It’s 11 pm, Thursday night

Longed for him to stroll into our room.... Instead, not even a fight...

His footsteps approaching from front porch again.

With hopes up, oh sure, how vain, how vain.

He was walking into the kitchen just to refill glass high

The addiction, we’re broken

Only, hi and bye.

Short days without him, Lonely nights alone

while desperately, I ...

Weep in our sheets waiting for my groom

Wanting to hear about his dreams, in bloom.

My eyes shut down, from our needy kids

—->I can barely even see to write this.

The tears from my heart, desperate to be touched.

Asking our 5 year old to massage my legs,

“he’s too busy” & such.

I have slaved all day just keepin’ the littles alive.

& When he gets home, it’s dinner then a dive...

Right in, to CC & La Aroma de Cuba

Hazed, and cloudy I just feel like succuba.

I don’t know where to go.

To sleep I suppose

Maybe in my dreams...

At least, that I chose ...

I sat, running my finger along the circular edge of my iced coffee cup. Nerves came and went in my stomach like a lava lamp. She'd be here soon, looking like a goddess that just stepped off a magazine cover. I didn't know how I was gonna break up with her. The clock signified that another hour had gone by before Re'Tina blew in. As predicted, she was bundled in the red peacoat I gave her for Christmas, and a scarf of her home flag was billowing around her sides. She saw me and smiled, sending a chill down my spine.

"Hey babe!" she said, pressing her soft lips to my face. "How are you, sunshine?"

"I'm fine, my moonlight. You should sit," I murmured.

Her face changed upon hearing my tone and she sat in the seat. I sat too, nearly sending my coffee all over myself. She giggled for a second then stopped once she saw my gaze.

"Thanks for the flowers at work. Must've taken a lot of work to engineer edible rainbow roses."

I shrugged. "It's my job."

"What's going on, Laeticia?"

"I- We- Um... I have a girlfriend."

"You what?" Re'Tina already looked like she was going to cry.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to continue. "I knew her way before I met you. We were having problems, and I didn't want to deal with her, so I started talking to other people."

"So, I'm just your side piece," she mouthed as tears began to fall.

"I'm not- I mean, you're not just another person I'm fucking. I really liked you."

"Liked. Past tense!" Re'Tina got up to leave and I grabbed her arm.

"T, no, please don't leave. I want this to work but I have something going with Net and I just- I'm sorry."

"Oh, shove it up your ass!" she screamed back, storming out of Starbucks as I cried into my cup of iced coffee.

Husband slaps wife really hard after getting so mad and frusturated at her.

When he notices how mad she became, he said "Only those who truly love you hit you!"

The wife replies cleverly "Let me to show you how much I love you!" After saying this, she started beating him up with the broom in her hand and he ended up in hell for his sins. She then looking at his dead body, calmed herself down by saying, "I killed him with my love, He had an overdosage of my sweetness and as a result, It was obvious he was going to die of diabetes!"

I don’t know who spilled the eggs, but I don’t think “no use crying” applies here. I remember thinking I’d walk across knives. I remember thinking I’d sleep on fire. I remember thinking it was only me and you. And now I’m sticky with yolk and wishing for cleanliness. I’m feet-bleeding, taking back my promises to the sky. I’m thinking of tearing down the walls. I’m thinking of drowning in shadow. I’m thinking of abandon. I’m thinking of jumping ship. I’m thinking of rapture. I’m thinking of all of these fucking eggshells. I’m thinking of inhale. I’m thinking of exhale. I’m thinking of eggshells.

I’ve fallen fast,

I’ve fallen

last.

I know where

mountains grow and

shadows end,

there behind

forbidden sanctuary,

deep in my cavernous

armory

of blank deceit.

I’ve starved that conversational

tick,

that frenzied bug which whispers

for faultless love,

I’ve lost my

humming senses,

that fanatical buzzard

swooping toward

wrecked prey.

Lost in

spiraling nightmares of

bliss,

eager for

the day vexing agony

would vanish.

I’ve fallen fast,

I’ve fallen

last.

