To Have A Home.

to have a home.

I long to be middle-aged

To do taxes and dishes and laundry

And a house to call my own

To paint and ornament and inhabit

To plant and sow the seeds necessary for it to blossom

Blossom into a home

Where i'd never be a stranger

And i'd always have someone to sit with as i'd eat my lunch

03.11.24

-lauren a.p

my life was never the same after reading “the only trick of friendship, i think, is to find people who are better than you are. not smarter, not cooler, but kinder and more generous, and more forgiving and then appreciate them for what they can teach you and try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself no matter how bad or good it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. but the best, as well”

"a prophesy"

Those worn eyes sought it.

Craved it with biting teeth and a carnivorous appetite

Lusted for the illuminating show in back-alley lights

Like a sinful dweller hooked upon the next hit, inhale, high

Addicted to the climactic downfall

Prophesied to repeat itself

-lauren a.p

Smile (04/22)

I don’t know how I had survived all those years before I met you. 

With that red-hot anger that thickened my fragile skin and cursed my hands into fists, I’d only ever known spite. Resentment for those who saw the world in a more vibrant shade, those who could channel such calm dispositions amongst the silent chaos that only seemingly progressed with every rapid breath. Those who could forgive. Those who could forgive and forget those who had so easily kissed bruises into their skin and took what had never been theirs to take away, let alone feast upon with prying eyes.

My mother had taught me that above all other actions deemed immoral and dirty and delicious, forgetting was the greatest sin. To forget was to be weak, and to be weak was an invitation for your untimely death.  A delicate disposition was a short skirt in the wrong part of town on a dark night. Weakness was asking for it. Pleading for autonomy to be ripped from a body that no longer belonged to anyone but the taker.

And so I kept my fists balled a little bit tighter every year as a reminder that I’d made it a step further in an impossible game. I held them so tight, they’d refuse to unwind every night, even as I closed my eyes and prayed to an unapologetic God. Even as I dissociated into another existence that promised a peace I could never verbalize, a color I’d never seen and languages I’d never heard. These illusions would plague my illustrious dreams and yet soon I’d awake, soaked in worry and aching between the skin of my knuckles.

They said stress could kill you. I worried more in an effort to prioritize the inevitable.

And then I met you.

With indescribable eyes, a calm demeanor, a 401-K and a pair of blue-jeans with a hole in the right back pocket that you’ve forgotten to patch up for the past five-years. You’d dropped out of film school and re-enrolled in an art program with no promised job market because the creation that is emitted from your loose fingertips brings the biggest smile to your chapped lips, one larger than any billboard with your name could ever produce. Your socks would never match, you wait a week until the deadline to file your taxes, you can speak two languages, but you could never remember the quadratic formula.

You were beat up by a group of boys when you were eleven for trying to save a little girl's lunch money from being stolen. You lost. It was cliché. She had cried at the blood on your skin. That was the only fight you had ever been in.  At least with your fists. You’d vowed that words were to be your defense from that day on. More illustrious, powerful, ornamenting. Less lonely, bloody, and sure, you may never win, but you’d never succumb to that guilt that’d arise from experiencing fear in another’s eyes. 

My mother would’ve called you weak.

Shit, I would have too, if it was not for how you’d relinquished my own hands from their treacherous grips of angst and freed my body from its imminent verge into an automated, aggressive response that was hardwired into my code. You deprogrammed an out-of-date, predisposed manufacturer mishap. You recycled what should have been melted and reborn into another something. 

You made me a nothing, which was everything. 

(NOTHING: to love and laugh and live)

I don’t know how I could of ever wanted the world to end if I knew you’d been roaming it for years with a smile on your lips and your hands in your back pockets, a pinky finger peeking out of that tiny rip. I think the wrinkles on my forehead have faded since you’ve held my limp hand. I hope to hold it tighter for every year that passes, only to let it go to wave to our neighbor across the street from our home. 

If only I had known all of it, all of the pain and violence and scars, would have led me here. 

I probably would've smiled more.

-lauren a.p

to be seen, to be heard, is to be loved

The way in which he came and went was eerie, yet ineffably comforting. Like flickering prophecies or an aurora plagued by solitude, it was a captivation with an indescribable feeling only managed to be harbored by those whose chosen fate was to lose. Those with cursed fingerprints and skeletons that danced amongst near-empty closets and an ephemeral name that would never be theirs. Macabre was the weight of his lips upon bare skin, a premonition of an aching heart and empty bed in every stolen touch. A personified ardor that'd yet to be stoked by late January's biting attitude dripped from his embrace.

Maybe he was simply just a side-effect. A dissociation that leaked through the fabrics of reality and stained her present with a warming rouge. He was Norman Rockwell simplicity mixed with the oddities of the late sixties. Mismatched yet almost perfect, a thrift-store buy with a warehouse charm. Or had it been the other way around? Either way, she had an addiction to that ceaseless feeling of the blues he ignited within her.

And he could see her. And just for that, she loved him.

He saw every inch plagued by a fragile decay and baseless faith. Heard every syllable from that tired tongue. Understood all the angsts and desires and outdated apathy. Wrapped amongst her tear-stained, baby-pink sheets, he'd crack a smile that took her back to a youthful careless careful. A glimpse of meaning in a savior-less world unable to be purified by even the most innocent hands of a promised keeper.

"What's the point of getting everything you have every wanted anyway?"

He'd always whisper this as she would turn the news on and off and on and off and on to reveal the next city a higher power had engulfed into flames.

-lauren a.p

12.8.22

A journal entry from 09/09/22 (aka an abrupt author's note)

Look, I just had to write this down while it's still fresh. Allowing yourself to feel is the most liberating experience you may ever endure. Angst and melancholy and selfishness and apathy and laughter. All of it. Solitarily and all at once and in random bursts of hot tears or ladened thoughts or clenched fists or smile lines. It's terrifying and awful yet scandalously enticing. A fragile hope for normalcy outside of dissociative thought.

My mind has yet to try to escape since I met him. It hasn't yearned for the stories that'd never be spoken due to their non-existence. It hasn't craved the spotlight of an unreliable narrator and a broken storyline with a happy never-ending. It's complacent. Unmovable. As though it has anchored itself to this very moment, like it has something it's dying to tell me, but its words can't be heard.

Happiness? It can't be. I have never been so stressed and confused and exhilarated and horny and immature and grown-up and feral and up-and-down and lost. Emotions that have been strangers to my thoughts have become involved with a tumultuous affair with my impulse control, hijacking the station and forgetting to switch to autopilot. Everything is in my hands: I've never felt so in control of a disorderly enigma.

I'm reveling in the skepticism.

I'm collecting bugs and reading memoirs and making detailed connections between Lolita and Nobokov and butterflies. I'm doing pilates and dancing and crying and spiraling, all with a smile upon my lips and tears in my eyes

I'm everything all at once.

Is this normalcy? A reality outside of my own fiction? A world exhibiting raw truths and vivid emotions?

I don't know, but i'm excited to find out. I think.

-lauren a.p