"I’m not too good with words."

"Yeah… neither am I."

This is always the case.

I am a hunter in a forest of nonsense.

Sam, sometimes I wonder if there are even enough words that exist in the human language to describe our state of being. I wish I could say so many things. That I could say so much more than "I am alone.” But how else can we say it? Jack Gilbert describes it like so:

Can you understand being alone so long

you would go out in the middle of the night

and put a bucket into the well

so you could feel something down there

tug at the other end of the rope?

But I am no poet. And I’m surely not a writer. How do we say what we feel the most when we feel it? Sometimes I wish we could communicate in animal noises. Conversation reduced to the purest essence of sound.

I would roar when I was frustrated. And yelp when I was sad. I could squeak when everything got dark. And hoot when I was already there. I would quack any time I felt crazy. And hum any time my heart swelled with storybook wind. No one would ever go mute! Cause our sounds would ring like little songs in the fields and the factories.

I could howl the whole night through and know that there would always be someone, somewhere, howling back.

And every night I'd hear the sweet, sweet symphony of the hollowed---of heroines, hello's, and howls.

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,

and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,

God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words

get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according

to which nation. French has no word for home,

and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people

in northern India is dying out because their ancient

tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost

vocabularies that might express some of what

we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would

finally explain why the couples on their tombs

are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands

of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,

they seemed to be business records. But what if they

are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve

Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.

O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,

as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.

Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts

of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred

pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what

my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this

desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script

is not language but a map. What we feel most has

no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

My dad told me that there is more to love than butterflies in my stomach, but if there were none to begin with then I'd never be happy.

He had good intentions, but now butterflies are gold and silver in my mind. I pain for past butterflies like true loves lost.

And no fluttering? No thanks.

Sometimes my heart starts beating and I worry it will burst out of my chest. I blush in fear that everyone around can hear the marching band within me, beating fast, fast, fast, against my blouse, between my ears. I tell it to calm down. Calm down, heart. You're making a scene.

Whether it be by choice or, more likely, by force, I've removed myself from the running, from every part of the days I knew. Like I'm some figurine being plucked up and moved from room to room of the doll house, eventually put back on the shelf, or cast away to the island of lost toys...

Here I am alone and there are no marching bands or butterflies and it's awful.

The sadness makes her fine, makes me happy.

Her old red sweater makes the whole valley ring,

makes my solitude gleam.

Loneliness is a terrible thing. You can’t dispose of it like old milk. It just spoils and spoils and spoils…everything. No one is alone. I say this once every morning and every night before I go to sleep. No one is alone. Yeah, loneliness fucks everyone up. You can kiss a boy and think that little rotting ghost will go away and never come back. But it does. And sometimes it comes in the form of another person. I never knew loneliness could be embodied in another person. And that loneliness could follow me everywhere I go…

Loneliness keeps showing up. He’s down the street, down the hall, down the stairs, on the phone… He’s everywhere. And every time I see him I just get so sad. And I tell him, Loneliness, please go away. I do not have time for you today. Or tomorrow. Please stop distracting me and just let me be. But he persists and persists. I let him lay down for a bit because I feel bad. He is so alone. But doesn’t he know that I’m alone too? And doesn’t he know that I can’t be with someone who is Loneliness. Please, boy, please leave and never come back.

I know you will come back tomorrow and the next day and the next. And I will lie today and tomorrow and all the days after that. I'll say things like, I have work to get done. But I know you can see me and I know that you can see I'm alone too. But stop following me, Loneliness. There can’t be more than one of us, ya know. It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes I think if loneliness had company, it wouldn’t be called loneliness anymore.

I think it would just be called Sadness. And I don’t think Sadness would be any better.

funny how our old age sneaks up on us like some shadow from behind. it's so gradual we don't even notice the wrinkles forming in our furrowed brows or that the sparkles in our eyes are fading ever so dim. i just hope that light hasn't burnt out all together because sam, i am not ready for grey hair and giving up. i'm holding out for a second great awakening of our spirits. maybe the fire in our hearts wasn't put out with our maturity, but instead follows a cycle of change, like the seasons. the sun came out last saturday and i saw daffodils lining the streets and my green hills returned. i hope the sunlight stays and reflects off of my heavy eyes. i hope the sidewalk chalk will bring good news before new rainfall washes it away again.

i told him i was trying to be his friend. he said that's something he wasn't very good at. i asked what he was afraid of and he just looked at me with so many sleepless nights and frozen lips and skeletons in the closet. sam, is that just the way the world works? the taffy pulls of our young heartstrings and the apple slice smiles from yesterday disappear while the closet door will never stay shut and our mistakes seep through the cracks, travel through walls like ghosts to haunt us to our fragile and aging bones until we die.

If there's one thing that I learned when I was still a child, it's to be alone.

Sam, I have a lot of pride. Pride with a capital P. But I think college has gotten the best of me. I'm regressing to old ways. Like when I was 7 and hid in the closet under the stairs. When I'd collect all my favorite things and just sit there for hours. No one could see me, or touch me. And I could turn off the lights and close my eyes and create my own security behind the coats, and the blankets, behind the vacuum, behind the boxes. I'm 18 and my knees are still just as shaky. Here I am, still playing the same disappearing act. I used to be filled with so many tricks. Only now I keep a lot of things hidden in my sleeves and journal and under my tongue...

