Only Living Ghost to Grace the Hall

Today is my sister's 18th birthday.


I wrote her a long letter, last night. Sort of in-re to a letter she wrote me a few weeks ago. Her's wasn't that long, to be honest, but it was. Illuminating, I suppose, if you'll pardon the Lizzie Bennet reference. She said that I loved her when no one else did. Said that it would've been easier for me to have hated her at certain times.

I hadn't been aware there had been a time when she hadn't been loved.
And now that I know otherwise, I'm sad.

Ink Lips, Paper Smile

Apparently, applying to high schools require certain things.

Such as essays.

I'm Not Who I Used to Be

The best birthday I can remember was a long time ago. When I still lived in New York.

I was 6, maybe. Or 7. I don't know. But it'd snowed overnight, so when I woke up and looked out my window, our entire suburban street was blanketed in white.

It was early, or maybe just dark out, but my mother had snuck into my room in the night and tied mini chocolate bars to helium balloons, and scattered them across the floor of my room. They looked like a kelp forest of plastic pink ribbon and purple bubbles, bobbing gently against one another.

My family came in to wake me up. I can't remember whether or not my dad was there. I was wearing my favorite blue nightgown, the one with a plastic picture of TinkerBell on the front, and my hair was still long back then. Down to my back, all straggly and sleep-mussed. I must've been missing a few teeth too- all the old Polaroid pictures we have of that morning show me with gap-toothed, surprised grins.

We had cinnamon rolls.


We don't eat them anymore.
Cinnamon rolls, that is.

Some Days

Sometimes the light goes gray.

Somedays, the clouds bunch together like flocks of pussywillow, and the sky hangs heavy with the moisture that refuses to let go.
Somedays I wrap a scarf around my neck and pretend I'm somewhere else, somewhere Northern, somewhere without dry heat, and sunburns in March.

And somedays I sit on this floral beige couch, wrapped in a scarf and wearing boxer shorts, and I just stare out at the sliding glass doors, and admire the way the overcast skies reflect in the golf course's fountain.
Then the air conditioning kicks in, and I dig my toes into the cushion on the other end of the couch, and sigh a little too loudly.

I'm Awfully Off

Sometimes I can't help but hate myself, and more often then not, my life.

And sometimes self-insecurity will hit me like a brick wall, and I'll just kinda of freeze and look at all of the coolly dressed, confident, attractive people that flow around my frozen stance, the literal pebble in a stream. They have friends. They have a happy life, at least to some extent.

And so do I! I'm not claiming not to have friends, or a decently happy life. Just. . . Just all of my friends (or at least a good number of them) are virtual. And many, if not all attempts on my behalf to change that fact, merely do the opposite of it's intentions, and result in my being more alone then ever.