Summer Night Ramblings

I light the cigarette with a match because the lighter I stole is too choked up with chalk-dust (I steal colored chalk frequently and keep it in my bag-which is also where I dumped the jet flame lighter…). I switch off all the lights, save for the one above my desk so that’s its dark but not too dark. Then I balance the laptop on one leg so that the bottom part is half in the air-its fan isn’t working and if I don’t keep it half hanging it warms up too quickly and shuts down. Its imperfections like these I could write a book about-the orange glow of a cigarette always concealed beneath ash except for the split second when you flick it; a 19 year old girl’s inability to type and smoke at the same time; a boy stuck in time, with hair coming into his brown eyes.

Clown pjs, and dusty shelves; smoke curling into slow wisps and songs on repeat.

If only I could string words on colored threads, and hang them all around: on trees and rooms with empty chairs, for people to walk into and get entangled in. If only I could blow them out into soap bubbles, or simply exhale them into the warm air of my room. If only I could scribble over white walls and white pages, and in snow and sand, without the existence of coherence in this world; if only I could weave them into mismatched sweaters that fit no-one. If only I could write on your skin with my fingers dipped in purple ink…

Wallow in thoughts of him, and how lovely it is to be in a dim room on your own, when even the sweat trickling down your skin, and the smeared kohl around your eyes just adds to the beauty of the solitude. Summer with its still blue skies, and nights buzzing with flies; with its fans on full swirling warm air round and round, and the shirts stick to backs and cold, cold lemonade slides down parched throats. The hum of the air-conditioners, the thin film of sweat that dots the skin above our lips; the numbing senses, the leaves on the trees so still it looks like we’re in a postcard.

We could talk about life, or your past, or sit at the edge of a gray lake and wait for the first ripple across its surface. We could be ghosts lost in a foggy winter night. We could write poetry, or look for hours at the spilt milk on a table. We could remove you from the picture and then it would be just me.

I could sit against a wall and type stories about little girls who dream, and little boys with grass-stained sneakers. I could feel the needle pierce into my skin, the blood flow into a bottle and imagine a life saved on a painfully white hospital bed.
I could search for the truth, and fight for justice, and teach the girl with the long lashes how to inhale a cigarette, I could pretend to be a drunkard and bump my way along campus roads with two other drunkards, I could try to climb a tree and fall down. I could read, and lie on my bed and watch the pictures on my wall and lean back into the past, just enough to catch the scent of French fries, and the feel of cold rain.

Some words stick with you forever and every time you hold a pencil, or dance your fingers across a keyboard they jump up from abstraction into momentary tangibility.

I write on scraps of paper, and dream of shoeboxes covered in wrapping paper full of the yellowed memoirs.

To travel the world, and learn how to ride a bike; to write of all that I want to do in a dorm room and love everything, from the song playing slow and soft, and half empty bottles of water warming up on my desk to the boy who lingers on my face in the shape of a dreamy smile.

Sometimes prayer can flutter in your heart as soft as the touch of a moth’s wing.