[x]

truthsi.

there are 2 things that not even the most
forceful of rains can cleanse me of:

-memories
-mistakes

ii.

sometimes, i feel like a caged lion.
only with a lot more impatience
and a lot less resilience.

iii.

i have yet to discover what it means to be content.
i am either too stagnant or too fluid.
no middle ground.

iv.

i have mastered the art of leaving.
it's the idea of moving on that still haunts me.

v.

i fear that the light in my eyes is so dim that it will burn out
before even i have a chance to see the world with it.

vi.

i am not as clever as i pretend to be.

vii.

someone needs to teach me that
i don't need reassurance; i

confessionalthey say sad girls change their hair color
and forgive their monsters.

i change my morals
and become one.

the city of AtlantisIt's 3:45 in the morning
and I find the world
half-asleep
underneath the ocean.

Things I'll tell you when you're older.The monsters
don't fit under beds
anymore

and neither
do we.

Stationery Pt IStanley loved stationery.

He loved the way it smelled when you stripped away the crinkly cellophane wrapper. He loved the Spartan beauty of an unspoiled pad of paper (A4, plain, 260gsm). He loved the sound of a cap crisply clicking onto the top of a Biro. He loved the texture of a freshly-sharpened pencil and the flake of the finely-honed graphite point. He loved gazing over stacks and stacks of untouched Post-Its, each a perfect square of yellow, an army of ideas awaiting orders.

He loved everything about it. Stationery was neat. It was orderly. It was always needed, easily replaceable, and something that everyone can appreciate.

Stanley

Understudy of a Prop GirlOdessa dislikes the spotlight. Always blinding her when she stares out into the audience to deliver a love letter in song, always tripping her when it swoops down at her feet at curtain call, it is the only thing that may tempt her back to the grand piano in cold Ms. Merola's living room. But she will not go, not unless Beethoven's fifth returns to her mind intact, untouched ebony and ivory.

She is a performer. When she describes herself as such to strangers, she tastes the irony sour in her mouth. It is a taste that stays there when she returns to her solitary school lunch table with a program for A Streetcar Named Desire, and it doesn'

001 i am a whirlwind of
bruised knees
(purple)

an aching heart
(dark blue)

twisted guts
(red)

&
a regret that could
crumble mountains.
(green-green-green)

(it is not a dream if it is everyday)i no longer have the gall
to write letters to my universe.
it’s stony quiet,
all around.
it’s possum eyes in headlights,
abandoned chandeliers
frozen
in Victrola dust.

some tireless pamphleteer
has wrecked this room
with motorized felicity!
there must be
at least
one bill for every breath,
paper
mountains
of indifference.

and now, i see
you are the same.
you’re no magic
planet. i will
get up,
some time tomorrow,
mid morning, when the bugs have died,
and drive to work
and i won’t think
there’s anything
that ever came
before that sun.

and there,
i’ll trade in shibboleths
and type in pointy let

wooden floorboardsold houses have memories
of things that you don't remember happening
until you touch the chipped paint in the garage
and remember
'hey, when i was a kid,
i ran a bike into this wall and broke my nose.
i was really stupid'
and
skeletons hidden in closets made of giant oak trees
of the wooded backyard.

specifically memories
of your brother daring you to eat an ant
and for some reason doing it.
note to self:
it tasted nasty but it was a bit better than
the centipede. a bit but not by much.

that oven where a mom used to put in
those cookies with the designs on them that baked
in what?
twelve minutes?
yeah.
and vowing one day

The extremely short storyI once heard the tale of a man who had the whole universe inside his throat.

"Was he a giant?" someone asked.

I thought for a second.

"No," I said. "He was a storyteller."

tumble drylaundry day came
in a tumult of procrastination,
fingers worn as rags,
skin dry and white
as eggshells

(pale ivory with cracks
and freckles,
the heart a fleshy yolk,
yellow with jaundice
and indecision)

and a chore as mundane
as folding linen
became a metaphor,
fertilised and fit for
breaking open.

don't go if you've got more to sayand last night i saw you, the real you
the you that i had buried under layers and layers of
blues and greens
from trying to find something
that was almost you
but not quite.
and i didn't cry
i didn't shatter into a million stupid pieces
i froze
like you were a car with high beams
and i was a scared little deer.
cause i hadn't seen past this you i made up
for so fucking long.
but i remembered
that you didn't catch my attention at first.
but when you did.
my god
i couldn't look away.
and i wish i had have stayed
with my eyes closed.
cause i was so proud of myself
for tearing my heart
away from you
and out of underneath your skin
or between your fingers

my body is a funeral servicethis morning i emptied your ashes into the sky, hoping to watch them sift through my fingers like an eagle taking flight. but the wind carried them backwards and my face became an ashtray for memories. you came back to me, like you always do, like a kiss or a reoccurring dream that i can never forget. i became cloaked in black grain, the remnants of your body. your cremated smile was caught somewhere between the stinging in my eyes and the ash on my jacket.

in that moment my body became a funeral service. my lips preached your names to the trees. i forgot what it was like to feel anything but hymns pressing down on my back like the heat of t

The Importance of Gold FlecksHereditary.

