you are fine and i am not: memoirs of an honest fool

it's selfish, but
this would hurt me less
if it hurt you more.

shame, embarrassment, humiliation and bitterness:
all products of a hurt that you do not feel
except through me.

i'm sorry for lashing out at you, but i -

for some reason,
i still believed you might share my burden.

i'm sorry i couldn't make it worth it
for you.

feature presentation

i'll blame it on the movies
for making him think that if he could just
trade his opinion of me with my own,
things would be okay.
for making me think that if i could just
give him some space, let him come to me,
it would all work out.
because in the movies,
when she walks out of the hotel room
crying because,
"well that's it then, isn't it?"
he comes after her,
catches her in the hallway and makes it better.
and in real life,
she goes all the way downstairs
and waits in the lobby for a half an hour
until her dad comes to pick her up.
and he doesn't call or text
doesn't show up at the front door with flowers
doesn't throw rocks up at her bedroom window
and play her music from a shitty boombox.
because that only happens in the movies.
and in real life, he's left alone in the hotel room
and he's crying too.
in the movies,
if a boy tells a girl she's beautiful
it somehow makes it okay.
and in real life,
no matter how smart or funny or good
he told me that he believed i was,
his beliefs are not my own.
in the movies i guess
you can change someone's perspective
with a few nice lines of dialogue,
but in real life i can't like me just because he does.
and never mind the fact
that maybe we didn't love each other
the way the movies say we were supposed to,
but at least what we had
lasted longer than your
hour-and-a-half feature film.
in the movies,
we'd be angry.
but in real life,
we're just sad.
because i don't blame him.
and i can't blame me.
so i'll blame it on the movies
instead.

never enough

the tale of the girl who always was

caution, crime scene

i suppose
that a growing sense of ambition
ought to be encouraging, but -

i can't help but think
of the way that each time i fall,
it is because i set myself up to do so
from greater and greater heights.

i am several stories in;
i am several storeys high.