I can’t. I really just can’t.

Brandon, thank you for always liking my posts. Now please come and take me with you where ever you go on the next plane you take out of here.
You are always traveling and I am so jealous. Take. Me. With. You. Or at least bring me back something awesome.
We’ve known each other forever. Lets use this random tumblr connection to go some place awesome!

Its finally come. And it didn’t just sneak in without me noticing. Or just walk in unannouced and take up residence in my head. If anything it was more like I sat around waiting for it for so long I drank the wine I had bought for its welcome and fell asleep in my party dress.
Amd when I woke up it was there. Bringing cold pizza and gatorade to nurse my hangover and smiling like I hadn’t waited endless hours for its arrival.
Relief is such a sweet sorrow. It envelopes me, its cold numbness entirely welcome and soft lips pressing my temple with soothing whispers of nothing.
I mean, I had to get over him eventually. I stupidly thought that it might a day if celebration. Instead there is just this feeling of emptiness that I am slowly learning to fill. And the knowledge that I will never again write to him. Ever.
That and ill never listen to blink ever again. Thank god.
I am now this girl I don’t know well. I’m sassy again. Motivated by personal satisfaction and a don’t give a fuck attitude. I’m mouthy, drink too much, might do drugs for no reason at all. I drive too fast, hate waiting, and run around with his hand in mine.
Oh yeah. Someone loves me. He loves me in that gut wrenching, all consuming sense that feels nothing like the impossibly huge responsibility my ex made it feel like my love was.
His hand is warm in mine and his lips are so soft. My hair is everywhere and he reaches for me in his sleep.
Even if I try to be sad about kyle, I can’t find it in me to cry. There’s nothing but the jaded feeling of knowing that ill be ok. Regardless of the situtation. My heart has been replaced with the strongest of barbed wire. Ill never fall again. Never let my mind wander past the boundaries of my life. Never again let myself wonder what he’s doing, or if he thinks of me.
Because I finally don’t care. And in the words of iconapop: I love it.
So bring on the warm summer weather. I will throw myself a birthday party. I will invite everyone I know and celebrate the girl I am without kyle. And I will not ask for gifts, but for slips of paper that tell me who I am. I will smoke cigarettes in the warm night air and kyle will burn like a distant memory.
I have replaced him with myself. And I’m never going anywhere.

My grandmother once told me the secret to a happy marriage. I was young at the time, too young to understand what she meant. She and my grandfather have been together for almost 66 years, and he still looks at her like she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.
I wanted that, at age eighteen. I thought, for sure, that there was a secret and that with that secret I would be sure to find it. I didn’t really know that by that time, for me, it was too late.
“You have to marry someone who loves you more,” she said to me. “Love is never 50:50. Someone always loves someone else more. Marry the man who loves you more, and then love him for that reason.” The wisdom of that statement was too much for me then. And in times past, the statement stared back at me from behind my eyelids when I closed them. It was my measure of success. I’d marry a man who loved me more. I would find someone who would truly fall for me, and then I would love and appreciate him. So that we could be as eternally happy as my grandparents.
But to a young girl, someone loving me more can be easily confused with being needed. It was that confusion that led me down the path I chose. I mean, afterall, I was the better one. The one who could handle everything. And didn’t I? Didn’t I do everything he needed? Wasn’t I worth loving? Indeed, worth being loved more?
As time has gone by, the answer was a resounding ‘no.’ Only a doormat can sustain the energy in that type of one way love. It seemed that being needed wasn’t being loved, and that despite my efforts, I was the one who loved more. I did everything for him so that he would need me, and I showed him with that just how much more I loved him than he loved me.
It wouldn’t have been so horrible if he, like my grandmother, had simply appreciated me for that fact. If he had cherished me for loving him so much. But, like people sometimes seem to do, he treated me carelessly. He let my love for him do the job of his love for me, and it atrophied from lack of use.
So I let go. And after a lot of retracing my steps to figure it all out, there was really only one thing I could do. I stopped trying to figure it out. I did everything I could to make that relationship work. If there was something that needed to be done to fix it, I’m sure I’d have figured it out and done it. But the only thing that really could have saved it was something I couldn’t do: make him want it to work.
It took the better part of a year, but I finally figured it out. It was never going to work because he didn’t want it to.
And its only now that I really see what my grandmother meant. If you’re with someone who loves you more, then they’re always going to want to make it work because they love you. And if you can love and appreciate that, then you’ll always want to make it work because they will always try. If they always put your happiness above their own because of love, then you should love and cherish that enough to put their happiness above your own. Thus creating the balance from the imbalance.
Almost ten years, and I’ve finally seen what she meant. Better late than never, I guess. Ill try to put this into practice this time.

