7.28

I lean over the table, staring out across the lake, eyes squinted against the glare and the potential shame about to roil across the table to me. I have only been asking questions, but I have been asking questions with hard edges, words what cut their way through too much and reveal the underneath. I'm not sure my companion was ready to be revealed. I think that at any moment it's just as likely as not that the careful façade of confidence between us, this edifice of rank or title or whatever else you or we might care to call it may become more cumbersome than it's possible to believe, and we will be forced to rebuild its foundations, as we are incapable of shedding its weight. I shift in my seat, not to get a better angle of protection from the glint of the sun on the lake before us nor because I am uncomfortable, exactly, but just to have something to do. My companion hasn't spoken in an uncomfortable long time—two seconds of dreary silence. For the two of us, in this place, with this relationship, and under the burden of this compassing pall of confidence, two seconds is forever to go without saying the next witticism. I am shifting in my seat to brace against the answer, if it comes. I know that my question carries with it an imposition and an implication, of power lost and wrong done, and I just want to know what happens thirty seconds from now so I can prepare what I can say ten seconds from now so I can feel confident again two seconds ago.
My companion clears his throat.  I realize I have been holding my breath.

7.27

I have three days to write a proposal for a big paper I want to write for my master's program. I have nothing planned and no time to do such a thing. I have ruined myself utterly and I feel guilty and afraid. They turned down the project I actually wanted to write and now I am left flapping freely in the breeze.
I want to feel persecuted, as though no one understands me. I fear that everyone understands me, however, and no one cares.

7.22

I have seen people so beautiful that they take my breath away. They deserve to have their whole selves hung in a museum where the wrinkles around their eyes and the long stretch of their fingers and the waft of their hair can be preserved in oil paint or pastel or watercolor or silver in emulsion forever, until tomorrow, when they are a masterpiece again.
I want these artworks, but I cannot myself make such things. The world is far too cruel for that.

7.22

Which shoe did we lose today? Left or right doesn't really seem to matter when all you have is one. It's curious how such petty distinctions fade away. Even your most unthought-of patterns fall apart. What foot do you shoe first? Do you tie your shoelaces so the knot falls left, or right? Which foot, new-shod, takes the first step?

These things are now immaterial. All that matters is my first and most pressing question: which shoe did you lose today?

7.18

Clark leaned over, well into Emma's space, pushing that infernal camera right up against the plexiglass. She had woken him, not the camera, to see the sunrise over the ocean, a thin band of orange fire that faded so quickly to ultramarine that she wasn't even sure how that pallate could mix so quickly and yet remain so distinct. Looking out across the vast ocean of hot, orange cloudtops past Clark's excited fist, Emma saw shapes of nothing drifting by, spinning and disintegrating, and the shape of her future, too excited by sharing the moment to actually look, slowly solidifying.
The ring still felt heavy and new as she spun it on her finger. She said her head against the arm he had snaked behind her head, ruining the stability of his shot momentarily. She kissed the inside of his elbow and went back to wondering how orange becomes blue.

7.16

I never have discovered exactly why it is you said that to me. All I know is that it didn't really but a second to turn around and shoot me down. Four words were the bullets, and the holes they left just won't heal.
There's some small part of me wishes you'd come on back to finish the job, just so I could get a look at your face one last time while I was dying. But that ain't like you. Only time you ever turned around was just that once, to shoot me down.

Sometimes, when the wind is fit to tear grass out the ground, you can hear it singing though my open heart. Don't mind it much. It reminds me of you.

7.14b

Sometimes, I fantasize about someone finding my diary and devouring the pages, savaging their buttery tone, drinking my years like claret, nourished by my secretive self. What if you were to find and read me, my unwalled self? You would find it too full of gristle, too poorly seasoned, too dishonest. I fantasize about it, so I am not willing to reveal too much of myself in it. I am curiously more open in my personal conversations than I am with myself. Alas, I am no five-course dinner, but a pie in a diner window, glossy, fake, and rotating.

7.14

I am not crying. I feel hollowed out. I should be asleep. She's not all I can think about. I wish I could stop thinking about her.

[I wish I could have met Catullus. Maybe we could have been friends.]

7.11

I can feel all my muscles. I decided to ride my bike, and I went out for an hour. A simple hour, surely, wouldn't kill me, right? And yet, here I am. Aching my way to bed so I can feel like I'm dying until I have to go to work.

7.10

I caught you looking at me, today. Once.
I had to glance at you a hundred times, and I did it willingly, daring myself to not stare. Added together, I studied your lips, your ears, your fingernails, your toes. I studied the way your skin comes together at the corners of your eyes and the open glow of life in the warp and weft of your hair. I added it all up and wished I could paint.
I would paint you looking at me.

7.4

I tell people it is important to have positive self-image, but mine wavers between alright and awful.

I advise others to work their hardest and take naps in the middle of the day.

I have strong feelings on kindness and love, but I struggle with both.