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April 12 - April 14, 2023
I miss you, I blink in Morse code. I still love you, say the turned-down edges of his perfect mouth.
The physical distance between us is meagre, but somehow still a forest grows between. Pine trees of mistakes so tall we can’t see over them and rivers of things we didn’t say so wide we can’t get around.
I want to make him laugh forever but I can’t because he broke forever and still I fight the urge to kiss him anyway.
“So which are you tonight, her guard dog or her boyfriend?” BJ shifts in front of me a little, gives him a tight smile. “I’m whatever the fuck she needs me to be.”
Hate this box she’s put me in, hate the walls she’s built around her. Hate these bones of a relationship, but it’s all we have left. And it’s the best part of my day.
for a few seconds she lies there, pretending to push me to my side of the bed, but really we’re just trying to hold each other in the ways we have left, and it lasts three, four, five, six—six seconds before her eyes go big with remembering the way I hurt her two and a bit years ago and she rolls off of me, bottom lip heavy in a way that’s not fair when you can’t kiss it better.
Have you ever had someone stare you dead in the eyes and wearing all the ways you hurt them? It’s fucking intense.
The lights go off and she stares at me through the darkness a few seconds longer, and I love her in the dark. I mean, fuck it—I down and out love her in all spectrums of light, even the absence of it.
When his grandfather died, he started taking his grandmother out on weekly dates. He still does, actually.
Painful things can still be beautiful things, in case you didn’t know.
He’s crushed. He’s crushed he’s crushed me. This is an old dance we do. A ritual, almost. Breaking our hearts open on the altar of each other.
the poetry
It happens because people are careless and callous and casual with hearts and emotions, and those people are dangerous to be involved with and so even if you love them, you shouldn’t love them, because nothing is worth feeling how he made me feel, and there was no guaranteeing that what happened before wouldn’t happen again because the word of a cheater, she said, is void.
The most beautiful boy in every room, the great love of my life—how many loves do you get in a lifetime? I remember wondering that. How many people will look at me like he does, not just like I’m the sun but like I’m the whole goddamn universe.
I remember resentment pounding through my body and then I remember it, like a physical punch in the gut, how much I loved him. Really loved him. To the bone, loved him. Cut me and I’d bleed him. How much I needed him, still needed him, would forever, always, never couldn’t even if I tried, needed him.
his chest rising and falling in a rhythm that was the soundtrack of my youth and I’d never been more grateful to hear it.
“If you know who he is, you know who she is. She is his family.”
He’s a time bomb for me, do you see now? He’ll hurt me. He’ll always hurt me. I’ll never be safe with him, even if I’m always safe next to him. So, it doesn’t matter if I love him—which I don’t—but if I did, it doesn’t matter, even now. Because loving him is the same thing as tossing the keys to my heart to a valet without a driver’s licence. He’ll drive me off a cliff.
She doesn’t look like Parks. No one does. That’s the interminable problem of my existence post Magnolia Parks. She’s the only one. Only one whose shit I’ll put up with, the only one who fucks me over and around and who I’ll stick around for, the only person who’s ever had my heart in a headlock.
It wasn’t just what happened, it was an absence of him and the way my life had grown around him, like ribs around a heart.
And sometimes I wish I could go back in time and tell little me to fucking run—that this girl is going to ruin you, she’ll be all you think of, all the time, she’s going to bake biscuits, grind up your heart and use it for sprinkles, she’ll hurt you and you’ll hurt her, and you’ll never, fucking ever, get past her. But I can’t. And even if I could, what parts would I change? The parts where I had her? Never.
What a mind fuck it is to comfort the person who just blew your whole heart open with a rifle. Carnage everywhere, men down, blood spilled.
For so many years, his pain was my pain. But that pain, the one he was crying about then, was mine. He was crying my tears, feeling what he had done to me, broken by his own actions. He cried into my neck and said sorry so many times, the word lost meaning . . . the word stopped sounding like a word.
I learned to look him in the eye again, I learned not to cry every time I left him again, I learned how to breathe through him flirting with other people, I realised we could still talk to each other without using words, and somehow, in the bloodshed of it all, I found my friend.
Everything wonderful, everything magical, everything painful, everything beautiful and spectacular and wretched and defining that has happened to me happened with him. And I hate him for that.
Then the world goes to black. We lock eyes. And this sheet of impenetrable glass slides up from the ground between us. We can’t touch and we can’t talk and there’s nothing to say anyway besides him screaming through the glass that he misses me and me screaming back that I miss him too and him screaming that he’s sorry and me screaming that it’s not enough. Our faces are frozen in what feels like hopeless love but couldn’t be, because I don’t love him anymore. I cannot.
“Any suggestions?” He smiles down at me merrily, his hands in his jacket pockets. I shake my head. I like him telling me what to do. He smiles and nods. “There’s a place about a ten-minute walk from here—” And then he does that incredibly sexy, incredibly grown-up guy thing where he puts his hand on the small of my back, but definitely not my arse, to guide me someplace.
Screamingg
“You felt so much bigger than us then.” He gives me a look. “I’m still so much bigger than you.” And I don’t know why that was a sexy thing to say, but it was.
AND WASSSS
“You’ll come to places with me?” I ask. He nods. “Hold my hand? Take me shopping?” “Yes and yes.” I bat my eyes at him. “You’ll kiss me?” He snorts. “Yeah, I’ve been trying to all night.” “Oh,” I lean across the table. “I’ll make it easy for you then.” He smiles a little as he leans in, brushes his mouth against mine and kisses me softly.
my roman empire
“Fuck!” I yell again. “Shit! Fuck. Fuck!” Henry squints at me. “Are you having a seizure?”
