Reading Patti Smith’s autobiography made me whispy and forget pots of Macaroni and Cheese on the stove and stand barefoot outside biting at pre-smoked cigarettes. 

Every scene is like something I’ve almost known. 

But the thoughts of us drifted to the reality of where we stood now and the disappointment of that relationship. We had just been twenty together. Our story was not as beautiful as Patti’s and Robert’s, not as honest and trying. I was still alone in some kitchen in Wisconsin. He was still thoughtless with his twitter uploads. 

As I poured through the book, I thought it would be alright to let him go. It would be alright to take the pictures off the wall I thought I could never part with. It would be alright to move to the east coast in two months. It would be alright to move on in general because I had not lost like Patti Smith had. This had not been my peak; this had not been my only moment.

The book begins with Robert dying and Patti Smith knowing he was going to die later in the night. She calls him one last time before bed and then goes to sleep saying, “At least he’s still alive” as though she’d known it all along and never realized it once before. The comfort and simplicity of that statement was one that made me look up and quietly say, “He’s still breathing somewhere.” But I did not feel it. I just could say it. 

Before he left, I called him on the phone. 

“Will you write me one last time before you leave,” I asked, thick tears coming out of my eyes. “It would mean everything to me.”

“Of course I will,” he said. “Lisa, you know I will.”

I checked my mail everyday for the next week, but didn’t let my heart drop when nothing ever showed. 

I booked a ticket for the east coast a few days ago. I packed everything I knew about him into a small envelope and buried it in the bottom of a suitcase I had sent back home. 

“I’ll find it again,” I thought as I walked away. “That’ll be a nice thing to find.”

I found some star charts in a book store once. 

“It has my birthday under your soulmate section,” I told him, tilting the glossy pages up towards his nose. He smiled softly and then we looked at my page. 

“My best friend of fifteen years has a birthday under my soulmate section,” I whisper running my finger down the page. “Your birthday isn’t here.”

We never talked about it again because we both believe in stars. 

A few months later we both woke up from the same dream covered in moon-colored sweat. 

“We should go see a psychic,” I said, twisting my body up onto his. “We should find out if were meant to be together or not.”

“Okay,” he said. 

We never did go see a psychic. 

We had all the nights in the world and we never spent one figuring it out. 

You know those mornings when you wake up in your bed

and it finally hits you. It just hits you so hard and so fast it was like it was there the whole time. Like, you’d already thought about it way in the beginning and then laughed it off. 

The big “oh no I see” moments happen between lonely sheets. They happen when the lights are flickering and everyone is laughing. They happen as you’re leaving a place you once called home. 

It all comes all at once, I believe I told you about it before. 

oh you… the forever you… the strangers I pretend to know. 

But then it all comes back and you try to fight it a little, but really, it’s just the explanation you’ve been looking for the whole time. 

Why didn’t it work out?

Why didn’t that work out. 

And that will kill you for awhile- they trying to knowing. 

Learn wise. Learn wise from the best!

I don’t think you can ever really understand someone until they’re gone. 

I get you now, Dick Jones. I did not then, but I know who you are now. 

And not in like the bitchy way

just

oooooooohhhh

oh oh oh…wow…

The sun is shining brighter and everyone is getting happier, I guess. 

We met Thomas together and heard the same story. I winced and you leaned in further. 

I guess I never really did want what you wanted. I just said I did because it had a nice ring. 

I guess you never really wanted what I wanted. You just said you did because my name has a nice ring.

Everything is changing for everyone. New blue-eyed boys who waited just long enough ask me to dance in parking lots. 

It’s hard to stay mad at someone who told you the truth all along. 

You could strangle kittens the whole time.

Seeing that mattress again wouldn’t bring a single tear to my eye. 

I can’t answer the phone. 

Sleep on the floor

dream about meeeee

I went on your tumblr because you’d forgotten about me. I spent the last twenty minutes thinking about how it really must be over between us and not only that, but you were already forgetting. 

My Mac is broken and I can’t even really type on it. You can make lots of money getting naked on the internet though. I can’t keep my heart from breaking. The ghosts are back.

I guess they were always real because I’m out of ambien. Just thought you should know. 

But then there it was…and it was so you. So unexpected. So on the verge of truly giving up hope. There were the letters I always wanted to get. 

I’m twenty-two, worthless and crying in front of my broken computer on a Friday morning. 

We are standing in the middle of a crowded party. This is the first time we have ever avoided each other at one of these things. I pull him aside.

“I think I’m going to go.”

Dick looks hurt.

“No,” he says firmly.

“Why?” he asks weakly. 

“I don’t belong here. I’m going to cry.”

I look around the room, suddenly as nervous as I was years ago. Our hearts are breaking. Someone spills wine and everybody screams.

“Please don’t go,” he says even weaker.

I figure this is the last time we’ll ever see each other. I try to think of something profound to say. I never said many profound things to him, only practiced lines with him I planned on saying one day. We use to not need profound lines.