I’d chase tempest

clouds and city stars

awaiting nameless things.

Like moths and monarchs

surging heartstruck

skies.

I’d sit and wait

on corroding shores-

where tides sung death

and hope sunk in

wavering depths-

finding only

scorched earth days,

devouring suppressing

malaise.

I’ve fallen fast,

I’ve fallen

last.

I’ve forgotten

your ways,

I’ve absorbed your lies.

I seek paradise...

Paradise I’ve

lost.

I’ve fallen fast...

I’ve fallen...

last.

Come with me, follow till the end.

Let your imagination tumble, humble I'm your friend.

Don't look for a way out, comfort needs a twin.

Look to me like a light in a cave, on me you can depend.

Sometimes I wobble when I walk, can't find a steady line.

If I walk in the dark on my tippy toes, the right direction I will find.

So come with me, and follow the color of the blowing wind.

Come with me, I'll protect you till the very end.

It’s a sick joke to call it an emotion, but disconnection is my least favorite feeling. Detachment, distance, and disinterest from the goings-on of the world.

My mentor teacher, a couple years older than my parents, had me over for a couple beers one afternoon. He, like me, is a Catholic who lost faith. A cluster of finches hopped about the yard, searching for food while we sat on his patio. “Look at them,” he said. “No thoughts at all, just following instinct like they’re part of huge computer program.” For a few moments, his worldview slipped into his larynx and came out in casual conversation, and it was cold. I knew the man just a little bit better, and I loved him all the more for it.

For my own part, I delight in birds. Most of the time. But when I feel disconnected, they are merely the irrelevant automatons my friend saw, and people are little more. They go through motions I cannot understand for all their predictability, and that I cannot influence. They hold no wonder. My attempts to help them, or teach them, or love them are meaningless because we all belong to the same void. This is the feeling of disconnection: nihilistic ennui.

Kafka wrote, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.” I’ve found that’s only half right for me. A book can warm the currents and make them flow rapidly, but when my sea is truly frozen, books do not break it apart. They take too much interpretation and require me to draw on emotion I do not then feel. Movies and music work best for me, preferably ones I feel strong attachment to and know well, because I’ll be on autopilot for the first while. Vertigo, American Beauty, Ikiru. The Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness works well, perhaps because it’s so overtly emotional in its swings from melancholy to nostalgia, anger, love, joy. I don’t feel like putting it on, but I do anyway because I’ve learned it helps. The swelling strings and choruses of “Tonight, Tonight” might start to work on me. By the time I get to the verses of “Muzzle” I’m usually feeling more myself again. The opening lines are anxious: “I fear that I am ordinary, just like everyone.” By the second verse, the attitude has shifted: “My life has been extraordinary, blessed and cursed and won.” That’s a better feeling.

Disconnection returns periodically. I recognize it, now, and before an evening’s over I can usually show it the door.

I’ve lost my mind,

I’ve lost my heart..

and now I’ve pretty much

lost my soul too....

but I’d do it all over again

if it meant

I could, forever,

be in love with you.

-Dare I hope, that you would love me back too?

~Love.

-Ray Bradbury

This quote is important to me because I personally use writing as an outlet for when life gets too hard or stressful or even too boring. It allows me to escape into a world of my own creation in my time of need. I think it's important for everyone to have some kind of world to escape into, some kind of happy place. Desite the light of life, the real world can easily became an endless repetitive circle of work, school, and misery just by its very nature. Being forced to stay in that state of mind, being forced to constantly focus on and relive all your problems, that's enough to destroy a person.

Some say that people that spend a lot of time in their heads are crazy.

I say, the truly insane people are the ones who don't.

Pretty white, sweetly scented, suspended bells on the Lily of the Valley along the park path dripped their poison deceptively as sixteen year old Kevin spoke the words I was waiting to hear, "Do you think your parents will let you go to the junior prom with me?"