HAHA
it was a supercut of you and them in every way and position my mind could come up with, trying to imagine what the fuck they did for you that I couldn’t do. Because I would have done anything for you—” Her eyes are too heavy for me to hold on to anymore. I feel sick. “And I thought you knew that. And I think you did? Didn’t you? Surely you did.” She’s looking for an answer I can’t give. “All this time I thought it was me, something wrong with me, some deficiency in me, something I couldn’t give you, but now, having seen you, seen what you’re like when I’m not there—it’s not.” Her voice goes
...more
shots fired
“Don’t bullshit me.” She’s annoyed. “No one needs as much sex as you have, and even if they do, which they don’t, by the way, because if they needed it, they’d be an addict. Are you an addict?” She gives me a long look that makes me feel uneasy about myself. “But let’s say, for shits and giggles, you did need it—you don’t need to tell her every time you have it. You tell her to hurt her.” She folds her arms over her chest. “You have sex with other people and tell her because when you do, it makes her sad and her being sad about that validates your feelings for her. She still cares. She
...more
Mic? Dropped.
He laughs and pushes some hair behind my ears, looking at me in a way that, if I didn’t know it was fake, might have made my heart go funny but my heart is just fine, thanks. Maybe just a murmur.
Yeah....ok.
“Am I going to get a black eye from this?” he asks with a laugh. I glance up with a grimace. “Probably.” He walks over to me, ducks down so we’re level, brushes his lips against mine. “Worth it.”
Tom has my entire heart.
Tom pulls my seat out for me, slides me in. Paili mouths at me, oh my God. And I look at her like, I know.
“But you had a girlfriend then,” BJ tells him, in case he’d forgotten. “So, once again, bit inappropriate . . .” “Sure, yeah I guess. But sorry—” Tom pauses—“didn’t you cheat on her?”
My soul has left my body
I remember looking around at the group of people assembled in front of me, piled on my bed in a hotel room I ran away to in Paris with my boyfriend, and thinking—maybe they’re what family actually is. Maybe they’re the ones who have been my family all along. Maybe it was these people who had raised me this whole time.
“I don’t want to look stupid,” he tells me. “Don’t make me look stupid, yeah?”
Ughhh
Then Tom tilts her face up with one finger—he’s so fucking cool, I hate him—and he kisses her. I haven’t seen them kiss before. It’s strange, the feeling it gives me. Nothing at first. Just . . . nothing . . . and then it was like someone lobbed my fucking arm off with a machete. Nothing, and then everything. Everything bleeding out everywhere, dying right here on a bed of peonies with the love of my life on the other side of the room with a man who isn’t me, who’s actually fucking probably finally worthy of her and the bleeding out starts to feel too real. That thing in your brain that sounds
...more
Our eyes caught and I felt like she was reaching out for me, like she thought I was far away, but I wasn’t.
She knows. She always knows me, and I always know her, and it’s probably unhealthy and it’s probably fucked up because it’s not just that I can’t move past her, it’s that even if I could figure out how to do it—I wouldn’t anyway.
“Whatever the fuck you need, Parks.” That’s what he said to me. That’s what he always says to me.
My father edges closer towards me, jaw tight, fist clenched. “I swear to God, Magnolia, if you leaked it, I’ll—” “You’ll what?” says Tom, stepping between us and shoving my father back a bit. My father is quite a large man to be honest, but Tom is bigger. His eyes are fierce, his jaw is set, and his face isn’t one to be trifled with. “Finish the sentence,” Tom dares him, glaring down at him.
🤭🤭🤭
I’m less fucked up when I’m with her. More grounded. Weird, I know, because she is the least grounded person in the entire fucking Commonwealth, but she just does something to me—I don’t know what.
“Christian,” Paili tries to diffuse the mounting tension, and rolls her eyes dismissively. “How would you even know?” And then he says this looking square into Magnolia’s eyes: “Because I know what she looks like when she’s having an orgasm.”
CHRISTIANNNN
“Really?” He blinks. I tilt my head and he stares at me, a bit incredulous. “You don’t like fucking with people?” His brows are up, eyes dark, and I can tell before he starts he’s about to come in swinging all over again. “You’ve dated, like, five guys in the past two and a half years, present company excluded, and you weren’t fucking around with them?” I open my mouth to say something, but he cuts me off. “You were fucking around with me.” “No, I wasn’t—” “Then what were you doing?” he asks, sitting up, swinging his legs to face me. My eyes pinch. “You know what I was doing.” “No.” He shakes
...more
Like the universe just gave me the time machine I’ve been praying for all this time and they’re giving me another shot. And it’s a trick shot. I’ve got to ricochet the disaster of what we’ve become off of the glimmering light of what we were and land it in what we could be again. Both eyes closed, one hand behind my back. This is my Hail Mary, and this has to work.
The writingggg
And with that, the finite window closes. The time machine the universe gave me catches on fire, collapses in on itself. The trick shot fails. The disaster of what we’ve become blitzes right past what we were, circles the drain of what we could be a couple of times before it teeters off to the side and lands smack bang right where we don’t want to be. I fucked my Hail Mary.
He takes one look at me and in two steps crosses the distance.
Sorry that was hot
