomorrow there will be fire trucks and three days later Mom's voice on the phone begging me to come back. Now everything is peaceful, quiet. Violet turns her lidless eyes like wingless butterflies, sucking the last residue blue smoke from her fingertips.

In the distance children are laughing.

It is winter now.

Where have the cherry blossoms gone? The mysteries hide under the snow, little secrets. The fires burnt out where we left them. It is serene now, calm, dead and very beautiful. The window is asymmetrical. The remnants of last night lay panic stricken on the floor; bad poetry and jeans and condoms, large red wet spot where we dropped the bottle of red wine. I laugh and mention how expressionists saw love as essentially vampiric and Jared takes another drag on his 300th cigarette and tells me I looked sad.

Now that I am pretty it doesn't seem important. I remember the hours Violet and I would spend in front of mirrors, wet with rouge. Time we spent primping before sitting out on that curb, blowing kisses to the passing traffic and whispering secret loves. Time passed more slowly then. Things seemed simpler, direct. Now I read Neitszche and paint. I sleep late on Sundays. I buy organic and talk politics over cappuccinos and am learning to play chess. I am broke. I speak in a sentence structure that is too long and littered with enough poetic drivel to smother a small child, and that's ok because I am pretty, thereby lending my erratic voice some kind of credence and charm.

If I started smoking now maybe I could get to heaven faster.