A Kiss is Just a Kiss

It was foolish to think that anything really changes, and even as I let myself believe, I knew it. (Naivete is a state of mind that is impossible to recover.) Am I just afraid to try too hard? I've always believed that hard work makes all things possible, but I can't help but feel that to work hard here is to lose. But is that really true? Is it worth a shot? (Ah, but if I actually gamble, it means that I cared enough to have something to lose.)

I recognize another in myself and feel contempt. I have eyes - I can see who texts whom first and know exactly what it means. (The game is to lean back and see how far they lean forward.)

I came so close to candor tonight, but we saw each other before we met and quickly turned to go other ways. What good does a close acquaintance do if you never put it to good use?

I managed to be euphoric for an entire three days. It's so completely ridiculous that a boy can make a smile stay. But I am much too rational for romance - a kiss is just a kiss. (Even when you dare to hope it is something more.)

Won contest - this time with poetry!

"The Laws of Physics", another piece that I am exceptionally proud of.

You can find more of my poetry at All Poetry.

Placed in a contest

"Societal Standards" under the pen name Sarah Darling.

Third place. :)

The Cold 'What If'

I feel all the more empty for having been briefly fulfilled. After all those years, it finally happened. I found him. I found him, and it feels as though as the world seems to begin, it ends. (It used to be the other way around.)

I am cold with unshed tears, but I will not touch the blankets. They have no comfort for me - not tonight. Like the moon crossing the sun, he has blotted out every trace of light I could half-way see. Or maybe I'm wrong and he is the sun finally moving from behind the moon. But this sun must not be for me.

Why is this such a struggle? This is what I wanted! The 'what if' I have chased since I first began to wake up! But, as I always knew but didn't want to, the 'what if' cannot be answered. And I really can't bring myself to really wish it could be. (That would only be to invite disaster, as what goes around, comes around.)

I want to burble on about him to anyone who'll listen, but I don't know enough to really have anything to say. Besides, it's a useless urge. ("Have you been eating bowls of rainbows with unicorn marshmallows again?" The one who I never realized is so much like him demands. "That'd be ridiculous.")

Goddess, why now? (Everything happens for a reason.) Why, when nothing can really come of it, when he may as well be galaxies away? Now not even that not-so-faceless lover will be summoned to my back, and I can't quite recall whom I hoped would shatter that silly adverb 'platonically.'

That pale substitute has the nerve to wink at me and I can't work up the courage to be the woman I wrote about. Hasn't the silly boy figured it out yet? I may as well be stamped, "Mormon Anti-Standard." And he may as well be stamped, "That 'what if' can't be answered." (This is one of those rare entries where the pronoun always means the same person.)

I had so much hope. My heart was thundering in my ears, and I forgot that logic ever even had a voice. I couldn't sleep for anticipation of waking up the next morning to see his face. (I think the problem is that logic was never really overruled by anyone else, no matter how close one almost came.)

So I'm empty now. (No, that's not true.) I'm shivering with tears that keep breaking through. (Leave the blanket alone - there's nothing it can do.) I can't even remember the sun I used to know, because all I can see is the far away moon. (And yes - this is what I wanted.)

Introductions

"Gurl, I've gots someone you hafta meet!"

I slowed my hip circle when I heard her, the smile melting slowly off my face. I'd know that slangy, officious voice anywhere, even in this din. Perhaps if I ignored the woman, kept on dancing, she'd go away, and I'd be spared her meddling for the night.

Uh-huh. Maybe once the world ended.

Rather than obliging me, my roommate grabbed my shoulder, her touch stiffening my spine with cold, and spun me around to face her looming visage.

"Serzisly, Carmen! Yuh've gotsta meet this dude! He's perfect sex made incahrnit, and he's curious about YOU!" She grinned wickedly. "He just about swooned on backwards when I told him I could gitz him a face-to-face wit yooh!"

I didn't bother to suppress a groan. She wouldn't hear it over the music anyways.

