Feeling a little vulnerable, a little fragile, a little lost puppy-ish.
I’m hoping that I’ll look at this tomorrow and laugh and say,
“Oh, Summer, you were just getting the late night blues.”
I wish they all knew that it was possible to feel lonely,
Even when you’re not alone- ever.
My own company could fill a crowded room,
In the same way a crowded room feels like darkness.
These pins and needles sew momentary stitches
Until I come apart at the seams.
Everyone is fighting their own battle,
Even if they’re not brandishing their swords.

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There is something beautifully nostalgic about the sky today. As though it could have belonged to a year ago, or three years ago, or sixteen years ago. Driving back from breakfast with my friends, I began to feel very close to several moments in my life that are so removed from one another. I remembered long drives with Amy, I remembered sitting on the back verandah at Grandma’s house nipping at icypoles, I remembered art lessons in the sunshine and the curves of the tree hugging my back. For all of the time that had passed, it could have been minutes ago. His words, her skin, their laughs, a ruled margin, the routine backpack slung over my shoulders, the orange sliver of the fish, squeaking swings, hot red pavement and the winding green snake of the hose. I walk inside and I shoulder the sunshine, carrying it with the concealed concentration of a tightrope walker with a secret. It lifts from me like a veil, or perhaps a temporary tattoo, precise yet gentle. The shade solicits me from its corner, finding its place inside my bones. It belongs to me like a truth. Like the truth. Comfort in knowledge, a brick wall,The End, dying applause, a wave, a closed door, a sombre embrace. I am overcome with the emptiness of complete consumption, an oxymoronic wasteland of every emotion I have never faced.

15 notes
  

Mum has a tattoo on her back which says, One Day.

It meant that ‘one day’ she’d marry this guy she was in love with.

But he turned out to be a drop-kick, so yeah, that didn’t really happen.

I really do love having ‘one day’ conversations, though. With lovers, especially. I can remember laying on our backs holding hands, planning each room of our ‘one day’ house, deciding which instruments our ‘one day’ children would play and which ‘one day’ school they would attend. Our house would be lined with a ‘one day’ picket fence and every day would be that ‘one day’, I’d trace my finger across a ‘one day’ coloured wall and kiss her ‘one day’ lips, revelling in our ‘one day’ paradise.

There are so many different versions of that ‘one day’ - there must be at least five thousand days, each with different houses and chimneys and ways of saying goodbye and bathroom tiles and fridge magnets and school newsletters and back tickles and heart beats through the chest. What scares me is that I won’t get there. What scares me is that I’m searching for something which cannot possibly exist. ‘One day’, by definition, never really comes. It’s a treadmill. You just run, run, run, run, the same steps over and over. I have spent my life wishing for a moment of clarity. For two children, a kitten named Gepetto and a beautiful girl with a voice like silk who tells brilliant stories and loves my freckles.

I’ll let you know when I get there.

  

I am incredibly busy this week. Lists consume my life; strokes, twists and curls which form letters, which build into words, which join as concepts, or else chores, and though the written word calms it also feeds on me, and I can feel my mind racing but I am too lazy to catch up to it. We consume each other in a pen-and-paper battle, and I never come out on top because there is always something more to say. How many words are inside of my being? How many memories? Would my writing fill books, walls, streets, the Pacific Ocean? When I think of death, I think of words in Times New Roman font trickling from my body as blood.

3 notes
  

I’m absolutely terrified about going back to uni, and that’s the crux of it, really.

I always feel lost. I don’t know how to shut off my thoughts about everything else while I’m supposed to be staring at a screen or writing on a page.

I am in my final year of university. I sleep with Piglet next to me, in a bunk bed.

I just want to close my eyes for a few seconds and open them again to stare unblinkingly at a melodic mobile above my head; a soft lullaby against pastel walls. Instead, I open them to a roof of glowing stars who serve as a bittersweet reminder that I am young in spirit but not in body.

I wish to escape my own mind.

Please, don’t let me be alone.