"Ashes, ashes, they all fall down!" The nearby cackling happy toddlers hadn't heard him, but I did and yelled above them a premature hopeful answer, spilling my "YES" as deep and as wide as the adjacent Allegheny River. Two long months of waiting would ensue, a busy two months for both of us, littered with teenage exploits; sports practices, competitions, homework and mind numbing chores. At fourteen, my mother said, "You are too young to date," but she made an exception and said I could go to the prom with Kevin because it was chaperoned and "Anyway," she shook the salt shaker longer than she should staring me down, "I like his parents." Leading up to my dream night there were tantalizing phone calls, toothsome hall peeks and subsequent slinky occasional walks in the park together, where I clutched at his every word as if he were Shakespere, intoxicated by my own personal interpretation of his seductive soliloquy.

My dress was not hard to find, pink, light pink, almost white, with a matching chiffon shawl that caressed the skin on my back as a temporary prop. Before the long mirror in the dressing room, anticipating his touch, I imagined slipping the shawl off and draping it carefully onto the back of my seat, replaced by his strong caressing arm followed by a tender benign kiss from his lips to my bare shoulder. He would then ask, "Would you like to dance?" Nice and slow, slower than the soft spring breeze, we would dance the night away stealing soft kisses and glances from the others, all of them only wishing they could be us. Love had bitten me so hard, everything I once knew slipped behind the couch and I didn't care to look for my family or my friends; even my favorite books laid dry in collected dust, as I habitually fantasized over my lionized paramour.

When the coveted night arrived he entered my family hallway as royalty, my dashing prince, and I stepped forward like a virgin bride ready to commit in pink. He did say, "You look nice," but seemed to look beyond me as he said so. I assumed he was embarrassed in front of my parents, and with the help of my mother, he successfully pinned the coordinated pink carnation corsage upon my heaving chest, close to my left breast atop my marshmallow heart. It was on the ride over to the prom with him in the back seat of my father's Cadillac that I first noticed it seemed I had lost my place in the book I was writing. Boldly, I reached for his arm and he quickly raised it cupping his hand to his mouth simulating a cough, pulling his body as far away as he could without leaving the vehicle. "Perhaps he's nervous in front of Dad," I thought, while following his lead by staring off towards pedestrians and vegetation, anything other than each other.

After we arrived, he led me to our table, and there I sat, shawled, alone, in my seat, other than when I would get up to look for him, only to see what my eyes pleaded to deny. Patty Paulson. Pretty Patty Paulson, also 16, the girl every 11th grade guy wanted to be with and Kevin, talking, dancing and even slipping away outside, together, I saw them, and when the door closed behind them, a tsunami tore the door off its hinges and flung it across the room crushing me. Had she come alone? Unlikely. Perhaps her date became a bore to her too and she found her next shiny object. When it was time for the meal, Kevin finally came to our table and talked to me and the rest of the sitting students jovially, while my tongue wanted to ask, "How dare you," but couldn't, as if my tongue was a duck stuck in a row bound and tucked in for the night. Was I just his decoy used in the hunt? Dead ducks and cracked egg shells littered the floor.

He didn't sit next to me on the ride home. His friend's father drove us and he jumped into the front seat before he was invited to do so. He said goodnight to me without even turning his head and didn't have to say it was over between us before it began. The why was simple and it started with a "P." I couldn't say her name and couldn't get the vision of them slipping away out of the gymnasium door off of my mind. That scene would haunt me, an open grave on a Halloween night long into my adulthood.

My parents were waiting at the front door when I pushed by them as if they were unwanted stray dogs, "What's wrong," they both asked recognizing the obvious signs of turmoil. "Nothing!" I protested and they would never know, although they must have surmised and decided to let me work through the pain of unrequited love.

It was Elton John I became acquainted with in the days and weeks following the prom. Tumbleweed Connection. 1971. I crawled inside his mind, like a worm down its hole searching for safety, but the darkness Elton must have been feeling when he wrote his words infected me and I drowned with him, zombie-like, somewhere on top of my cold twin bed for too many excruciating minutes multiplying into hours, day after day, losing count and my way, so close and so far away from Elton, farther from Kevin, alone.

"Some leave you counting the stars in the night."