"ANOTHER fiddler on the roof, Anna?" I shook my head, irritated that she'd interrupted my dancing for this, though aware that she wouldn't be able to see the motion down in the shadows of the crowd. "I'm so not interested in meeting another one of your so-called 'sex-made-incarnates.'"

She tugged impatiently at my arm, already scoping a path through the writhing throng.

"This one's different. He's PUHFECT sex made incarnate. Now, come on!"

It would be easier to just do as she wished, though we must have made a comical sight, me taking three steps to every one of hers. We two have always been utterly mismatched.

"Here my shorty is!" Anna stopped suddenly and my nose met with her second rib with a silent but painful protest. "Carmen Betty, pohtent, provackative, and purrrfect."

I grimaced, massaging my nose. Owww.... I still didn't know who I was being introduced to, but I was fairly sure it didn't really matter. After all, Anna was worse than my parents, always pushing me at someone or something.

"It's nice to meet you," a pleasantly masculine voice rumbled as a hand glided into my field of vision.

I froze, my hand still attempting to comfort abused cartilage.

It was quite a nice hand, actually, with a callused palm and hitchhiker's thumb, the type of hand that makes a girl's body itching-ly curious. It was attached to a bare arm with just the hint of the curves that muscles make. My eyes seemed helpless but to follow those curves up to the shadowed line of a t-shirt, to the swooping hollows of a throat, to a... face.

Woah. That level of public sexiness had to be illegal in at least three states.

"I'm Repens Lantana," he said, smiling at me, wreaking havoc with my internal organs, and then proffering his hand again.

My mouth was doubtless hanging open as my hand drifted down into his grasp. It took strenuous effort to pull myself from the fantasies he was inciting and to bully my lips into forming recognizable words.

"Um... Uh... Do... Do you go to the University?" I managed.

Repens smiled at me again, cocking his head to the side. My mouth went dry and I licked my lips.

"Yes, actually," he replied. "I'm a junior, a biology major." He winked. "I'm also a regular at this club, where I often admire your dancing. You're quite good, you know."

The blood rushed happily to my cheeks, a welcome change from where it had been heading. Repens had noticed my dancing? Repens had thought I was good at dancing?

Oh, God. All heat drained away. He'd noticed my dancing. I didn't think anyone noticed my dancing. I loved to dance - it made me feel sexy, wild, free - but I knew that I danced like a stripper, even though I kept my clothes on. If Repens wanted to meet me based off that, then he probably just wanted in my pants. Oh, I didn't think anyone noticed-

"Hey, don't panic. " His hand slid up my arm to my shoulder, so pleasantly warm, the only thing I could really feel right then, his palm spanning over my right collarbone. "I'm not stalking you or anything like that."

But he had seen my dancing, he had admired my dancing, he had noticed. It was only a matter of time before he told people about me, and then word would spread, and soon everyone would know. They'd whisper about me then, loud and laughing, and I'd be back in high school, my name scribbled in bathroom stalls; "Carmen Betty is a whore," even though I'd never done anything but love to dance, too afraid they were right.

And the next time my parents came to visit, maybe someone would say something to them, or they'd see, and then they would know that I was still the same; I hadn't changed. They'd be ashamed of me again, look at me sadly and condemn me for what I was. Oh, I had told them I had changed!

"Carmen?" Concern now, in Repens's voice, concern for the girl with too many curves and too risqué moves. And she didn't deserve his concern, the filthy tramp, not even a little-itty-teeny-tiny bit, because she'd been imagining what that hand on her shoulder might be able to do in other places. "Are you okay?"

But I wasn't okay, I've NEVER been okay, not since the day I started dancing and found out what I really was.

"It's nice to meet you," I ran out, twisting to get away from him, from the temptation, "but I have to go."

"But, Carmen," Anna protested, "you hasta MEET-"

But I was already moving, running, going somewhere, anywhere, away from the situation, falling in time with the music without thinking, All-American Reject's "Dirty Little Secret."

