I miss your sweetness, how gentle you always were with me. I miss the way your laundry smells. I miss how small my hand felt in yours, and how safe I felt when I was with you. 

I miss so many things at five am, as I stand here folding. 

300 squats times two days.  Feels so good to feel the burn again.  I'm not even kidding.  I fucking love it.  

Late at night, here alone, there is no profundity.  There is just the terrible bitterness of absence and the hollow thrum (pang?) of aching for your voice, your hands, your curls. To close my eyes and feel your love returned. A thousand shining suns. I love you. In this space between day and night I am too spent to fight it: I love you.  Echoing in darkness like a moth's furtive wing-beat.  Lost on the wind and tucked away in the edges of night, the love still palpable and real forming in morning like dew on leaves. I was here and I was real, this heart a bleeding pulp exposed.

I'm learning a lot.  I need to be a stronger communicator.  I'm learning about what I do and do not like, and about taking time for me.  I'm beating myself up less.  I'm trying to throw stuff out.  Trying being the operative word.  I'm starting out slowly, but it's going.  I'm learning that work isn't all.  That to be happy, I need to make time for myself and my personal life.  

It might seem like this vacation time hasn't been all that, but for me, it's been everything.  I've slept, I've been eating.  I can't remember the last time I've cried.  I've been talking to friends a lot.  The next step is family.  I'm trying harder with myself, and it feels weird but it feels good.  

I can't lie and say I'm not stressing over a bunch of things.  Money and Sammie and things I need to take care of in general.  Doctor's appointments and driver's licenses and annoying life shit.  But I'm taking each day as it comes.  And I'm grateful for them.

Also, you know what's a good fucking song?  Every time I hear it?  I am just transfixed by The Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter.  

So damn good.  For so many years.

Thank you.

at times I focus on something so much as to become something else

I still miss.  Seven days.  I can do this.  I can stay strong.  

I can survive with missing things, and before long seven days 

will be eleven, then twenty-two, and eventually forty-five.

In forty-five days, my heart will burst from this ribcage.  
I will know what it means to really love myself and be happy.  
I will count the days not from the end of him but the beginning of me.  

It is alright, it is okay.  Each day is brighter than the next.  

I am writing this on my head, my hands inside gloves

 that don’t match

Silvina López Medin

I lose at least onefrom the pair per seasonand hold on to the other, that singleglove left behind still contains the lost one.That is to sayon the winter break I read Pascal Quignard,in each image there's a missing image,says he, I addin each sound there's a missing sound,say: my motherhow she, because of her hearing impairment,is permanently reconstructingsentences from fragments, isn't thatwriting? I amwalking the nine blocks back homefrom the subway, it is -18 degreesand I'll never knowhow to turn that into Fahrenheit or howat times I focus on something so much as to becomesomething else. Glovesprevent us from breaking apart,gloves are not relevant in Buenos Airesthis cold does not existthe kind that makes you turn not only your headbut your whole body just to look atwhat's coming. I did not write muchback there, just broughta couple of summer images: my mother and Iat night standing in front a white wallkilling mosquitoes; my mother,my sons, I, in the backyard,hurrying to take away the clothes from the clothes lineunder light rain.

sirens and tequila

Sirens.  And tequila.  

Sirens and tequila.  And water.  Substituting vodka for tequila sometimes.  But always water and sirens.  Each night of vacation.  

And memories of Dan.  

He doesn't read this.  He doesn't review the memories.  Go over the shared things.  He doesn't give a flying fuck, as my mother would say.  He is done.  I would like to be on that page of the chapter, I pretend to be so far advanced.  But at night it does its catching up.  And everyone else in the universe goes to bed.  And I'm wide the fuck awake with shitty memories and a blinking cursor and tequila and no limes.  

I want to be penetrated.  I want to cum.  But just by one person in the universe, only one.  It's impossible, it's fucking monumental.  It's inane.  But I want to feel real.  I want to be held.  But only by him.  

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.  Can someone just make it a feasibility already?  Where do I sign?  

I've practiced Spanish.  I've cleaned.  I've folded origami.  I've written.  I've read.  I'm developing character, I tell myself.  I even pray.  I smile in darkness with tears on my face as I say thank you.   

But I want to trace the stubble of your chin.  I want to feel the weight of your curls in my fingers in darkness.  I want to listen to you breathe as you sleep.  

I miss.  I miss.  I miss.