i love that i’m a carousel horse and he is a unicorn.

one of my favorite things i was ever given was these old movies of my dad when he was younger, and i don’t know what draws me so badly to them like a moth to light but it must have something to do with my obsession with catcher in the rye, with what holden understood about us constantly losing pieces of ourselves. and maybe a little to do with what charlie understood in perks about us being happier in the photos. and a little to do with what epiphanie’s mom said about how it’s weird our parents know us our whole life but we only know them for half of theirs. i find myself nostalgic for not only my own childhood but my parents, for rodney’s, and i think it’s so sad when i’m laying in bed and i remember something insignificant like what was on my sheets on my bed when i was younger, or how whenever we played house at recess i always wanted to be the dog, and i’d have the name lucky. and there are a lot of memories i have that i’m not sure even happened, because i used to vividly remember stacking everything my brother and i owned in the living room and another memory where i swallowed a necklace and went for a long drive in the rain where i just looked out the window, but my parents said it never happened. so i guess i just think it’s both funny and sad that i could never tell the difference between my dreams and waking life. and here’s a memory of all the forts i made in my room where i’d use the tubes those velvet posters you color in  came in to hold up the sheets. how my brother and i would sleep in sleeping bags in the living room on weekends. my childhood was the richest part of me and it slips away everyday no matter how much i try to hold onto it. still sleeping with the same pillow i’ve had since i was little, talking in run on sentences, collecting things just to collect them. and i’ll stay up all night with rodney finding out who he was when he was younger because these are the stories that really tell me who we are. underneath everything i just want to know. and here’s the neighbor’s uncle eating a firefly and how incredible we thought it was, here’s your birthday in your backyard with all the presents your parents knew you wanted because you could talk to them. and i remember we had this gap between the barn and the chain link fence where i would spend so much time and i don’t even know why, and i remember all the dew in the morning on the grass that got through, and i’d sit on that daybed in the barn with the doors only open enough for the tiniest bit of light. my whole life has always felt like a mystery i’m supposed to solve. and if i die and go to heaven i bet i’d be a child again, and i know you’d be there, you’d be my valentine when valentines were real and i’d put all of my cards in your box, and i’d kiss your cheek shyly, and hold your hand and i bet we’d ride bikes down our road. when i see us in my head that’s how i see us sometimes, i love you that much, but i also like how we are now, i like us as twenty-one year olds renting our first duplex, kissing you on the lips and holding you in a bed for two. i’d give up the pieces i tried to hold on so badly for to have these ones instead, and i remember my english teacher telling me he wrote a song about holden once, and i’d give anything to hear the lyrics to it now. 

we were brushing our teeth in the mirror in the morning and you were pulling my shirt up over my head in our bed at night, and climb in the gaps between point a and point b and try to get how much i love you. who am i naked at 3 in the morning pulling myself closer back under your arms because you’re the one who knows. because you’re the one who has always known me. and maybe i’m not enough of a hoarder to get onto a  tv but ask me how many collections i’ve started to escape, and then ask me how any of it stacks up to staying up late finding parts of me i lost just because nobody ever asked. save my caulfield, and let me escape in how beautiful the story of you is, in the pictures of you as a child on a birthday before i knew you, and in words whispered on my skin. you don’t get the way you stain me like a wine, don’t ever get pulled up from me. and when you trace your fingers on my back i hope the freckles spell out in braille how much i love you. i hope you feel it. and when i kiss you maybe your body will tremble the way mine sometimes does when you touch me, from how you love me. 

this is about letting yourself be happy, about falling in love and forgetting the rest. do this for you because nobody else will, because nobody else can. because the nights aren’t lonely anymore with you there and there are some things that only happen once in your life and this is one of those things, you are one of those things. how extraordinary it is to even sit in the same room as you.

i just sat in my car with the headlights off and tilted my seat back almost as far as it lets you go, and laid there looking at the sky, looking for some stars. looking at shadows move across the side of the garage when a car would drive by and i started feeling less and less like a person if that makes any sense at all. i didn’t let myself change any of the songs my ipod played, i just took them all as signs even if they made no sense to me now. i took a lot of pictures in the forest before that. i took them alone, and screamed a few times too, i screamed for a lot of reasons but namely because i was scared. i cut the side of my hand with the edge of the mirror on accident when i went to take one of the pictures, and that picture came out bad like the rest. it got so dark i had to turn on the headlights of my car and there is a picture of me seeing a toad and chasing it because it was you visiting me. and the pictures after that were different and on the drive home i took a picture of a church with a really long exposure, so i stared at it too, for a really long time. a lot of cops were on the road with an ambulance and i turned in my driveway thinking to myself how much i love fog and when you can see in people’s windows at night.

