yesnothankyou

I was in a shitty motel in Los Angeles some ten years ago, my feet hanging off the rusty balcony, while we joked about nothing, talked about visiting while I was in town. "isn't it hard to not be friends?" You said it casually the way you ever told me anything. It felt good to hear you say and also like a summation. I said nothing because there was nothing to say. It was a fact we were always trying to cheat. I held it with the hands that helped build it and knew this was all it would be. I didn't visit you.

That was the last time you said that but it wasn't the first time. I don't think about any of that until every few years we talk again and suddenly I remember everything. and anything I've ever said about it is never really what I meant for it to be. Probably because protecting you used to be the only way to protect me. I've been soft and I've been mean and I guess I just want to be honest.

Sometimes good things can be lodged in bad things, sort of like shrapnel, and this is hard to talk about. I was always trying to anyway. You climbed through my window, said that thing about my wrists, an abrupt affection forged but all the rules were yours and I didn't know I had a choice. Loud like a kick drum, lose control, spill it into the earth, just give a little won't you? It's new years eve, smoke and noise, and you make me laugh until I can't breathe. Or we stand in the rain and you kiss me on the bridge of my nose and I think I hate you a little already. I lose my virginity in the house you grew up in and the house was crumbling. Your parents were splitting up and so was the foundation. We were friends in that house for years first but none of that's what I remember anymore. the dreamy sounds of your broken tv, sit on your stairs like a special forgotten thing. There is no way to make any of this even but I don't know anything about that yet. my small blue wish, my small blue bad-break. Wait, that's not the right song, is it? Let's try it again. I think we were just too young to know what some of it would come to mean. You weren't always the only one. I thought the crush was what made it count. Muscles flutter in your jaw, make you say it again. So much out of spite, called it something else sometimes. cry with me, laugh with me, don't talk to me ever again. My side yard in the summer and you're so tan, too tall. I feel little in the worst way. You flex your fist in the sunlight, let it split, took back a promise I already told you I never wanted to begin with. I don't know what I wanted. I trusted you the most, it was supposed to be a safe bet. I wanted to tell you to be quiet. Tell you we could be something different and it would be better but you'd have to stop kissing me first. Remember on those concrete steps when I asked you to pretend we were just friends and you said you didn't know how? I think trying to love you was such an ugly thing I did.

None of this matters though, it never really did. I've just got a lot of questions. I've got these things I don't know how to stop looking at once I start. All this proof of something except the proof keeps changing. I get a little closer and I get a little braver but sometimes bravery is also a kind of masochism, another vice. It's not surprising that I haven't learned much about discipline yet, I only welcome inertia if it finds me first. Had to take drugs for that kind of thing once; every now and then it still just becomes too much. All my overly-affectionate and commiserative bullshit. The things I did and the things that were done to me are just so loud sometimes, you know? This is all a practice in reflexes but I keep breaking the rules—you'd think that'd stop feeling good only it almost never does. I don't say this shit for you though, I don't say this shit for anyone. It was all mostly just for the younger versions of myself, trying to make sense of something I didn't know how to once. It's like reaching backwards, like talking through tin cans connected by a string.

saying some things will never have a counterweight and it's okay that you didn't know yet, you weren't supposed to.

saying my relief double crosses me and I even the score every time I find another home in all of it.

saying don't worry, you learned how to keep yourself safer than this.


Anyways. It isn't hard not being your friend. I feel fine with it all. I liked that you weren't though. I thought I deserved that, at least.