when i was a girl, i dreamed about drowning. not the choke to sputter darkness or the slow drift into light. but the kind of swim sparkle sun floating madness one gets from lulling in a hand-me-down seventies unheated water-bed. when i was a girl, i lived in a place that always rained. and the grey skies were all my sunshine days. and now, under big comic blue skies and neverending grass fields and foreign tongues like spies. i long for landscape. and drizzle. i long for the slow rocking madness of those moments in flight where i drifted and sucked water to breathe like oxygen.

i'm the kind of woman who might punch you so hard in the face you'd forget the space of yesterday. instead of just saying i loved you. and there are things, about me. that never come to even sum. i am afraid of motor vehicles. trapped winged things. and sometimes, of my own damned self. these days, my neighborhoods are filled with heavy rains. my halls with cardboard boxes. and i am spilling my guts. over everything. these days there's a kind of man that keeps all my edges clean. keeps all these desperate parts of me seamed in and safely, gently, moving. i'm the kind of woman who could do it without him. and am grateful i don't have to.

when i first started this everything looked different. the whole world covered in some kind of gloam. this candy coated shell of a fragileness. and me. and only words could make the whole things stop. like love letters to the lilacs in the back garden of my childhood home. or garbage. i remember walking around the streets of this city so filled with so much i thought i might burst into a million pieces. that if i weren't lucky, i might light right off the ground. float myself. into no where. and this was the anchor of it all. the buts. ands. ifs. every full stop that i jambed into you, even when you didn't want it. when you came home late from a party to check your stats. cruise the bloglines to see who else was feeling just as happy.sad.lunatic.lonely. as you. and there i was. always. just sitting here. never knowing i was saying everything you were saying. our two mouths so much distant and moving.