#FreeWriteFriday: Things In My Dreamcatcher

12:04 p.m. 

I dreamed about meeting you in an airport. Saving my pennies for a plane ticket. About falling into your arms, about crying with the sheer joy of finally getting to put my hands around yours.

We are jumping on hotel beds. We are watching terrible TV movies and laughing to tears. Building an impressive blanket fort in your basement. There is a dog there, and he curls into the small space between our sleeping bodies. Everything feels right and slow and warm.

In my dream, I am thin and beautiful. You are you before sadness stole your light. You play guitar absentmindedly and I croon along. I sound like Joni Mitchell; You smile like the sun.

It all ends like a sun-speckled dream sequence from a Sophia Coppola film. Flashes of the five Lisbon girls smiling, miniature supernovas of teenage freedom before the darkness comes rushing back. You and I tripping through years and years of “come here, come here, come here,” stumbling over our I love yous because they can’t come fast enough.

***

There is a mystery boy who lives in the very back of my memory. He kissed me over and over, little pecks until both of us were laughing. When I woke him up with the same kisses, he grinned. Tucked his arm around me, tracing his fingertips along my arm. “This is perfect. Let’s just stay here all day,” he said with the sleepiest sigh. I was afraid he could hear my heart fluttering.

He made me roll my eyes and laugh when he threw the cutest tantrum about getting out of bed. He held my hand in the back of my friend’s car, then disappeared.

I don’t think about him often, but sometimes the way the light comes in through my bedroom window puts me back there. Kissing him was a flash of a fairy-tale, a sleepy summer night with the last chapter missing.

***

I miss him with a faceless innocence. I miss you with a painful, misplaced ferocity.

These are the just ghosts my dreamcatcher caught. I am not sitting on the floor on a hotel room with you. I am not drunk on freedom, pointing out fireflies.

I am sitting at my kitchen table, listening to old records and drinking coffee. It’s no longer hot, but I don’t have the energy to do anything about it. My body doesn’t move right. It is big and heavy. I stare into mirrors, screaming silently at myself to change, to stop crying.

You don’t like coffee. I have no idea if he does.
I dump the last half cup down the sink.

12:58 p.m.

I haven’t posted a FWF since April 2014. Whoops.

#FreeWriteFriday: The Morning Space

10:28 a.m.

Sometimes I fall down rabbit holes.

Say yes to more things. Learn how to say no. Speak up why are you mumbling please keep your voice down oh my god don’t say that out loud why don’t you spend time with me why don’t you give me space you are too big you are taking up too much room you are

You put your hands on my shoulders, and I am above ground, above water once more. Keenly aware of the air rushing in and out of my chest, I hum a “thank you” in your direction. You are sure and solid ground. I know I can lean into you, push back against everything I love and hate and don’t understand because you love and hate and don’t understand. You are warm skin and you are kind eyes and you are a smile that’s keeping a secret and you are made up.

You aren’t there to hold my shaking hands when I wake up wrong, and that only makes me shake more. I don’t know what’s worse.

10:48 p.m.

#FreeWriteFriday: “A Half-Fiction Saturday”

4:52 p.m.

You tucked a hair behind my ear once. It was storming and I was complaining about how long my hair had gotten, how it needed to be pulled into a ponytail. It happened and we froze. We never talked about how it made me want to kiss you right there in the middle of the sidewalk. How you looked at me, nervous and breathing slowly. Neither of us brought it up again.

Two weeks ago, you were in my dream, out of focus and out of reach. I woke up with hands shaking like my window frames during the rain that lasted three days. My lungs pulled in and pushed out just like they have every day of my life, even on the days when your eyes smile at me and I think my heart might stop.

I woke up with your voice stuck in my head, and I want to hear you reading old Emerson poems out loud while I dry dishes over the sink. I want to hear you humming while you scribble something down in the back of an old journal.

I leave my hair down in the wind now.

5:25 p.m.

This is a mess, but I guess that’s kind of what free writing is all about … right?

#FreeWriteFriday: Rivers to the Atlantic

12:57 p.m.

I believe in my bones like I believe in the dirt on the ground.
I am able and solid and if you don’t take care of me,
I will wash away into the ocean and settle at the bottom.

I believe in the beauty of my body like a fairy tale,
collecting dust on the bookshelf of my childhood room
because who has the patience for lies with illustrations?

There is a pull like a black hole through my whole body
when I see you happy and never needing me, like I am
nothing but dirt you can’t get out from under your nails.

You laugh like sunlight in my eyes, you smile like you have
known me forever without ever learning my name,
and you miss me like you don’t.

My heart is warm and humming, beautiful and soft,
until that painful wave of not being the first choice
or the second best or even on the cutting room floor.

And all the 20-year-olds with no clue about what is is to live
are wringing out their hearts onto journal pages and wishing
to be his, her, their kind of pretty-funny-cute-perfect.

So I will stare out of windows and write in blood
and fall in love with every kind face I see.
I will keep myself from the bottom of the ocean.

1:26 p.m.

#FreeWriteFriday: Like A Mask

9:02 a.m.

We are screaming, screaming, screaming
all of us, screaming like the day we were born,
our bones begging for mercy as we pounded
our feet and heels onto the dance floor.

The flowers I let you weave into my hair are
dropping their petals under our bare feet,
and the entire warehouse smells like daisies
and clover and lavender and rosemary.

I love this open space and the dusty rafters and
the ragtag bunch of writhing, dancing bodies,
but mostly I love that when you look at me,
you can’t even tell when my hands are shaking

9:12 a.m.

#FreeWriteFriday: Frost Warning

10:52 a.m.

There is something about cold that likes to stick to him,
settling into the fibers of his sweater,
kissing his cheeks from now until lunchtime.

It’s the same way that my chest is a magnet
for aggressive voices and bitter undertones
of other people’s conversations.

I have gone running, tail between my legs,
to take a break for cigarettes I don’t smoke,
just to get away.

He is cold in my arms, the way your bed feels
when you haven’t been home in a long time.

Come to think of it,
it’s how he feels when he hasn’t been home
since the last time I held him.

Come home to me.
You can stay until dawn or
stay until the end of this song.

How can a boy with sunflower eyes
feel so much like ice in my veins?

11:02 a.m.

Note: #FreeWriteFriday is exactly what it sounds like. It first came on to my radar ages ago with Garrett Richie. Then Celia Ampel. Then Elise Schmelzer. I decided to jump on the train, because creative writing is where I first found my love for writing. Why not?