baby blue sedan

I’ve been (barely) living, slow like clock hands during the final stretch; a hiccup in time. Currently spending all of my time staring at maps, measuring the distance, the difference, praying my feet will find solid ground before momentum knocks me completely down, writing, you, writing you. West coast weather, southern boys, yawning, staying awake all night. Forgetting what it’s like to not be anxious or to not miss someone or to not be so tired all of the time. Life is pretty funny sometimes. More often than most people want to realize, I think. Some people just don’t get its sense of humor, that’s how I see it. Because it’s not always “haha” funny, it’s not always “keeling over on the bookstore floor ‘til your eyelashes are glistening with tears” funny. Sometimes it’s “walking all night in the rain with a broken flashlight and a broken heart and sleeping on the front porch till the morning comes to wake you up” funny. Sometimes it’s a series of ironic somethings that have you feeling like the universe is playing pranks on you. Currently wishing I was doing anything but wasting all of this time wondering. Currently letting my tongue roll the ‘r’ in risky like it doesn’t terrify me. Currently, Baby Blue Sedan, I am doing the best that I can.

--jenna2step

hot and cold ghosts

all of the things i’ve got aren’t quite what they once were. have you ever swam in the mississippi before? have you ever bought strawberry preserves from a great white porch off the side of the road? have you ever counted the stars that make up the little dipper on the shore of the gulf of mexico? have you ever stolen walnuts from your neighbors tree in november when the leaves are warm and gold? sometimes i opened my eyes to yours being full of smoke, to fevers and rivers and secrets i’ve never told. i used to know a boy that called me darlin. we ate sweet potato fries in the back of your pick-up with all of the dreamy static stuck between us and a cigarette pressed against your lips when you told me “c’mere baby.” and i kept thinking “bury me here in your backseat, bury me here in the sweet tasting autumn heat, bury me in the backyard underneath the leaves and let the stars build a grave out of me, bury me in a place where it’s safe to stay for a little while longer and no one will ever have to know” i forget most of it now. i forget a lot of things. but sometimes i can still hear your always slightly out of tune guitar strings. the way your wild blue eyes cut everything they saw into quarters. i figured one day i’d be replaced by a pack of cigarettes, a fifth of vodka, another girl in your passenger seat, and those nights that’ll keep secrets better than any of your friends. but you caught me sunstruck and right where you wanted me. you caught me watching from the cracks of your broken windows, you caught me hiding where i was smiling into your sheets when you told me stories about achilles regretting everything and how you used to think that the red spots you saw when you closed your eyes were souls trapped between this life and whatever was waiting for us on the other side. remember that tuesday in summer when a boy died driving home one night? i was quiet for days. i kept wondering what he saw right before he passed. i always think about those kind of things. about how maybe the end is just across the bed spread. i forget what day it was or what shirt you were wearing or what i had said. but i remember it was four in the afternoon and i loved you. that’s when you asked me if i was ready to leave and never look back. “alls you gotta do is get in the truck, darlin.”

--Ashli Wood

I'm just a vessel waiting to be filled

All quotes from Story People

Whatever you do, she said, don't wait too long or you'll have to start from the very beginning & those new bodies are always kind of a crapshoot.

I've read a lot of books, so I know bunches of stuff that sounds like it could be true.

The surprising thing is that a beehive hairdo in marble is not that much heavier than the real thing.

I'm just a vessel waiting to be filled, she said as long as it mixes well with the stuff already in here

He wouldn't eat lobster the first time. He said it looked too dangerous & he couldn't be sure it wasn't watching from the astral plane or wherever lobsters went when they tired of being food items.

I can imagine it working out perfectly, I said. I can't, she said & I said no wonder you're so stressed.

