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I wake up at 7:30 AM every day, sometimes I can manage to half sleep until 8:30, I wish I was done writing about heartbreak. I’m tired of looking at other people’s messy bookshelves and knowing that they don’t read their books, although mine isn’t much better — it’s essentially nonexistent. I have piles of books everywhere, with empty vases and forgotten keepsakes resting on top. In New Jersey I remember tiptoeing into my grandfather’s bedroom to find loose paper to write on, barely 7 years old. He had stacks of books and blank paper everywhere on the floor and I think maybe that informed my organizational impulses, or lack there of Maybe I want to know about everyone because I know too much about myself. Sometimes I ask people for gossip about people they know, that I have no connection with or idea about. But still, I want to hear something. I constructed a fridge word magnet poem, it might be rearranged by now, and I didn’t have the correct kind of connector words to do it the way I wanted to, but I was bent over and immersed, searching for the words. And it was nice. One orbits ruin I like words that sum up absence and loss. I like words that are destructive. I like to repurpose words. I like when they have friction and I like when they hurt. I’m not the first to say English is a great language to write in. I know it’s an unpopular sentiment but it is true: It is a malleable language and you are required to interact with static symbols to evoke something. And I know this isn’t unique to the English language and it’s why I love writing and reading every way, but it’s what I know. I can’t forgive myself and I cannot forgive anyone else: He was searching my face and could tell something was wrong but I’ve already used enough words, every way; I’ve used action. I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth. It’s better to disappear. There are too many internal things about me. I used to pore over my fathers medical books when I was barely literate to look at the gory surgery photos of diseased bodies. People misinterpret you in an instant: R said years ago that I’m beautiful and invite people to look and then punish them for doing exactly that. It’s true. But it’s also more: I want to be drowned in an essence that isn’t me and isn’t shared — and I want to also be the one that drowns another It is not an impulse I can tame and I can’t try to anymore — What else is truth but reducing something to its is?