I learned the meaning of the word when I was young on a summer afternoon. Too hot to play outside, I was sitting with my dad on our blue couch with the small white polka dot fabric. In retrospect, it was probably a tacky piece of furniture, but love is unconditional when you are small, and I sure did love that couch. I remember my dad watching Winnie the Pooh with me every Saturday morning on its spotted cushions. That day, though, we had a conversation about eyes that I never forgot, and even then, its deeper meaning was not lost on me.

"Daddy, your eyes are green like a cat's," I said.
He smiled, and told me t

affair with anamnesisShe has a long-standing love affair with memory.

It comes to her bed between the lovers who find her in the corners of this city; in cafes and clubs, under streetlights. Men with broad shoulders and scarred hands, rough jaw lines and bedroom eyes – they seek her out subconsciously and find themselves entangled; heart-deep in damp sheets and raspberry hairstrands. They lick chocolate from her fingers in the half-light, and kiss that place behind her ear where her neck smells like cinnamon. In the mornings they wake, sated, enamored with the sight of her in nothing more than a button-down shirt -- too big, picked up off the floor. She is

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i have a problemwe promised only years of drugging ourselves with latitudes and longitudes would result in conversation. we agreed to a vow of sexually tense silence because the minute we sober up, we're alright with a big eleven triple o between us. time's easier to keep track of when we're on the polar end of the equator but we're back to quiet gestures to remind us that love is still poisoning the air, thicker with longing and fear.
it's harder to stay quiet when i want to scream your name across the multitude of Atlantics keeping you from screaming my name too. love, i've taken many maps to the head before, but I've only spilled minutes and navigation orders when i wake up in the ER after the pain subsides.
though distance is a drug with no rehabilitation facility, you need to keep yelling in the comforts of your own head, just so i know that you're as stoned as i am.

roll over meour eyes were fogged with farewells marking territories down our cheeks. the ache felt like salt at the edge of my throat and i was afraid to say it loud before you said the ocean kissed your taste buds. we both knew then.
we just knew.
maps tore apart and our paper walls built with just enough faith to last three decades broken into our salt-bitten souls. it's been too long since we've been hurt with the blue of the sky and you are not the ache in my bones when he says something i want to hear; you're the salt crusts between my fingers when i try to remember the pain i haven't really felt.
when i coughed up latitudes and minutes on to the shore, i swore i thought i was finally corporeal -- finally able to call reality dormant for all these years but i still felt transparent. my hand still slipped right through you. no warmth, no breaths, no you.
you were not here.
you were the flutter in my chest right before it grew wings, and you were the wails of the ocean when i finally broke us f

she had a habit of making stars cryprobably could've settled for
less than mine, but there's
a tongue-tied night sky
crying to the moon and
its narrating defenses
against my remarks, comments
too
snark: it's
never too dark to notice the spark, dead
shooting stars have been
trying to prove. to me, it takes
more than will to move
the north to the south, no field will
help you, no power will allow you,
no words will let you.
should've stuck to rhyming for
catharsis and, let the night cry to
a fraudulent sun and
found comfort in anonymity to
hang on some more; should've quit
being a witness before i
fell to the floor. should've opened
more books
before popping those pills and let
the driftwood
drag reluctance until it
swam into ripples too perfect for
the moon, and stayed to hold the
stars when they fell
into our lagoon.
probably could've lied about
discovery and the Nile, probably would've
granted every wish worth the while. could've
said the day was too dark for the
night, could've stopped the moon from
settling to surviv

when he said forevereduard, i need to know,
sweetie,
am i the reason your
canvas stays blank?
i remember the sunrise meaning
so much to
you that
you lied to keep me until
it was light enough to open your eyes.
darling, our suns aren't
misunderstood stars that only
happened to crash and create
a universe
and if anything,
you shouldn't have been
so catastrophically
beauti-
ful,
your soul was full that night, wasn't it?
you washed your skin
with the warmth of mine,
lied to me about a
forever
when all you needed was
someone to blame till
sunrise;
someone who could take the
blame till you got high again.
oh sweetheart, my dear eduard,
your acrylic eyes and
pastel cheeks
are tired, wrinkled spaces
of the rest your wanderlust
needs,
they are unaltered homes of
all the wishes that
kept your
collarbones under the
water:
they cleaned your slate,
your words,
but your lies were
just
too
stubborn.
you shouldn't have said tomorrow
you should have said, "till sunrise,"
you should have said
that it's a mistake
for me
to

it's a wonder, we'll never landSage-lipped and infinite, Peter pries open the soft teal of September with fingers that shake and shiver; Alice watches from afar and through windows that tremble beneath the weight of almost-frost, there is the green eyed cheshire smile of a boy both familiar and completely unknown. But as much as the wanderlust has gnawed on the edges of her patience, cracking her reserve, her thirst for Peter keeps floating in her malpighian layer; and, cursing the idea of wrinkles folding her youth, it creeps out before she can close her eyes to restrain it.