“I love you,” I say quietly and he holds me. Someone walks by and sticks their tongue out. The gum he was trying to show us falls out and lands by my boot.

“That’s for you two,” he slurs out.

Dick looks back down at me.

“I love you too.”

It’s 11:30 on a Friday night and I am the girl standing outside the party, crying. 

I hate that girl. Dick and I used to lean our heads out of the large, antique bay windows of old apartments and ease drop on the girls outside of parities crying. We used to make up theories and spread rumors. We’d sit in the corners with finished cigarettes between our fingers, making up entire lives for the people we deemed pathetic enough to be crying outside of the party. 

But now here we were. The ones who had passed so much judgement, the ones who believed would never part, and definitely not in front of a party of hipsters standing two tories up, noses pressed against the glass. 

Dick Jones is trying to hold back the MDMA in his system. 

“I shouldn’t have come,” I say.

“Don’t ever say that,” he says. He wraps me up into his arms and I sob again into the sweater he bought one morning with his mother for a wedding he attended with me. 

I look up at him. The cars running beneath us on the highway seem to slow down and all play the same soft song. 

“It’s not fair,” I say for the hundredth forever time. “Why did this happen to us?”

It wasn’t fair. it wasn’t fair that for so long we felt infinite and untouchable. It wasn’t fair that for so long, we were the only two people living under the sun. I guess we just thought things like break ups could never happen to us. I guess we just thought we were going to live forever or something.

He closed his eyes and I could see them twitch and roll. 

“I don’t know, Lisa. I don’t fucking know.”

I weep again, but this time lift my head up just in time to see the hostess see me, see us. 

I wonder what she thought. I wonder if she knew me well enough to knew this was all profound. That my heart really was breaking outside of her party. That for that year, I dated that boy, and we really did love each other. We thought we had something. We thought we had found what everyone else was looking for. 

Why were we so careless. 

“I love you,” I moan into his chest. It feels like the last time. We both know it’s the last time. 

“I’ll never stop loving you,” he says back. 

A group of hipsters come out of the party to smoke cigarettes under a streetlamp. Dick and I look awkwardly towards them before I bury my feet and eyes to the ground. 

“I don’t want anyone to see me.”

“Fuck them.” Dicks red hair flashes in warning. The hipsters back of slightly. 

“I don’t want to be that girl crying outside of a party.”

Dick holds me in his arms and whispers words I cannot tell you about in this blog. Some things have to be private I suppose. Sometimes. Somethings. 

I take a step backwards and I am now the girl about to leave the party crying. 

“Good-bye Dick Jones!” I cry out, my teeth digging down into my lip, my hands shaking. “Long liveth the soup snake!”

“Bye, Lisa Bones. You’ll always be my home.”

I left the party as a crying girl. 

It’s like, I know what you’re doing, but I can’t put my finger on it.

It’s like, hey, this is the first time I’ve written on this blog in six months without a mouthful of ambien.

It’s like, why don’t you get it anymore? Why don’t you feel bad? I know it’s all broken and you know it’s all broken, so why don’t we just leave it alone?

Maybe you’ll be more lonely than you think you’ll be. 

Maybe that time I spent hula hooping on that cat-soaked wooden floor, watching you play guitar and laughing all spun out from wine was just

oh. twenty-one. 

i’m starting to think we were just twenty-one. 

My eyes are all fuzzy from ambien again, 

but these fingers have a story to tell. 

Tonight, across web lines surfed, a video appears on my screen of a boy, not a bit older than me

injecting a needle filled with you know what into his blood stream. 

I watched it while rocking back and forth on my bed, Dick Jones—as always—on the other side of the phone. 

“How can he do that?” I whisper over and over. Feelings I did not think I still had in me rising up as I watch my friend commit himself to a life. 

“He was always like that, Lisa. You know that. He’s wanted to do this his whole life.”

The video cuts to his face which looks… I mean, scared. He looked scared. I can’t even try and be poetic about it right now, he looked scared. Maybe he was thinking about him mom or something. Maybe he was thinking about all the money and well-slept nights he’d stolen from her and how many more he would now steal. Maybe he was thinking of his little sister and her haircut that matches his. Maybe he was thinking about his girlfriend. His dreams of being a famous director. His dreams. His dreams. 

Or maybe he was just high. 

Maybe he’d always been high. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that some people are just kind of born with that level of stupid danger in their blood. Some people are born heroin addicts, they just don’t know it yet. You probably know it. You can see it in them. It’s hard seeing people for who they are and the only one who can’t is the one you’re all looking at. 

I watched my artsy friend’s film of himself shooting up heroin for the first time, tonight. It twisted my stomach, it shook me up inside. Regardless of how he turns out, I know I’ll never really get over this. I’ll never stop talking about it like it matters. 

I’ll keep this story going in my head so long, I’ll probably be able to tell it to him when he’s dead.