He is warm in sleep, skin soft and breath even. His hair is soft, falling across his forehead in crisscrossed designs. His shoulders are perfect, so smooth and perfectly shaped. Sleeping next to someone so beautiful has its benefits and drawbacks both.
Isn’t it strange how you can get to know someone’s body like your own? The way kisses after awhile are so perfect they seem choreographed, caresses a soft and practiced dance, fingertips on skin. Even his breathing is familiar to me now. His face is what I expect to see upon waking, his name’s a whisper on my lips in the middle of the night when I reach for him. We know how we prefer to hold hands, and fix it when it doesn’t feel right.
Every night he reaches for me in the dark as we settle into bed. He kisses me, the entrance long practiced and perfectly timed. Lets his fingertips graze my shoulders, my collarbone, my sternum. I stroke his right hipbone with feather-light touches.
His lips are so soft. So perfect. Is this happiness? Or simply the feeling of coming home? How do you get used to kissing someone so beautiful? How can I ever get used to watching the way he looks at me?
But this has become something close to normalcy. This boy with the dark eyes, tall and handsome. We take baths together in our big tub, his size only barely accomodating my small frame. We wash each other’s hair. I sit on the sink in my underwear and one of shirts and shave his face. We cook together, either me following his direction or him following mine. We read side by side, smoking cigarettes and stealing glances at each other. We laugh, have inside jokes, take turns with chores, make voices for our animals and hold imaginary conversations between them.
We bicker over stupid things, pee with the door open and don’t even break the conversation. We play guitar and sing the moldy peaches to each other. We grocery shop. We take turns giving Riley a bath. She reads to us on our bed, curled up against him and does her homework under his watchful eye. He quizzes her on her spelling words as he drives her to school.
This boy, this beautiful boy, a breathing Adonis, slim of hip, long of leg, and broad of shoulders, is real. He’s real, and here. Sleeping next to me and reaching for my arm to drape around him. How does someone get used to this? How is it possible to be around someone so lush with youth and vitality, and not feel old/dumpy/worn out/jaded? May fell for December. Or is that a bit dramatic for just a five year age difference? Maybe I’m allowed because I’m the older one.
He introduces Riley as “our” daughter, claiming its easier than explaining. True, she is usually in his lap, climbing up on his shoulders, snuggled up and laying on his chest, or standing in front of him with her arms stretched towards him demanding “up”. He doesn’t seem to realize that he’s too young to have a daughter that’s almost seven. I wonder how many people even wonder.
The strange thing is, people tell us that she looks like us, both of us. It happens too often to be a one off. Half Mexican boy and half Japanese girl. Perhaps we could equal Riley if you went based on coloring alone. But its funny, the straightness of her eyebrows, her lighter brown hair, the things she got from Kyle do in a way match Sam. She does look more like Sam than she does Kyle. “What a beautiful family,” people say to me. Only I’m the awkward one. The odd man out in this beauty contest. He and Riley look like models cast as family at the park, and I’m the ugly one cast as the obscure mother. Even our dog is purebred and gorgeous. If Sam were a dog, he’d win best in show.
Although its hard not being as pretty as my boyfriend, its also amazing knowing that this boy is mine. He looks at me like I have the answers to many questions. He smiles at me, kisses me on the mouth, tells me I’m pretty. Reaches for me in the darkness and holds me close. He’s the most attractive man I’ve ever seen up close and he’s mine. Lucky me.

Maybe I’ve stopped writing because you’re gone. Maybe you were the last person I wanted to hear my voice.
But, which ever it is, I don’t write anymore.

i’ve been thinking a lot about what to be thankful for. it’s about that time in my life to take stock of the things i have accomplished in the not so short amount of time i’ve been here. it’s been a ride. really. and i’ve gone from naive child to not so stable young adult to a sell out punching the clock on my nine to five. well, not really punching the clock because i’m on salary. but you get my drift. i’ve come out educated and smart mouthed. old enough to know better, but too young to care. well, roll on middle youth. i’m ready for you.

twenty seven. in eight months i will be the same age my mother was when she had me. for some reason, this is some sort of significance. not that i know what the significance is. but i can’t help but feel that it should matter in some sort of way. interesting relationship with my mother aside. i will be the same age as the woman who birthed me. 

so, i suppose i’m grateful for the experience. even if it took a lot out of me. it’s exhausting, learning the hard way. doing the wrong thing. following that dream that you never really had a shot at. but, i suppose, this is all part of the process. not that i’m looking forward to more, but there’s a grudging respect for life now. an understanding that you get what you put in. 

it’s been a long time since i started trusting myself. and i’ve given up on it so many times before. but this time, i’ve got to let go of it. i have to know that i can get through this, no matter how hard it looks from the inside. i have to take steps in what ever direction i think i will lead me to the next scene. this is not the hardest part by a long shot. 

the hardest part is letting go of something i chased for so long. watching pieces of me die in order to let other parts of me flourish. pruning back to allow for new growth. and don’t you miss me now? well, let’s cheers to this. this is my life.