Stocking Stuffer

The ducks don't care that it's Christmas. They still smell like shit, and they will still bite each other to get to your flecks of Wonder bread.

I write from a MacBook, my head spinning from the distinct feeling of having suddenly crashed into an alternate universe; I am at the mercy of the wondrous image of outer space that lines my Desktop. I scoured my entire room just to give this beautiful machine a home on my desk. My computer knows everything. I hear my Spanish teacher say "sublime", soo-blee-meh. Hard work good, and hard work fine, but first take care of head.

0400

I don't know how people will define me. Maybe it'll be by the rug burn I gave myself when I acted big, or by the fact that I have my dad's complexion. Maybe people will put me in the dictionary because I like Christmas, and I bruise easily, and I like untangling yarn and rolling it into balls, and I don't know how to get what I want. Maybe they'll flip to page 220 and remember that the lines that end the chapter are possibly my favorites.

Diane stopped me at the door and said, "Since I can't seem to find a way to love you, let me give you the closest chemical equivalent."

She handed me a sandwich bag containing one hit of ecstasy.

This was a painful thing to hear, but it was mostly just disenchanting. I spent the subway ride home wondering if Diane had rehearsed that line. I mean, who says things like that in real life? It almost seemed like she said it on purpose, just so I'd have something interesting to write about at a later date.

Three weeks later, I took that ecstasy at the Bronx Zoo. It didn't do anything to me. The tigers still looked like tigers. But I was back in love with Diane.

Fresh!

Comfortable silences. The movie was like toothpaste, yes; I'm bleeding at the gums because I am right.

Second Nature

I forget sometimes, like trying to remember what the top story of a skyscraper looks like. But I think about looking up into his face in the shower and my muscles part and smile, my stiff spine curls and smiles. I want to get so high that I can pretend I don't exist, floating over a smile like a worn picket fence. I smile like a girlfriend in the mirror, and I spill tea on myself as my house lifts from the ground, hovering, threatening to fly.

So Long Told of the Night So Cold

It is odds and ends that are keeping me warm now: my brother's sweatshirt, a leopard-print blanket, a sunflower barrette my mother threw away. My dog keeps his nose firmly pressed to the dotted line that leads him in beelines. The night is hollowly gothic, dramatically angular, rendered in shades of purple and yellow.

He stops. "This is the place," my dog says, and he definitively shits in a small heap. Wiping his feet briskly, he harmonizes with my blood. The dotted line, weaving between the bricks of the driveway, ends on the doorstep. The front door is unlocked, and everyone who passes through it is going to sleep but me.