As the thirst slips into the jagged corners of her vertebrae, leaving shards of glittering wander

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Submitted: June 28, 2012
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[x]

i fold paper for a living

by *your-methamphetamine, Jun 28, 2012, 2:45:02 PM
Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Biography & Memoir / Stories & Vignettes

^{people think it's weird - that i fold paper for a living.

i sit by a park bench, chant numbers under my breath and bend each fiber of light, fragile paper just the way i want.
because it makes you feel powerful? you ask. and i sit there and smile at the words that twitch the sides of your lips.

i sit here and watch that simple square turn into a crane right before my eyes - with my hands - because i can make it happen. i imagine my next move, anticipate an outlook and create beauty out of the simplicity of what the bark of the tree next to the bench twisted into from the paper in front of me. because you've been ugly your whole life? you ask. and i laugh at your naivety and inhale the scent of the rain.

the musky scent seeps into the paper and carries itself into the presence of the butterfly i folded. and it sits on the mantelpiece with all the other folded paper i find beauty in. i watch them on cold November mornings, when the fireplace is lit and the clouds sigh outside my fogged windows. because you're only capable of faking pretty? you ask. and i stay quiet while you parade around my sanctuary.

i inhale every scent on each of the paper folded beauties in front of me; rain, the park, the desert, strawberries. i inhale in a memory and let out a sigh. a painful, long-awaited, blood-tainted sigh. because memories are all they'll ever be? you ask. and i look down, too afraid to tell you you're right.

maybe you couldn't rest til you knew the truth behind life and death, or before you could find the right card on a random corner of the street (one that i haven't folded a living out of) or maybe you were just scared busy. maybe it would've hurt you if you knew how much it takes out of me to turn those memories into matter. because you're weak and needed me to hold you through everything? and i lie back down and hope you stop talking because i was too simple and in-the-moment to think that far.

my life exists in these folds. these folds i make to restore beauty in the mind that you ravished with your chocolate-polluted words. my life exists in paper-cuts and small bleeds because i love doing my job so much, i forgot i'm not paper thin as well. because you like to look at me and wish i'd understand your delusions? you ask. and i cry out to you, whimpering words of help that you're too tired to hear.

i was too simple and impulsive to think about the universe and determinism. most days i was just glad i could feel; feel the blood behind a wound, or pain behind my eyes, or the papery feel of the crane mobile on my window.

because people think it's weird - that i fold paper for a living.}

i fold paper for a livingby *your-methamphetamine

Literature / Prose / Non-Fiction / Biography & Memoir / Stories & Vignettes

_{"this picture needs a frame
and I needs a pane of glass
that can separate the subject
from the days that they missed.

our little microcosm might have blossomed
into something better but I doubt we'll ever know,
no, we'll never know."
-- god's favourite sketches; witness

from my old account.
i thought i'd show the prose side of a December too.}

love 2 2

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~~neutral 0 0~~

~Aiciluam Mar 30, 2013 Student General Artist

This is so...humble.
How the questions keep lashing at the narrator, but they keep quiet in their paper world.
You can see pain (I liked how you brought up the papercuts) but the reader feels admiration for the narrator, well done.
This makes it such a pretty piece of literature to read.

*your-methamphetamine Mar 30, 2013 Student Writer

_{I love comments like this. Thank you so much, dear. It means so very much.}

~Aiciluam Mar 30, 2013 Student General Artist

No problem at all. C: I'm glad you appreciate it.

*Lady-Yume Mar 28, 2013 Writer

_{Your beautiful work has been featured here: [link]}

*your-methamphetamine Mar 29, 2013 Student Writer

_{Thank you ever so much, dear.}

~catching-cinderella Feb 15, 2013 Student Writer

_{gah. this piece. <3
i love folding paper - stars are my absolute favorite. i string them together and hand them from my ceiling or i put them in jars.

"my life exists in paper-cuts and small bleeds because i love doing my job so much, i forgot i'm not paper thin as well."
lovely.}

*your-methamphetamine Feb 15, 2013 Student Writer

_{I love paper folding too. Thank you so much, lovely.}

*Adrolyn Feb 11, 2013 Hobbyist Digital Artist

One of your first pieces I fell in love with.

*your-methamphetamine Feb 11, 2013 Student Writer

!Lacewinged-Beauty Jan 25, 2013 Writer

^{You have no idea how much I adore this piece.

My sixth year of primary school I took Japanese class. I became obsessed with origami. I never made a crane but oh, folding the paper and making beautiful things while it poured rain outside ... It was just the most beautiful thing. I never really kept any of the paper-creatures but I remember them. I always made blue pencils - dark blue, but not navy. Purple was dedicated to penguins though I cannot explain why.

It was beautiful and one of my better memories}

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i fold paper for a living

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