idk i’m partially drunk and i think i just love the way how when he closes his eyes they twitch like when someone’s pretending to sleep, i think i’m in love with the way one of us will roll the other way to hold the other in the morning, we wake up and all we want first is to have the other under our arms. i love the way his beard feels when he kisses me on my neck, or the way he lets me kiss the freckles on his back. i’m in love with the voicemail i have of him singing a whole new world or who he tells me he is when we lay in his bed at night and just talk. and i’ll never get over the first night it started becoming real when just his leg touching against mine while we sat in the same chair at a table with his friends made me feel like i was back in fourth grade with a crush big enough to crush everybody in the room. just when all his friends went to sleep or left and we were laying in the same bed watching aladdin and drunk and when we kissed for the first time, i get chills even now, i could have cried, and i did later, but you could never understand how bad i wanted that kiss. how bad i wanted this, how bad i wanted him and i told myself i couldn’t have this so many nights, it was never going to happen. it was maybe like when people win the lottery, maybe like that maybe that much happiness rushing in them at once hearing numbers, but all i heard was aladdin, all i felt was his lips and myself feeling light. it was the closest to any heaven i ever got. if my life had to end anywhere it could have ended there maybe, if it was a movie i mean that was the part where the main character’s whole journey wasn’t for nothing idk just and next thing i know we’re in ikea pretending he left a mcdonald’s cup on our dresser when i told him i hate that, and he’s asking me if we can have pink rose bed sheets and i don’t even care, i don’t even care what bed sheets we have as long as he’s happy as long as i’m cuddling him under them. and here we are laying in his bed watching the flintstones movie together and then girl interrupted, he’s asleep and i’m holding his hands and i can’t even watch the movie and go back to when we watched percy jackson and i’m making my friends wait until the movie is over til we can even leave. take me back to when he asked me out, blindfolded me and lead me in a fort filled with lights he changed the bulbs to to match the northern lights because it was on my bucket list, that was better than the real northern lights though. when i opened my eyes and he was sitting there asking me if i’d be his boyfriend, you don’t know, you don’t know, just there is nothing more beautiful to me than his face than the way his eyes look staring into mine, even when i watch him watch movies, if you could see him turn around in the passenger seat and tell me he loves me, if you could see him the night he made me a candle-lit dinner and we listened to 90’s music. he is more important to me than anything, his happiness determines mine. there are a lot of things i can’t write on tumblr about how much i’ve cried knowing nobody has ever loved me half as much as this but could you trust me if i said this was it, i know i’m going to marry him. i know, i know i know. i wish you could know what it feels like to have our inside jokes, rat kisses, to buy groceries together, to have him kiss me whenever my car stops at red lights or behind other cars. if you could see when we have to say goodbye when we say it so many times it just becomes numb, that’s the only way. i love wearing his clothes i love laying in bed every night with his teddy bear that’s about my size and wrapping it’s arm around me from behind like he’s big spoon or sometimes i’ll lay on it’s chest. how much i talk to my mom about rodney because i want her to know, and i’m drinking dr. pepper at work even though i don’t like it that much but he does, and how much i love when his hickies stay when i’m away. laughing at a documentary about chris crocker together, trying to convince him to go on the ride where it lifts you up and drops you, drinking peach four loko cause he loves the way it tastes when you kiss him, and laughing playing uno on the floor with him and his best friend and i don’t know, everything is better, every detail is better now that he is here.

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and i hate so much that people say you shouldn’t find all your happiness in being with somebody. that you need to find it in yourself, but if we were being honest we know that’s not possible. for some of us that just won’t ever be possible and god you are so lucky if you don’t live like this, under these ceilings that you could love yourself with nobody’s help, but it’s hard to even believe you when you say it yourself. don’t think i’m naive and want to live like this but i’m not ashamed, i’m not ashamed i’m happier when he tells me i’m beautiful than when i stare in my mirror until it happens. if it happens. everything stems from this loneliness of missing something close to what my shadow gives me. keep me company my whole life. his words crush mine ten fold with what they mean and i’m too trapped in my head to believe my own words anyway. his words are the only thing that make me real and i’m coming back, i’m coming back. believing is seeing and there are too many things that happened in my life to feel this worse than you but i do, but i do and and when i hold him in my arms i’ll remind him how much i need this, the way this feels when he looks at me and i’m better than the person i wanted to be, or anybody wanted me to be. i was third place but i was happy. i’m already home. how this feels when he touches me with his hands and i don’t wither or fold, and when his mouth is close to mine and i breathe in his breathes, they fill my body like an answered prayer, it’s the only time i feel it, i fell out of my body and someplace better, it was just the two of us and you warmed my cold hands. and what’s it mean to have cold hands, what’s it mean to you because i always think of standing outside JCPennies with my mother and my grandma at night in the winter, and my grandma lit a cigarette while i pulled my hands in my sleeves and cried that it was cold and i couldn’t feel anything anymore. you make me feel is what you do, you bring back the constantly fading parts. you’re the one. 

