a letter

Dear Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,

I’ve been wanting to write to you for some time—I know my absence is likely worrying you, but it was too difficult to make contact before now. Every time I think of you, I’m filled with a hauntingly familiar lust that fills my chest and pools in my fingertips. It’s silly, I know—maybe we were more obsessed with one another than “in love,” maybe the relationship was parasitic, as so many people tell me. I credit you with both saving my life and with slowly killing me. Two years ago we were in the exciting and (somewhat) exhausting phase of new love, and I couldn’t get enough of you. I felt to some extent that you reciprocated. Nobody satisfies me quite like you do, still, after all this time. I try to brush thoughts of your comforting presence aside, remembering the tools you used to control me. You were manipulative, paired with the Devil himself, as they say, leading me “carefully down to Hell,” taking my heart with your added sugars and tempting taste of toasted peanuts. The day I decided to leave you left me paralyzed, tucking myself under my bed-quilt, forcing myself to curb my appetite until I finally fell asleep in a state of near-illness. How did I ever let it go so far? But this is turning to emotional assault, see, I never wanted to hurt you, and I still don’t—I admire your perfection, and perhaps it’s too much for my uncontrolled passion to truly receive. Even now, as I write, I realize that I’ll never be truly free of you. I tried to pry myself away from you slowly, tasting, restraining, but it always turned into bags and the bags turned into pounds, and I knew cold-turkey was the only way to truly cut free.

I’m sorry for leaving. Sometimes I still regret it. Sometimes I think I can still taste you…

What it was to be drunkenly controlled by you, putting all my trust and pouring all my emotions into you. I never had a lover so reliable, so fulfilling. My mind in a sugary haze floated above all my hurt and everything seemed like the foam atop a latte for a while,

but I’m here now, and I got here without you. I’m not boasting, only validating my own decisions, knowing that my wounds were only blistering in infection when I was so distracted by you. I can still see the scars, and it’s tempting to come back to you, when everything seems fine, but I’ll try to remember the past.

For now, I send my condolences. Don’t think too hard on me,
Kalli

back to the same place

I want you to know everything. 

This always happens, I don't know why I'm running myself in circles,

I don't know why I'm always distracted just long enough to derail myself,

and I come back to you every time.

I want to tell you how you made me try harder,

how your smile always makes me feel loved x1000,

and I'm a magnet when you're by my side

My brain is pulling on my heart-leash,

bruising it and suffocating it,

and all I want is to let it off and let it run free

but last time I did that you left it to the beasts

they almost nearly devoured it,

left it in a shredded bloody mess on the ground

and I ran to pick it up and heal it in solitude

but it's the same beating heart

with the same impulses,

and you can't teach an old heart new tricks--

I need a new heart but they are too expensive

and I'm okay with this one for now

Can you catch it when I let it loose?

grandma florence

Grandma Florence, it was just a headache. 

Deserts of Nevada and four babies and a giant headache.

All her insecurities, all her failures, all her successes.

The house over the freeway.

1-15 is my heritage.

How much do they pay people for houses when they need a freeway

Public roads and voting

Memories and things, relationships with each other plaster onto relationships with things and with the universe

Driving through Nevada and looking at the slate colored walls and neon signs thinking, Florence, why here? Why him? 

this is fiction

the freckles lined her lips, tracing them with spots of fairy dust and sun-memories. whispering, whispering, she stared at him with hazy eyes, foggy from sleep and drifting into submission. he combed her hair back, the dark wisps pulling away from her eyelashes, making her shiver run down the back of her neck and eat at her insides. shh, shh, she thought she heard, and she lifted her fingers, tracing his ear, wondering where did he come from? why was he here? he winced and took her fingers from his neck, holding them and staring, tracing the spaces between like they used to do in church. it had been so long, but he felt familiar and warm, and she missed him. she missed the grass, and the games, she missed the running that made her insides heave and the scrapes from the sidewalk, the wet cement and incriminating laughter. she missed the rope burns and the plotting, the butterfly jars--she missed summer and the heat and the carelessness. don't leave, she told him, don't leave. when he brushed her cheek she smelled sunscreen and paint on his hands, so familiar she wanted to reach out and hold onto it. his hand was wet from her tears, the tears she didn't know were there until they smeared against his hands. he didn't bother to wipe them off, and he smiled sadly at her, pulling her up and rolling her onto her back, tucking a blanket around her. are you cold? she nodded, and he added another blanket. he stared at her for what seemed to her an hour, in her incoherence, and then touched her forehead and sighed. he turned, slowly, intentionally, and walked towards the door, glancing back at her before he took hold of the doorknob and closed it. she felt the tears running hot down her face now, fast, stinging her sunburned cheeks. she closed her eyes and imagined him away, imagined it all away, until her mind was nothing but wisps of darkness and bright spots of light, swarming together in a garden of emotion, sinking itself into oblivion. the more it swirled the more the pressure built in her brain and she forced herself to breathe, keep her eyes closed, ignore the tears. she felt the bed under her and let it swallow her, let it open up and take her in, and she gave way to the hole in her mind and slept.