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"when faces called flowers float out of the ground

and breathing is wishing and wishing is having-

but keeping is doubting and downward and never..."

ee cummings

there is a boy that is soft in all the places that i am hard and i am madly, madly in love with the idea of liking him. he is light where i am dark, is pleased and pleasant and caring and kind when i am mean and cold but i do not love him and i will not love him because for all the things that he has done right he has also fallen in love with me.

i wished for him for days, in the quiet privacy of my room and in my diary and in texts sent to friends describing the perfect boy. there is nothing wrong with him except for the fact that he thinks that i am right for him and that is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous; i do not want to be right for anyone, i just want to charm and then flee, charm and flee, charm and flee, a repetitive motion of the waves against the sand.

now that i have him i do not want him.

on teenage girls + why they're not that bad

let me be frank: i'm sick and tired of old white dudes who make fun of teenage girls. whether it's mimicking of the way that we speak- "like, omg, that's literally the best thing ever" - to calling us vain and self-absorbed, middle-aged men on the internet love to pick at the things that we like and do and say. the number of times a tweet mocking selfies and starbucks and the use of instagram to garner attention has appeared on my timeline is sad and disgusting and makes me pissed.

teenage girls are people, too- important people. young women are the leading linguistic innovators in the world- the speech patterns you make fun usually turn into common vocal inflections half a decade after we start using them. the use of "uptalk" (ending every sentence in a question? which is usually attributed to teenage girls?) is now found in dads ordering food, communicating with people, as a way to make them seem less intimidating. and it's not seen as stupid as they do it, because a) they're men, and b) they're not fresh-faced + youthful.

i think that this is the thing that really pisses me off. teenage girls are not stupid. teenage girls have never been stupid. the things that adolescent women write, draw, paint- create- are self-aware, interesting, wonderful. check out tumblr if you want to see: it's these teenage girls that are taking current events and mashing them up with tv shows and jokes and pictures to ground them in our reality. it's not us grappling with an inability to understand world affairs- we're internalizing them and making them part of us, part of our aesthetic, part of our interests.

and goddamnit, if you shame teenage girls for doing that, you're probably not a person i want to be friends with.

You are more likely to be found in the places where your flesh recedes from your bones than in any town plotted eye-of-a-needle small on maps painted in candy-colored pastels. I know you in the hollow stretches between ribs, under cheekbones, around kneecaps; I know you in the rancid scent of alcohol on someone's breath disguised by Tic-Tacs that rattle like the pill bottles collected on your bedside table. Once upon a time, before you swam so far into yourself that I couldn't find you, you were something holy. The patron saint of perfection, in t-shirts and ratty cutoffs and Converse All-Stars. Once upon a time, you were a constellation. I could find myself in the palm of your hand and navigate my way north from the guidelines written in birthmarks and freckles along your spine and collarbone. But once they started to protrude from your melted-wax body, I found myself lost. No compass could guide my out of the terrain that was you and your sadness. It was your sadness that possessed the uncanny ability to swallow a sun whole, leaving me in the dark.

I lit lamps and lived inside of you. Told stories like Scheherazade inside of you. Set up camp and grew a family, all while living in the chamber of your heart that beat thumping rhythms of earthquakes. Some nights, your tears turn into torrential rain storms. Others, the heaving of your breaths create tornado-winds. You are a walking natural disaster: fascinating and dangerous and volatile. Not everyone knows how to love something terrifying and annihilating. Not everyone wants to try.