"These sleeping dogs won't lay, and now I've tried too hard...."

The bathroom. As I dashed through the door, the bartender came out.

"Careful," she cautioned. "The mirror's broken."

It didn't matter. I locked the door behind me and curled over the sink, my tears making the little shards heaped there glisten and seem to cry themselves. Oh, I had to be damned, always a slut and always loving it until I realized it, no matter how I struggled to be respectable, to be someone my parents could approve of. I cried harder as the weight of judgment crushed my stomach and the taste of bile flooded my mouth. It tasted so horrible, so bitter, so natural; like I'd always had that taste there, like I'd always been dancing, like I'd always been lost.

I cried myself out.

When I was done, able to see again, I stared down into the sink. It was clogged with glass trying to slip down into the drain and not quite succeeding, my tears mixing in. Floating bits of mirror winked at me, showing broken reflections of my face, cut off at the jagged edges.

"Carmen!" Anna's voice. "There's still someone you've agotta meet!"

I took a deep breath and let that push me up straight. There was a hold above the sink, slate gray metal, rusting over, empty where the mirror obviously should be. It was a dull, depressing sight, but it seemed to whisper to me, telling me something forbidden.

"Carmen?" Anna again. "Come on!"

I didn't know how she was going to say it to me, but I knew the message, always inconsistent and always the same - always wrong.

And I knew it.

I wasn't the only one who knew it either. The broken images in the sink, trickling away with my tears, knew it was wrong, the rusting empty frame knew it was wrong, the buzzing fluorescent light illuminating it all knew it was wrong.

It was time to stop listening to Anna, because I now stood, exhausted and exalted, face-to-face with whom I had become.

Only Yesterday

It suddenly hit me that the boy on the screen is only eighteen - well within my reach. This is my world now - it's not just something off in the distance I can barely see. (And yet that night so long ago when I shimmied innocently and was told I should learn to dance was really only yesterday.)

I've filled notebook after notebook with this glittering trash. There is nothing more concrete and nothing more abstract. I remember when I was told I should really get it published and I laughed (and wondered if it would ever really happen). (Remember when 'social commentary' used to be called 'bitching in your journal'?)

I'm shivering fever-cold as I recall who I used to be and look at who I am now. Have I really changed? (Duh.) But it all comes full circle far too often. (He used to be the boy on the bus I'd look at before smiling to myself.) History is a loop or, at least, a spiral.

The boy on the screen who cries like an artist is really just a reflection of me, roller coaster of body language heart pinned to his sleeve. You want to reach out and touch every wry smile, because you had that thought too, so long ago, only yesterday.

I laugh because I still write poetry - or maybe it's that I only ever wrote prose. Whichever way it happens, it's still where you can find the meat of things - all the overblown pretense, and delusions, and buried deep inside a set of parentheses... (the truth). Though if I recall, I didn't like those all that much back then.

I swore I'd stop writing these, but I missed them too much. (I suppose what is real and powerful inside us can be neither hidden, nor disguised, nor repressed.) I just want to be honest.

So let's say it.

I am lonely.

But I am not depressed. (I gave up on the idea of bleeding grey a long time ago - but then again, it was only yesterday.)

I am vivacious and flirtatious, and when I see the people I used to know, I tend to clam up and laugh to myself. Not because (as I claim) I see all the layers of irony, but because I want to make them think I'm interesting. (I've always tried too hard to make that third impression.)

And they lean their heads in close as the camera catches the flickering end of a caress. They're only eighteen. (I wish you could rewind real life to see these moments.) Good Goddess, they are only eighteen.

I sleep with a stuffed frog that an ex-boyfriend gave me (so long ago, on a bus - no, I guess it wasn't yesterday), not because it reminds me of him, but because it reminds me of his quirky best friend. Bless you, Buddha - why did one of those quirks have to be the habit of not wearing a seat belt? (I suppose all this really comes back to you and John and Jesus.)

