Girl

At one point, I sat back here with a girl. A girl and a pair of jeans. I wrote our names on the inside pockets with a red ballpoint pen and a small paragraph underneath that I didn't show her. Since then I've cut these jeans at the knee and washed them many times, so the red pen is all gone. At least, I can't find it. 

When we were here, we wrote stuff. Strange, disconnected stuff. I kept feeling like the girl in the book I was about to buy, or maybe that's me looking back on it now, associating the two when I wasn't actually there yet myself.

There are places in this bookstore i can't go anymore. There's a cubby hole in the back where we sat and drew pictures and didn't look at each other. We found an orange peel with "i hate oranges" written onto the milky inside skin of the peel tucked behind a fake plant. And it's not like I hadn't sat there with other girls before her, but it's her chewed down fingernails and the notebook with the taj mahal on the front that I never saw again that make it stick in my head. 

She was so cold back then. Physically cold, her brain malleable, but tired. I didn't know what to do with it, our potential. I saw lines spiraling out like road maps from our temples but each line I tried to travel ended abruptly in zero space. It was an immensely frustrating process. 

My head hurts. I can't just keep sitting here like this, imagining myself talking to you. Fighting, pushing, screaming for an answer. I want a way out of this but not in the way that you think, and you probably didn't love me in the first place but I know you felt something, something strong and visceral and as close to touching as atoms or thoughts could ever be. I want to lay my head down in my hands and tear out my hair and skin, leave nothing but bone because my fingers can't break into bone, or at least I've never tried. Will I have pulled off enough of my humanity by then to cease to feel? To sympathize with the waves with the rivers and the tumultuous molten lava flowing, flowing. But you're just a glove now I glove I stole and used to keep one hand warm, two hands, yours and mine. A glove we spilled coffee on coffee that the blonde boy served us, Joe was his name, whatever happened to him? Joseph.