you should know that you made the colors bleed out of my clothes and onto my floor when you wrapped your arms around me. or that if you rolled up my sleeves on my shirts pink roses would probably grow out from underneath. start from the veins in my arms and break out. gradually turning into stems. turning into flowers. i’d say the same for my legs but i’m weak at the knees, weak at the knees getting out of my car. take a deep breath and kiss him on the lips, close your eyes and put your hands on both sides of his face. do you remember how this felt? your eyes are shut do you remember? could you time travel from now to the first time this happened because i bet you could, like using the slides in chutes and ladders. your eyes were shut then too just like this. you’re back, you’re back, you’re back. can i see you again. and when we stay up all night telling each other secrets on his mattress we moved into the living room would you know that i’m better now. that you never had to worry. we’ll make the apartment so cold it feels like winter and we won’t get out from under the blankets and this is better than when it’s really winter. this is better because we need it. and we’ll go on a date to the movies late at night and you can rest your head on me the whole time while i hold your hand and let go only to move my fingers up and down the inside of your palm while it rests against my leg. let’s be the last to get up, sit in the dark with the credits so i can tell you how i feel about you just a little bit. tell you like i tried to tell the complete strangers who would sit in a delta airlines plane in the seat 29F because i wrote your name on a window ledge. so when they look out at the clouds, at their lives getting smaller, maybe they’d notice, maybe they’d know i needed them to know i was happy. 

i remember someone saying once they really wanted to touch clouds, to know the way they would feel when they ran through her fingers, probably like nothing, and i’m on this plane and i bet it wouldn’t be what she wanted. nothing like that is ever what anybody wants. what people should want is the things we don’t even know we want. we should want back the times life surprised us completely and knew us better than the people we pretend to be. where we stop trying so hard to write the parts. we want to be beautiful in this way that’s like a film, but the most beautiful parts are unscripted. i want his chest against my back the day before i leave again. his shirts in my closet for nights i just stand between them on the hangers and cry. his kisses on my arms instead of my face. a mixture of his hands around my neck and his fingertips writing on me asking me not to go when i had no idea. bruises staining my skin while he calls me his ghost boyfriend. this is a lot like being inside the house they filmed a christmas story in, because it was a set but it was also a home. real and a story, the lines are so blurred and i guess i was just wondering if you’d ever liked the sky better when there was no clouds at all. when the sun went down and the skyline bled too strongly into the ocean for your eyes and you’d swim out there if the water wasn’t so cold because you really want to be in places that aren’t places. we all need out of our bodies and if i were to suggest anything i’d tell you to ride the ride at the carnivals that takes you up slow, real high up into the sky and just drops you. the whole time you’re thinking the top has to be close, i’ve got to fall soon and maybe if you watched vanilla sky you think of him jumping off the building. be brave but close your eyes. it’s better than all the drugs or the drinks, you feel like a whisper, like a ghost, like you died and came back. we have an awful lot of reasons to come back. when the dim light from the hallway lights up his face while we talked in his bed before we sleep. or when he stands on his toes when we kiss sometimes, because i honestly think there is nothing better in the world than when he does that. that if i don’t believe in a god than at least i can believe in the way this feels. and how he leaves his television on even when he leaves his apartment, even when nobody is watching it. how nice to come back to something, more things i didn’t know i wanted. for commercials to greet us back into our apartment like a person that missed us. it’s the most important part and you don’t even realize it. the plane hasn’t landed yet, we still have time to be nowhere. to travel through time, and it’s not as good as back to the future but it’s the best we’ve got. losing hours, losing hours, losing. and everybody always asks what you’d do if you found out you were going to die but i’d take you on a plane and we’d fly through central, mountain, pacific and pretend. i’d tell you you’re saving me but that wouldn’t be pretend, no that really wouldn’t be pretend at all. nobody really wants clouds to touch when they start falling in love with the real things life already gave them. you’re better than any dreams.