Yeah, I'm crying. I have been since before that boy said, "Get off of me." There is some strange drive within that won't let me stop, won't let me sleep. There's all this remembering, all this thinking I still have to do. (Oh, great. We're back to that vague sense of rhyming rhythm once again.) I think there's no such thing as a crazy random (ironic) happenstance. There's always a reason. (I'll swear he's timing the intervals between each wall post.)

You want nothing and you want everything. You want "one." (Remember that conversation we had yesterday about second person?) So make up your mind. There isn't a way to have both, no balancing point to stick your rapier-sharp wit into and see the hilt quiver. There is only "get off of me" and "she really has a secret crush on me." (Whirls of interrelated intricacies.)

There will always be the 'suppose's. Even though I want to stop dealing in those. (Let me take my glasses off.) So, I suppose it was a long time ago, when I stood in a circle and shimmied innocently. And I suppose I can count back the years and find that they aren't as many as I first felt. I suppose it was really only yesterday. (Good God, he's only eighteen, that fellow there, on the tv screen!)

Dying Embers

Cara stood on the beach and stared up at the sky, head cocked to one side. She looked silly.

"Whatcha lookin' at, sweetheart?" I sing-songed, slinging an arm around her shoulders.

She didn't answer, and I ended up caught in that awkward moment where expectations are not met.

"Cara?"

"Hm?" she intoned, her gaze not breaking.

"I threw your book-bag in the lake."

"Good place for it," she murmured.

I massaged the bridge of my nose.

"It's the sunset," she finally told me, her eyes only now meeting mine. "It just struck me down with its perfection. It made me think about all the things I used to love, but that I burned away."

I laughed. After all, this was Cara, everyone's favorite party girl. Her chief concerns were boys, fashion, and popularity, in that order. But now she almost sounded... philosophical.

She sighed, and shook her head, her gaze darting briefly back in the direction of the horizon, which glowed like the final dying embers of a campfire.

"Don't worry on it, Hannah," she assured me. "It won't happen to you."

I followed her back towards the music, only vaguely wondering what she meant.

Galaxies

Do you ever think of me? Oh, I wouldn't have back what we had for the world, full of emptiness and repressed urges. Besides, now you have her. But do you ever think of me, when it's dark at night and you can't quite get to sleep, and to recapture a feeling more than a moment, picture my face before guiltily replacing it with hers?

You never know whose fantasy you are. There may be dozens, even hundreds, of people who imagine you when you're not there. You become important to them through those intimate instants. You'll probably always be ignorant of your minute stardom.

And now I can almost feel your lips pressed against my shoulder as I scribble, cold fingers brushing my hair across my neck. I turn to look, but I know you are across this galaxy of a southern state from me. (Warning: this thought process encompasses more than one person.)

So why do I care? (Excellent question. I may even endeavor to answer.) Well, there's something about multitudes that leaves one feeling utterly alone. (Ah, my favorite paradoxical truth.) No matter how much you smile and laugh, and lie with words about support and family, you know that (I know that) you are (I am) still that girl who scribed nonsensical chimes in the shade of a bus. (Second person narrative is never really second person.) You were the only guy who ever made the lies even a little bit true.

What she says isn't true, though. I don't want you back - not in that sense. I may remember laying in your arms, but it's more for the feeling than for the moment. I am only happy that you two are happy, because though I may miss both your conversation, you both deserve your smiles and romance. (I guess I don't really want to know if you ever think of me. I'm not that important.)

Maybe now I will finally be able to drift to sleep in your embrace, though you may as well be galaxies away.

Contemplatia on a Common Paradox

Sometimes it's worth noticing that no one is really paying attention and that reality is not the same thing to any two people. We are irrevocably separate. Never mind this and that bung about 'other halves' and 'soul mates'. There is no symmetry among human beings.

But that's not to say that some vestige of understanding can't be achieved. One just has to remember that we don't fit in the other person's skin. Sad but true that we even try. (The main component of metaphysics is physical.)

One has to adore the paradox of the social animal that is the human being.