3 notes
  

Looking into someone’s eyes is difficult, for me.
I’m not worried about what I’ll find, I’m worried that I won’t find enough of it.
So I hide a lot. I twist, bury, shy away, close up, curl up, shut up.
I am still a child, afraid of looking under the bed.
Only sometimes, I fear emptiness more than monsters.
I fear floorboards, timber and a cold white wall
All-consuming silence and nothing to prepare for
Just the funnel’s end of all wisdom: keep on keeping on,
And maybe tomorrow it will all make sense,
Maybe in an hour or maybe yesterday,
I am losing something every day,
A second, a breath, a laugh, a memory,
That’s what memories are, don’t you know?
Lost pieces of ourselves,
Comfort in distance.

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The further away from something I am, the more beauty and opportunity I see in it, and the less fear it contains. My eyes widen at the sight of roller coasters in the distance, a keen grin spun from the corners of my mouth. The butterflies in my stomach flutter softly at the mention of a name from home, or the memory of a kiss. But up close, the finer details of a situation- the present tense- invoke such terror and anxiety.

My view from afar feels like Valium. Thoughts disconnected from feelings, booking a tattoo, ticking the ‘yes’ box when she asked me to be hers, telling a lie, kissing on impulse, lines on a page, tapping at the glass, dreams, lists, plans, words I’ve never said, photographs, wearing headphones, labelled diagrams. Disconnected. Looking down at the glasslike stillness of a lake before the ripples. Surface tension. And yet these recurring dreams persist- these dreams of being trapped underneath, fully clothed, weighed down so that I am willed into death, or else life in spite of it.

3 notes
  

Every now and then I take a deep breath and I think to myself, it’s okay, because you are only a skeleton, and you have a box that you inhabit with other skeletons who care about you (or whose craniums and aortas co-exist with yours in a way that projects some form of comfort), and you even get to drive a box with wheels alongside other skeletons, and you have a tiny baby rat skeleton in a box inside that box-you-inhabit, and your shelves are filled with ink on paper (see also: craniums and aortas which co-exist with yours in a way that projects some form of comfort) and this is it, this is how you are, this is the hair upon your head, your ‘capelli’ in the mother tongue of those you desire to walk amongst, the same meaning but a different way of moving your mandible, lips, teeth, those are your eyes, this is your soul, a safe blanket to return to when the night is dark and the air is thick. You are safe.

  

Only Perth is clever enough to provide lightning timed perfectly with the Australia Day fireworks. I kept repeating that as we ran aimlessly: “Only Perth. Only fucking Perth.” I am happy to say that I got absolutely soaked in the torrential downpour with four of my best friends, pushing one in a trolley, running and rolling on the wet bitumen and through grassy alleyways in my rain-drenched shoes, from one heavy thud of a step to the next. Rain on my eyelashes, rain on my lips, her rain, his rain, their rain, our rain, wild and rampant- I think of the word ‘passion’- and yet the drops that fall resonate only within my soul; they exist in a soft and peaceful languor.

1 note
  

I’m playing with fire, but it’s all my own
Just trying to find something that feels like home
Deep breaths in a new place, existence transpired
Limbs are weary, thoughts are tired
A thousand words befit such a simple notion
Too tender a sore for too soft a lotion
The prosper of a promise no match for lingering doubt
It belongs to a time, but emptiness echoes without
The certainty of a kiss, the clarity of something shared
Not just words on a page from someone who once cared
The plaster revealed just as much as it covered
While I needed your presence, it was absence you smothered
Salt in the wound and another clenched fist
Green, speckled eyes met my blues in a tryst
I forgive you for everything when it’s skin on skin
Anger is poorly disguised, it has worn paper-thin
I’ll always return, coin-in-the-fountain, rain-in-the-sky
You know that- I wish you didn’t, but you do and that’s why
I’ll shy from your touch but pull you in as you leave
Offer you the knife and bask in my own reprieve
Every tear brimmed is something you once said
Or a way that you looked or the sheets on the bed
Closing the distance between what was and what can never be
And somewhere in the middle are thoughts of you and me.

