you smell like winter

Everything always happens in winter and this time around it’s one winter later and I’m suddenly back where I was the winter before. He is a different he and we talk like old friends because that’s what we’ve become in a year. The words spill fast and easy because I’ve drank too much and my heart is pounding and the room is spinning. The room is always spinning. Sitting close enough to touch but never touching, he hands me books he knows I’ll love because they’re romantic and he knows I’m the most. I’d forgotten what his room smelt like until I stepped foot inside and I think to myself that this is what winter and memory smell like. Always slow to go, I stand across from him on the porch, smoking a cigarette I only took to prolong a goodbye. But this time he seems to be lingering, too, and when I shiver from the cold, he runs his hands along my arms to warm me but stops short. We hug and part as old friends because that’s all we are a winter later, and even though I know all this, the street still spins as I turn the corner home.

on streets

Winters later and we pass on the street and it takes seconds of staring at your face to realize it’s your face and the look on your face says you feel the same. I raise my hand in recognition but do not smile and you do the same and we both keep walking and in seconds you are gone again. We used to dance in your kitchen across dishes and you’d hold me so tight from behind and splatter kisses on my neck to the sound of running water. And water splashed our faces on that ferry ride one summer when you looked at me in a way that made me look away from the way that look made my heart race. But now when we pass each other my heart slows by the time I cross the street and we never even stop to say “hi.”

tonight, tonight

Some nights one beer feels like four and every song played is your favourite and all your best friends are there to sing with and dance with and hug and you can't stop smiling because the room is spinning and this city is yours again.

someone's sleeping

Earliest Tuesday morning and I've found this record I forgot you once bought for me and how did I forget an album you insisted you buy because you knew I would love it and how did you know what I would love just because you loved me.

It's a Tuesday morning in February and so it's grey in a familiar sort of way that could make today any day and any day including a February two years ago when we listened to this song and this album together for the first time and you raised your hands in the air and reached out towards me, all the while singing along.

Music is our time capsule and so much time has passed I can listen to this album and forget all the sadness and all the fights that happened at the end and this album is still perfect two years later and without you and so I can now listen to this album and love it for what it is and remember what it felt like to love you.

love song

It's Valentine's Day so of course I'm paintng my nails red and listening to songs like this one, and oh, this one too because it's me and I still cling hard to the idea of love and old time romance despite any recent fascination I may have developed for dirty boys. But with that being said, the more I listen to Devendra and Daniel sing these songs about love, the more I realize these love songs I always seem to come back to time and time again are less about being in love and more about the idea of, or the yearning for, or the loss of love itself. Devendra tells me to put him in my blue skies, put him in my grey as he sings a song to bring me home, and one night in the summer, I listened to Daniel reassure me that true love will find me in the end for an hour on repeat and I cried the entire time.

And so maybe my definition of a perfect love song isn't one about the actual act of being in love but rather about the yearning and the missing and the hope of it all because isn't love, perfect love, about having someone to miss in the end? Love should consume like these songs and make me cry for hours on an end on an evening in July. This is not to say that I'm bitter and jaded about love. Oh no, I'm quite the opposite (my nails are painted red today, after all). These tears can be happy tears, and this missing carries with it the promise of return and reunion that sends shivers up spines and turns your head and heart all sorts of dizzy.

that love drug thing

As written earlier and forever before that, there is something about dirty boys that turns me obsessed and slightly crazed. I can't put down the drinks or the phone because that boy is out there and the drinks make me want to phone and the silent phone makes me want to drink and suddenly the room is spinning and my heart is racing because maybe he replied or maybe he didn't but maybe he still will and maybe he will even walk through the doors of this very bar at any second or maybe he won't and maybe my phone will remain silent and maybe I'll keep drinking when I get home and pass out alone in bed. But whatever ending I'm met with on any given night is not important because a beer is almost as good a substitute as drunk kisses and spoons that never mean anything in the morning. No. What matters is the maybe. The unpredictability of it all, the rush, the excitement, the almost euphoria or the disappointment. It's why I come back time and time again to boys that are only ever fun and always forever bad. It's a love drug thing. I'm hooked on the possibility of love and companionship and connection presented one night and then so easily forgotten the next.

I know I deserve more than one night and these boys, but things could always be worse. I may be a love junkie for dirty boys but dirty boys are dirty and this love is never real and so dirty boys can never break your heart because they were always dirty to begin with. I'll take the possibility of these nights with dirty boys over real boys and real feelings because I know I'll always walk away whole and intact with my walls still firmly in place.

24!

Last night was as perfect as any birthday could be. A house full of my bests, "Age of Consent" always, birthday cake and crumble and cupcakes, and my crowd surfing dream realized in the form of 24 birthday bumps. The details may be blurred, but I do know that everything was hazy glowy happy and I don't think I stopped smiling once.

Since I turned fifteen, I realize I've only ever spent one other birthday single. And I may have been boyless last night, but I was in no way alone. No, not one bit. The rooms were warm with love and who needs texts when they always come a little too late and they always are just texts and nothing more.

a love like yours will surely come my way

Everytime I go home, my parents seem older than they were the last time I left. The signs are small but telling. A missed turn. The way my dad holds the wheel a bit tighter than before. The names my mom now forgets. The story that never gets told quite right. And everytime I leave, the panic sets in and I wake with tears streaming down my face and the nightmare of life without them. They are fragile and fading and even though I know they are stronger than I think, time keeps passing and they are becoming more fragile and they are stil fading and their stories aren't being told and so why don't I ask them about these stories sometime? I worry that one day the stories I tell of my parents will only be just that. Mere stories of fragile and fading memories to people who never felt my mom's warmest warmth and my dad's big beautiful heart.

But how do you tell two people who don't see themselves as fragile or fading what you fear and how do you hug these two people you love more than anything in a way that says everything you feel?

summer, come back

Also, as much as I am okay with right now, I feel an aching for sticky days and long nights and to fly through the air on a swing.