Maybe it's called "free time" because if it's spent with the right person, they repay you with the time they spend with you.

 I feel like broken glass and split lips. I feel like I am breaking glass and splitting lips. The house is dark and the sounds would break the walls if they were glass. If the sounds were glass, they would split lips. If glass built the walls, it would be dark like the house. When my lips split, I will sweep my hands along the sidewalk and spit the blood on the cement. As the cement bleeds, the sounds of the glass walls shattering will darken the sky. This civil twilight is a glass at my lips: I will get drunk with the summer nights.

I want sleepless nights and hazy sunrises, pale-faced from forgetting to breathe and emaciated because the world is too beautiful to stop running. I want a whirlwind romance that screams and throws me down hillsides, keeps me awake just to share the sunshine and fails to take deeper root. I want it to end with a passionate crawl down a city sidewalk that glows too brightly to be real, and when it's over I want to curl up on the trampoline and wait for the owls to come comfort me. I want to be everything they told me not to be, break every rule because it's my last chance to show that small town what manic looks like. Wake up as the fog burns off and scrape my mosquito-bitten body into an upright position, chew an ice cube and wash my hair in lawn sprinklers. Stock up only to lay waste, wasting away as my hand-sewn seams unravel and then watch a Jimmy Stewart marathon with my father. We'll drink the lemonade we make ourselves and keep the cats stoned on our stash of home-grown catnip. At the end of the night I'll take my bicycle to the streetlights, dance for rain under the starlight and collapse promptly at 3pm because 4 is an ugly number that should be slept through.

My only precaution will be spf 60 and my only regret will be not owning a time machine.

Sorry to anyone who doesn't want to read about oral sex, because that's today's topic!




"No one likes to go down on people. It's not fun. You do it for the other person."

You've heard that. I know you have, because I hear it at least once a week, if not more.


Orally stimulating another person's genitals is like playing a video game.
You don't actually enjoy pushing the buttons and moving the joystick on the controller, you enjoy what happens on the screen.
In the same way, you're not expected to enjoy repetitive motions with your tongue and mouth. You enjoy what happens as a result.


The issue for many people is one of cleanliness--"That's where things come out..." but, if a person is openminded and can build a new view from past experiences, that can be negated as well. If you have performed fellatio or cunnilingus in the past and not found it to be unclean, then then the stigma of the bodily functions associated with the genital region can be rejected by that experience.


Oral sex should be fun because you enjoy the other person's reactions. No "In spite of [random dilemma]," just fun. Like a video game.

The fact that this time of year is so hard for me just cements how WRONG I was about him last year. And it kills me that I ever bothered to cry over him when I know how false it all was, from all sides. Not when I know what two years ago was. Not when I know what any of it was, when I look back and think of all those fucked up days and the shit I did.

Remembering how I went just reminds me of how I got there. So all the hurt of that autumn just waits until the breakdown of that winter comes back to haunt it all in. And then the after, the hope and that moment that I can't bring myself to breathe now. (Or is it just not there?)

My prepositions are all confusing now.

I'm more okay than this seems, I swear.

I feel like I could use a good breakdown but there's no reason for one and no motivation or energy to make that cleanse happen. It's all just resonating from the past, nothing tangible to be upset about now.

I think the problem is that I know I don't feel that little whatever-the-fuck-it-is for this girl now.
She's cute.
She's fun.
I'm totally into her.
But I just don't feel it. I know that it's not there even though all of the prereqs are.

Fuckkkk I need to stop listening to Tegan & Sara. I'm going the fuck to bed.

Oh, and now this song is ALSO making me cry because in 7 days I won't be 19 anymore. Great.

Oh god, I still feel it, every bit of it.








When will I not cry for them?

I'm beginning to get frustrated with this new years situation. Rachel and I planned this great party and invited more than 30 people, the VAST majority of whom neither of us have seen in 4 months because we both go to college out of state. We've had only 5 people say they're attending, and I know at least 3 are planning on going to other parties as well. I want to see my friends, but a bunch of them are now going to Russ's party, which was announced DAYS after ours, after we had invited him to ours (and did he kindly return the invite? NO.) so there's that. A bunch of others don't give any reason for their declined invitations. So now I'm probably not going to get to see these people unless they deign to show up at my birthday party.

What gives? We've got great music (I should know, I made the playlist), 3am pancakes and my camera. OH AND IT'S A FUCKING MASQUERADE.

PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO COME TO A MASQUERADE.

My conclusion is that the people I thought were my friends are actually kind of crazy or something, because no one sane turns down an invitation to wear a fancy mask.

Her manicure is a pretty kind of uxoricide; her eyes are wide with forbidden temptation, and she's been asked to leave her old bags behind. She's insecure about her facade, she's tried to hasten the end but the path was too hard to find so she left her spoken pride at the station. It's no wonder she cries in the basement, tin cans her carapace against the easement of broken modern life, and no fault of hers the resting cure just made her restless for death over the complacence of the over-tried bridal veil. There comes a time when the pure must fail, cast as smoking replacements for the perfect wife.

_{nonfiction prompt on a moment in childhood, for my creative writing class}

    Somewhere in the hills of one of the Carolinas, or maybe Virginias—I had slept most of the car ride and missed all of the signs—my parents' friends had found a commune of artists and made a brief home. The giant farm had great rolling hills, ancient trees bent toward each other in conversation, huge sculptures that rang with the sound of kissing metal and glass whenever the wind blew, and absolutely no electricity. The studios alone had lights, and the small scattered collection of houses were relegated to gas stoves, early bedtimes and the jovial conversation that only happens when there's no television to ruin the communion of it all. We arrived late at night with a hurried application of the emergency break, and once assured that the van wouldn't take a reckless plunge down the steep gravel drive, made our candle-lit way to hand-quilted comforters and mattresses on a mosaic floor.
    I wish I was still young enough to wake up at dawn and eagerly throw on love-worn overalls. That day, I adored my overalls, and I was especially proud of their patches, the mismatched fabric flowers that made them better than my mom's. I was young enough to like overalls, and too young to go out strange places alone.
    They said I could go if I took the dog with me.
    Well, we ran.
    Past the welding and glassblowing and tiling and sculptures amidst half-planned gardens, I raced the golden retriever over the open grass and into the copse of gigantic trees. I stumbled over roots and she wandered back to make sure I was okay, to this day the only dog I've ever truly gotten along with. She knew the property, nudged my dirty knees toward the secret clearings and a huge felled sycamore and worried when I climbed too high in its roots. It was too impressive, too perfect, and I was too full of buckwheat pancakes to do anything but find funny bugs and hope they wouldn't bite. On my knees I collected ant friends and box elders and my lab lay in front of me, nose on her paws and chuffing at the bugs in a mothering way; she seemed to particularly dislike the occasional caterpillars I brought her. A few hours later, I was mildly itchy and rather sunburnt—we had run before they could attack me with sunscreen—and so I let her guide me back out of the mystical forest and told her about how much I hated spiders and that she must look pretty in the fall, the same color as the supreme leaf piles I imagined the trees would make.
    She disappeared as I approached the house, my mother admonishing me as she plucked an aloe leaf from the pot growing in the kitchen, stories of the broken china dishes that made the bathroom floor echoing through the varnished wooden walls of the glittering sunlit lunchtime. The next day I would find a spider in the sink and breathlessly wash it down; at a picnic in a park my father would gently place a freshly wet butterfly on the front of my overalls, where it sat and slowly breathed its wings to life. The batteries on my walkman died that night, so he told me stories about when his friends had lived in Florida, and I went to sleep hoping that I would never have to see a cockroach on my pillow.