Sam, I used to have a lot of pride. I didn't use to wait around wishing so many things. And now, look at me, just waiting, and waiting...

Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.

...but put me on the stand Sam, cause you know I'll just deny, deny, deny.

I met a man today, and he told me something pretty strange
There's always somebody saying something
He said, "The world was as soft as lace."

But I don't love anyone.

"I'm nobody, Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody.

How public like a frog

To tell one's name the livelong day

To each admiring bog."

Sam,

we aren't getting any younger.

so i wish i didn't have to rely on my imaginary friends for company

do you know how much it hurts to live vicariously?

but it seems i've become insignificant to everyone but myself

I've ignorantly overrated solitude for so long

Now to wake up one day and realize how few people i've let really know me

oh if only the world of my imagination was finally enough

I'm sorry, but i can't take one for the team

if it means hiding myself from the world

that's just too much for them to ask.

"I wish I were a Warhol silk screen hanging on the wall. Or little Joe or maybe Lou. I'd love to be them all. All New York's broken hearts and secrets would be mine. I'd put you on a movie reel, and that would be just fine."

...to be continued at a time when I am not facing the pain of a three-hour night's sleep

and so it goes, she's lost control. i feel inclined to ask a question or two. how is it that we've become the people that we are? the people we will be forever more. i love making tea and watching movies and dancing. i am hopelessly romantic and i paint. i sleep in past noon, i am not always polite, and the only jewelry i wear are rings. i am violently passionate about so much. and the world spins on and on and you have your own quirks and traits. And how did I end up doing what I am doing, sitting where I am sitting? Our choices, sometimes blind or misguided or rash, our choices guide us through our lives and through this world. So are we in control? Or is it some tangle of interactions and influences that wash us out to sea, wrenching us loose from any control we may have otherwise depended on. suppose we are all in control of our own lives, then we are to blame for our own unhappiness and our regrets. well then maybe i'll forfeit my control to the elements, just to clear my name.

There are certain hours of the night when I wake to the sound of a train. It roars right through my apartment. At times it feels as if it will lift me out of bed. All that earsplitting thunder and then silence. A quiet that can't be captured in prose or likened to certain kinds of weather. A calm that defies even thought. Just the purest absence of noise.

Perhaps souls have the ability to leap from womb to womb? Like invisible tree frogs.

I am alone, Exley. I am very much alone in a city that at times makes people feel old and used. But I am somehow lucky. Even during the darkest hour I manage to always pull through.

Sam, the fishes in my belly are flopping around like they never knew how to live out of water. I asked them, "Fishes, haven't you ever seen life beyond the sea?" And they said no. I told them I hadn't either until several months ago. And they asked if life gets any easier. I said no. I said, "I'm still flopping around like you, and sometimes I can't stand it anymore. There are nights I wake up in the middle of a lake somewhere." They looked at me like I was crazy. I told them one day they'd understand. And one day I'd find them sleeping in a lake, or a pond, or even a pool. And they'd laugh and they'd sing. Just as lost, and alone, and crazy as me.

"Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy"

I'm caught in a funny state right now. I'm positively in love with the clicking of my boots down the street, how smooth it feels to run my tongue over my teeth, how I can't keep my shoulders still when the music's on. Have you ever seen the the wind blow open the folders of sanity, loose files flying to the ground round your figure? You are overcome, you are overwhelmed. Or if you know what's good for you, you should be.

Oh Sam, nothing's in the right place and so much has been lost in the winter (6 more weeks, did you know?), but for today I'm not going to resist the trap. I feel good and I don't feel much else. Who needs to! My personal storm system has been outrun. Aha! And maybe I don't have anywhere to go, but I'd choose a moving target over cowering in my closet any day.

I've spent my days searching for a movie or a song to tell me someone understands, but pop culture can't reach me. Stories won't replace living. So I've got a grocery list the length of the mississippi and my to-do's stretch from this kitchen counter to your dorm room and, I accept the challenge.

INSANITY! Who do I think I am? I didn't think I was the kind of girl to get derailed so easily. I didn't think I was the kind to melt into self-pity and self-proclaimed depression, a mess more gooey than any brownie. Who do you think I am? I am intact. Sam, I am strong, but not bulletproof. Do me a favor? From today on, don't just watch and wait while I let the bugs crawl under my skin.

or does it?

"Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality."

We are young and old and everything in between. But mostly we are just old who want to be young. And we put on our leather skirts and cougar makeup, fighting for that last piece of youth still in sight. Sam, I think all we really have left is that little hopeful ghost wandering in the dust-filled corners of our mind. It's so cute the way it drifts from room to room. Peaking at memories and other things. Like what could be or what could have been. I feed it thoughts from time to time. I know I'm not insane. I wish so many things that I know I can not have them all. All we can do is tuck them in their beds and kiss them goodnight and tell them that one day they'll wake up and the world will find a place for them. For now I say goodnight, sweet dreams.

The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you should die, are you not certain of reawakening among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.

'You are no longer trembling, carcass.' This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions.

Existence is elsewhere.