I will stop complaining when I'm dead, she said, so I got out my day planner & told her I'd love to pencil that in

Getting as comfortable as possible in the moments before she has to be anxious again

This is a story that usually I write in white ink, but most people miss it & start to read too much into it & think it says something about life they couldn't figure out themselves. So, now I write only with stuff people can read & say things as clearly as I can. Like this: don't believe anyone who writes with white ink on white paper. They have too much to hide.

frustrated because it's going too fast to see but if you could see it, it wouldn't make any sense because you'd be looking too close

I know I don't go to church as often as I should, she said, but I still wear pantyhose & that should count for something.

secure in the knowledge that it's hard to ruin mashed potatoes

How do you know? she said & the answers fell like feathers, or the first snowflakes of November, Light & without words I looked in her eyes & smiled. You just know, I said.

I was going to live simply & give away all my money to the poor, she said, until I figured out then I'd be poor, so the simple thing was just to keep it. I like it when things make sense like that, she added.

white noise

you are fucking up. there are rules to this. you do not get caught up. you do not knot things around yourself. this is what happens when you do. don’t ever fucking do this again. you have to keep yourself at a safe distance. because there are no priorities, there are only options. you do not open these kinds of doors because they will always close behind you. that means that both the danger and the excitement exist on the peripheral. that makes the doses small, but it also keeps the ball in your court. this is the only way the game can be played. you have to cut out all of the factors which could gather between you and what you want. this is the way these things work. and what you want can never, at any time, be more valuable to you than what you already have. it can only be some glimmering possibility on the side that you will either take without ever needing or easily shrug off without ever regretting. this is the way it works. these are the rules. and nobody else will ever understand them the same way as you. but this is the only way.

--Ashli Wood

on letting go.

Winter found my bones early this year. I’ve been shivering for a week straight, standing on my front porch wishing the sun would light a fire under my skin and make me warm again. I didn’t think I would cry this much, but every morning the salt clinging to my eyelashes greets the day, and I am trying so hard to just wipe it away. We agreed on this: goodbye. But my body’s got a memory that my muscles keep and there are places where you plucked the rocks out of me. They found their way back and now I’m heavy with all the weight I learned to love without. My fingers don’t want to uncurl themselves from the promises we tucked under each other’s loose edges, the places I let you pick apart with your quiet Latin fire—the parts of me you pried upwards. I wanted to keep us safe, close at hand and unchanging, but you’re not mine. I wrapped my winter heart up inside your summer bones and found a home; now I’m cold. Crying into the bend of my elbow like the world won’t know and I can trick sleep into finding me, I was wrong. You were wronged. And I will miss you at my right hand, the gaps you filled, the months you spent, the parts of me I let you keep. I said “my heart is breaking, Bird” and you stuttered something chaotic but beautiful, like bird wings, fluttering.
--jenna2step

Gravity was a form of nostalgia.

All quotes by author Lorrie Moore

"I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up."

--'Anagrams'

"I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that."

--'Anagrams'

"When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with..."

--'Birds of America: Stories'

"She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane. "

--'Like Life'

"I was too fresh from childhood. Subconsciously, my deepest brain still a cupboard of fairy tales, I suppose I believed that if pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something to deserve it. I had a young girl's belief that this kind of negative aging would never come to me. Death would come to me - I knew this from reading British poetry. But the drying, hunching, blanching, hobbling, fading, fattening, thinning, slowing? I would just not let that happen to moi."

"I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - not bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it any less lonely."

"Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not."

--'A Gate at the Stairs'

"Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply."

--'A Gate at the Stairs'

"Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost."

--'A Gate at the Stairs'

they looked like strong hands.

We woke with leaves in our hair. I don’t remember what month it was, but I know the sun stung us and we both squinted our eyes like we didn’t understand. Your arms were sturdy like the limbs of an old tree I couldn’t ever find. Somewhere past the cemetery, somewhere past the maple that fell during that lightning storm, somewhere past the tall weeds and blackberries, you hid like a secret garden. There were times I just barely caught you disappearing into it, but the entrance closed just as soon as I talked myself into following you.

This is a chalky metaphor for all of things you kept from me. You used to call me out like that, always taking the words I grew like vines across my meaning and unbraiding them, flattening them out. “You are trying to say you’re afraid.” “You wrote this about loss.” “This is a letter to say you’re leaving, isn’t it?” Paring down my branches and just pulling down the fruit, you made my dimensions flat. I let you unknot me and you got lost in the strands.

--jenna2step