i read a teen novel

and it left me feeling miserable.

it's this nostalgia i have for an idea of adolescence that does not exist, and this idea of 'life' that you hold when you are 16 and your life is ahead of you, and your teenage years are behind, and these Experiences you are supposed to have had, well they didn't happen like that. and then you keep going, you walk forward, one day at a time, breathing slowly and deeply to stave off the anxiety. you walk and you walk, and you get older, and slowly, things do happen, your life happens around you, and all of a sudden, you realise the life that you see, and you read, and you dreamed of, well, it never did happen and it never could have.


i read these books, about teenagers who have boyfriends or girlfriends and their lives are swept up in the majesty of the drama. it is breathtaking, how much stronger things feel then, or how we remember them as feeling so much stronger than they really were, or how we lack the capacity to put things in context. then all of a sudden, you are there. you're older now, and you're a clever swine, and those dreams, they are the only things that ever stood by you.

and it never did happen like that. you end up looking back at the two marriages you destroyed before your 25 birthday. you look back, and there's no person there now whose eyes light up just knowing you exist - you'd had that, oh yes, but always fucked it up, time and time and time again, and time is against you now. because you are slipping away. it's only 25, but the clock is ticking, and old men love you for some reason, and you can sense that it's growing, whatever draws them in like a moth to a flame, you know you aren't there yet, but it'll ebb and flow and you'll fade away, like everything dead in bad poetry and songs. it's all going behind you. not the best part of life, or the worst. just time.

there's no little cottage. there's no one dying to fall asleep beside you every night, no one who would die for you, no one who wants nothing more than to have a little person with you, no one who just wants to cook dinner and curl up on the couch, backs resting against each other, as you both read yourselves to sleep. that's a stupid dream, elizabeth. it'll never happen, you overinflated intellectual intimidator. every lover you've had in years is scared of your room, and your space, and your scent, and your very being. you are too much. be less. be less. subside. take it back until you are small enough to fit where you belong because you just scare them, and it leaves you with nothing.

and god, i am trying. i am whispering so softly i cannot hear what i am saying. i'm trying to be good, i'm trying to be as small as my body. i'm not even singing along to the smiths now.


but still.

there's more to life than books you know, but not much more.
there's more to life than books, you know, but not much more.


it's on my thigh. it bled when i got the tattoo done, little beads of blood forming as the needle dug in, higher and higher, me cringing more as it rose up. it is a part of me now, and no one will take that away. no one will take my words away, even when i am left with nothing, sitting on dirty red sheets, up to my elbows in tattered half-read books of poetry, unable to sleep again.