I’ve been saying goodbye too long to make this sentimental. I said goodbye when we won in quadruple overtime and you held my hand as we jumped the fence and ran with our hands flailing above our heads to the end zone, at our last dance, when I craned my neck to see your face and it glistened with sweat and sadness. I said goodbye when I wrote my destination on the cafeteria wall in green chalk. When I returned my three overdue library books. When I signed stupid sentences in countless yearbooks. When I bought my last bag of chips from the vending machine. When we watched ‘Up’ in AP Bio and I cried at the opening sequence because the 5 year old me could never grasp its grief. Change is hard, they say, but this one came like a slow creeping thunderstorm. It was a natural death, layer by layer it gradually disappeared, now all that remains is a shifting of a golden tassel, and post-ceremony pictures.
I don’t know how long regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don’t know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light
of a candle being blown out travels faster
than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit,
but I do know that all our huffing and puffing
into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick
birthday candle—didn’t make the silence
any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses
I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out
of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years
to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate
to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.
(via luxurists)
Thank you! Today was actually my last day of high school, so I’m thinking about Dartmouth more and more… hopefully it was the right choice for me!
Haha this is awkward. I read Good Squad last year and I loved it! I liked the non-linear plot, but mostly I liked Egan’s writing style, and how intricate the characters were and how it was almost like a maze to figure out how they were all related. But from a plot standpoint, I guess I see your point, I mean nothing of substance happened. I liked what it revealed about the characters, and from there, humanity, more than what it did with the characters, I guess. I don’t know though, I never got a chance to look over it again, because I loned it to my aunt and she lost it in Prague! What a tragedy!
Honestly I could not get through Kavalier and Clay, and it sits half read on my bookshelf. But did you like The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao? I thought that deserved the award that it received.
(Source: lunati, via trishdafish)
I don’t really want to call my friends up, I just want to brood over sad songs in my room, thinking about how you just confirmed that you are slowly falling out of love with me. I thought, that if I wasn’t perfect at least in my eyes, that somehow I was perfect in yours and that was enough, because at least in one reality, someone thought I was worthwhile. I never thought that love was fleeting. god damn it, you asked to live in my heart and now your belongings are thrown haphazardly in cardboard boxes.
I’m 18. I wore a white lace dress to school. No one really cared. I want to go buy cigarettes or a lottery ticket or something just to make this day interesting.