1 note
  

There’s a picture of him, sitting on a skateboard at about six months old, dappled sunlight and a lopsided smile- probably one of his first. I cut it out in the shape of a love heart and cried more tears than I ever remember crying, because I thought I’d never see him again. I was ten. He turns ten in two weeks. This is hard for me to process. I found the outside of that love heart whilst cleaning my room, and thought of that time again. I remember taking that picture out of my album when things had cleared, and that was one of the first and only times I have ever thanked God. I made God exist for all of two minutes, because I needed to express that I would never take that boy for granted, ever. I have never felt so appreciative, so compelled to thank a greater force, in my life. That love heart is the reason I will never let him (or either of them) say goodbye on the phone without saying ‘love you’. That love heart is what I see when he rushes up to hug me, as an invisible height marker is etched higher on my torso every time. I remember the afternoon at the park next to Grandma’s house, just us two, and how he said “I love you Summer” without me saying a single word. I believed it then and I know it now- that love will never be matched.

  

The one with the piercing blue eyes- she kissed with an awkward surety. I wonder about her, some days. Whose hands she holds in hers, cold and clammy, and if she’s filled her blank picture frames. Lonely eyes. Always searching, as if through a crowd for parents who will never arrive. But she knows this- her stare is measured, she is through with hoping. What she waits for is something more, a missed step on a darkened staircase. A beautiful lie and three kinds of happiness.

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A bittersweet relief, perhaps- a reprieve.
A slower beat, a paced rhythm, steady.
But I crave the beautiful disaster of you and I.
Your soft-skinned lullaby and sugary laugh,
The gaps closing between what I think and what I feel,
Between my hands and yours, your lips and mine,
I wait for you as a child waits for a carousel
Bathed in mellifluous grandeur, freckled with colour
I spin with reckless abandon, without direction or cause
Intentions as blurred as the faceless spectators
Who watch for the same horse with every turn
A glimpse, a blink, a snapshot, the decision to let go
Instantaneous, and that is why we are here
To spin and twist and tangle, years spurred by a second
Fairy floss clouds and the sun in your eyes
Remember that all that glitters was once golden.

5 notes
  

Breaking up. To break, he breaks, she breaks, they break. It’s funny, isn’t it? It really does imply that you were half of a whole. If we are not with someone, are we broken? Is every soul broken until it is united with another, just the same? You must break yourself in order to blend with someone else- a full egg will surely crack when it crashes into another. Half and half, then, is it? It sounds like a recipe. We break ourselves to make something new, to become a part of something bigger than ourselves, bigger than our words, actions, thoughts… yet so much smaller on the surface. A relationship means nothing to the universe. Nothing to bombs, tornadoes, tsunamis, heaven, hell, ants. To us it is a ring, a letter, a kiss, a feeling. The grass beneath us does not care that we feel. The clouds do not sigh as we embrace, nor do the skies open when we fall in love. Gifts, rings, a dress, a suit, flowers, invitations- the solidity of marriage. These things can be stolen, lost, ruined, wilted. Breaking up with someone is not as big of a deal as we believe. They exist, we exist. Separately, but in much the same way as before. The flowers will grow, the cars will pass by, the rain will fall, and the sun will rise. Do not doubt, however, that our finite, tangible existence deems it in any way insignificant or superficial- remember that we can imagine, create and destroy. We are the masters of our lives, and we can make and break love. If nothing else, the human race has this to offer. We keep our secret from the sky above and ground below, and everything in between. To love is to suffer, but it is also to live.

9 notes
  

Once upon a time there were two girls and a little rat named Jemima, and the girls used to have a bath while Jemima sat on the cupboard and chewed on a cracker that was as big as her, and sometimes one of the girls would write on the other girl’s back in soap, but they were secrets, and as she wiped them away she hoped that they would sink into the other girl’s flesh, because it was so hard to tell her what she needed to tell her, so hard that it hurt, so hard that it pulled on the strings that held her together, and if it weren’t for the feeling of skin on skin, she might have given up long ago, but she couldn’t, because of the postcards and the stolen glances and the hands held over the gearstick, because of the summer nights and the tiptoes to the kitchen and the notes on the counter, the invitations for two and the addictive pain. And I guess the end is that they didn’t work out, because the secrets weren’t soapy anymore, they were real, brick-wall real, inescapable, nails on skin, time and place.