Darling.

You're my partner in crime on failed hotel pool romps, with my back up against the brick, spilling pop on city grates during garbage strikes and cherry flavour shot stickiness.

You're the Clyde to my Bonnie (circa Beatty and Dunaway because, like me, you wouldn't have it any other way) in Floridian seafoam green, clutching my pool blue fingernails and holding bottles of wine on my couch. Telling you stories of worlds I've never let anyone understand.

I'm in my war bride dress wearing a half-stupid smile running into my room with you, leaving traces behind that napkins could fix but in the meantime it'll make us laugh, laugh, laugh and I want to laugh with you forever.

We're in a bubble with books about Hollywood vs. Aliens, sunflowers and azaleas on the windowsills smiling at us while we curse my late alarm and break into someone else's place.

And as I sat there with salty hands and cupcake lips, shelling pistachios to the drifting sound of the gates going up next door, I knew in my heart that I've never really loved like this before.

July.

Diet Coke
making out in public
Californian red wine
Lucky Strike Mexico
scary movies
wonderful sex
answering e-mails from mom
photo shoots
perfect skin
Rolling Stones
boxes of office supplies
music videos
bathroom bang trims
late wakeups for work
early bedtimes for two
new sheets
broken paper bag groceries
typing things out
submitting poems
acrylic paint inquiries
mock-ups of banners
no time for my real job
writing a real book
meeting the parents
metric conversions
happiness that's so full it hurts
$4 pints on patios
festival weekends
being so into this
letters from the editor
wait times
simultaneous spreadsheets
flying monkeys
drunk koalas
walks for more wine
blue nail polish
quick dry
stolen sunglasses I miss
high waisted skirts that pinch
being in love. love. love. love. love. love. love.

Suburb.

night after a night of falling on
front lawns
in the expanse of this place's yellow lined pavements
and our lips that can't stop touching and pulling
at the throats of all of our friends in our blissful
reveries on the
front lawns
of where you grew up and you showed me
coloured concretes and red-bricked buildings
and birds of your father's
and kitchen sinks, dishwasher fillings,
interrogations lovingly spent over cups of
coffee and I took another sip, saw
into a flash of light, same
colour eyes and I think you could
really love me
after all.

The Sixteenth of July.

I’ve got offices to clear out and debts to call back and coffee change to be handed over to the ones who couldn’t for a second know what I mean about any of it (likewise, I can’t really bring myself to do any of it). To spend any more days, yet another day, with my legs at an appropriate 90 ninety degree angle while sitting and my fingers click-clack-clocking the time away on words just like these words and other words that mean even less than these words, it’s all so unbearably nothing sometimes, isn’t it? Nothing’s anything except pictures printed and pasted on my books of paper while on someone else’s dollar, and where are all of my morals now? The guilt hasn’t set in yet here and it’s been years. But oh, how these weeks sometimes fly.

So last night they watched from the step as I made my stumbling stop carrying bags of dryer sheets and cheap wine, and I expect they saw through the untruths that even now I don’t regret telling. Sometimes the change came fast and sometimes the change comes slow but most certainly of all we must, absolutely must at this point know that it’s going to. It’s going to happen to all of us. Unspoken but not unacknowledged, the awkwardness won’t really go away and baby I’m just a fool tearing all my heart out just for you.

The documentarian to it all, I consider that I may only do what I do because I want you to know that this was a time, is a time, when standing on dark July-hot pavement, covering wine-stain smiles and looking in each other’s eyes was all we had and all we needed. Refilling Evian bottles on broken headphone nights, tales of bike accidents and how someone else has ended up coming along for the ride. We need these moments like the sun needs love to shine itself upon in these recent glorious mornings.

So don’t count it out yet, go back to the drawing board and searching for your replacements as I’ve heard you’ve done so many times in your many moves around these streets that are so much smaller than they first appear. Don’t count me out yet, but when there comes a time that it’s the only thing left to do, just know that I’ve saved all of these words for you.

Help I'm Alive

To give a full and complete rundown of how my recent staycation was spent would require far more time, words and mental capacity than I'm currently willing to give it. Yes, there were the requisite club parties and cottage trips, purchases of $4 stars and stripes sunglasses and afternoons of finishing entire books on city rooftops, meandering bike rides and long-awaited brunches with best friends. So on and so forth. It was all fantastic, obviously. How could it not be when my life so unfailingly is these days?

But the most "unexpected and brilliant thing" also happened (and I quote these words because they're his originally, not mine).

I fell properly and totally, completely and surely, absolutely and fully IN LOVE.

I hesitate to use the above "i" and "l" words because, in my typical Cancerian fashion, I'm impossibly careful with them, likely to the point of often failing to admit to feeling them for quite a while after I actually do. In this case I do know, more certainly than I usually know most anything, that it's it, it's amazing, it's putting an unwavering smile on my face, it's everything I've wanted with someone for longer than I've even likely known that I've wanted it and IT'S FUCKING TERRIFYING.

I've fallen, fallen, fallen. And since this has all transpired I just can't help but feel as though I'm falling down into a crater, and one which is much deeper and longer and farther than I've ever been in before. Then again, I'm not really falling down - that would imply something apart from what it is, which is (again, in his words) one of the most brilliant and unexpected things that's ever happened to me. The clothes hanger stuck in my mouth making me wake up to an eye-roll-inducing expression on those around me tells me so.

I'm letting the ubiquitous guard down. I'm scared beyond any fear I've ever felt and happier than I've quite possibly ever been. I could write more about this, and have in fact done so in my new notebook...shitshitshit, what did I say about the dawn of every new notebook in my life?! Seems as though the transition between that red piece of shit and this new silver leather one has proved my point yet again...

But anyways. Just thought it would be fair to let you all know that my general misanthropy may be put on hold for a while. Or based from how this feels right now, forever.

Ugh, I even make myself sick with this FYI.

Staycationing.

And it couldn't possibly be more magnificent.

Details to follow...