He said she saw me. I said where. In the corners, on the backs of his eyelids, outside smoking the trail end of the cigarette he tossed out on his front porch last night. I said I can't stand him. He said why. I said for all that you are, because you never care the same way I care, never take your shoes off inside and you know that makes me mad. I said I think I can do better than him. He said who. I said I'm independent and strong, a special individual that deserves to be treated like someone's queen instead of working for somebody else's royal court.

He guesses I'm right, but he tells me he's in love. I say with who.

I'm finding where I fit. The lights outside my apartment window are so bright tonight.  They're keeping me awake along with the dull hum of life and living things surrounding me.  The machines that carry us home, that carry onto the next great adventure, that carry us back where we belong at the end of it all.  I imagine what each of those dull green and yellow lights are doing, the shadows passing by the makeshift curtains, trying to differentiate between the rooms with one or with two.  The flickering neon brings my two fingers to my temples and I feel the pulsating rhythmic reminder that nothing dies unless you let it.  My eyes continue to dart to the left no matter how hard I try and concentrate, they cling to each movement with slight interest.  The wind picks up and runs through my body like a current, only to be shaken off and brought back down.  On my couch, alone, typing fervently at a too-bright computer screen in a pitch black room, a cell phone across the room that continually beeps and flashes with messages from people I'll never know, people who will never love me.  The only way I don't drown in this overwhelming sense of scrutiny, isolated from so many things that make me feel whole.  Loneliness creeps in again as I notice the double shadows in each apartment window, the sounds of the upstairs and downstairs, the laughter, the chatter, the tears, the footsteps across busy floors.  And then there's me.  Where do I belong?

What You Need.

You wouldn't know her if she sacrificed everything for you.  I hold you at a distance so I don't have to feel you, so I can't stop thinking of you.  Not the same as you once were, standing on the other side of a snow blanketed street covered in the yellow light of the street lights... a convenience store selling your perfect poison until two in the morning, waiting for me in the water.  But I won't come.  I'll never be there to fulfill your needs, to answer to your duties, to be the woman that comes when you call.  I'm sorry I can't and my god I wish I could.  I want to love you with everything that I have in me, you hold me in your hands.  Everything that I have inside of me is in your palms, I would give you everything I have to give.  To clap my hands and feel you here next to me.  Your wrist reaching out to mine, my spine curving into yours.  To close my eyes and have you within arms reach.  To let you see me as I am now, to be open and honest and all of the things that make me sick to say.  The distance wakes me up in the morning, the heartache embarrasses me.  I want to hold your hand as you walk through whatever fire encompasses your feet, rehash old memories and look through the glass with a sideways smile.  Knowing you is hard, knowing where I belong is the worst.

Same Love

No matter how many romantic issues, encounters, debacles and debates I have in my life, none of them will compare to being denied my rights to sufficiently and wholly express my love for another person.  I am (fatally, sometimes) attracted to men, and often times I've wondered what my life would be like if that were not the case.  Usually in a joking manner, like, "having to deal with another woman? yeah right we are awful!"  But on top of that, how would my life really truly be different?  I know my family is loving and accepting and they would love me for the person I am regardless of my sexuality, but what about when I aged a few more years (lets say a lot of years) and was ready to get married?  What happens then?  In my home country, in my home state, in the state I was born in where marijuana is decriminalized and we still can't seem to get a grip on our judicial system and our prisons are overcrowded to the point that gymnasiums are being made into makeshift barracks, if I wished to marry another female it would be barred by law.  Regardless of my own personal sexual preferences, I cannot fully comprehend why laws like these are in places.  Why issues like Proposition 8 even need court cases, why they can even be passed in the first place.

You cannot marry the person you love because marriage in an institution that has been between a man and a woman in our nation's history.  You know what else was institutionalized in our nation's history?  Racism.  Lynchings.  Sundown laws.  Laws against interracial marriages and relations.  Should we keep these things on the lawbooks in our country because they are part of our nation's historical laws?  Does it make any more sense to abide by these laws than it does to deny same-sex couples marriage equality?

You cannot marry the person you love because you cannot have children together.  There are 40,000 children of same-sex couples in California alone.  These children's parents deserve equal rights when it comes to being able to marry just as they had equal rights when adoption or procreation were the case.  Does this mean, then, that we should not allow sterile men and women to marry?  Or if a couple has chosen to not have children, should they be stripped of their marriage license?  Should we deny people over a certain age the right to marry or remarry because they are no longer able to procreate?  Is that any more logical than the former argument?

The ACLU Presents: Voices Against DOMA & Prop 8

The New Yorker's Account of the Oral Arguments in Day 1 of Prop 8 Case.

I try my very best to consider each point of view in any current issue, regardless of my personal stance on the matter.  After considering each side of the marriage equality issue, I cannot find one single factual substantial piece of evidence that would even remotely persuade me to want to deny a same-sex couple the right to marry.  I don't find that personal beliefs or religious values should override logic, lawfulness, or infringe on another person's individual rights.  If I disagree with another person's lifestyle choice, what right do I have to override their personal choices based upon my own judgements and beliefs?  What makes my opinions and values more important than theirs?  Personal values, beliefs, and ideas of normality have no place in this argument, and it seems that the base of all persons who disagree with marriage equality is founded upon those very principles.  To pass laws that dictate the way another person lives their life while causing no harm to you or your personal status is asinine.  Marriage is love, love is marriage, and any two human beings who love each other and want to express that love through legally bound vows should lawfully be able to do so.  I don't see any other way around it.  Humanity is a simple concept.

Just a couple of words and I'll go.  I know I promised you I would leave, I wouldn't bother you this late at night again, but I give up.  I'm not strong enough to forget memories that grip my legs and pull me to the floor.  Not smart enough to shake off the demons that remind me I'm still alone and you're somewhere out there by yourself, too.  Maybe you could use something like this again, maybe we could work things out and make each other laugh at another point in time.  I don't know what to do if I don't give this one last shot, another desperate attempt to encircle your wrist with my fingers and pull you back to me.  Where have we ended up?  Oceans away and I'm still turning over in bed to see if you're laying there when I wake up hungover at 2pm on a Sunday afternoon.  My feet are too heavy to walk the blocks that take me to your apartment, tonight I'm too tired to force another friendly cease fire.  I just want you to know, I just want to be able to tell you.  I want to bring my broken body to your doorstep and have you put me back together again.  I want to understand why you operate the way you do, to open you up and crawl inside, see what makes you tick, what makes you sigh.  As far as my arm can stretch, as loud as my voice can get, I'm still miles away from reaching you the way I once did.

This song is giving me another reason to hate you

But most days I feel nothing

Open my eyes to the morning and feel nothing

Completing the monotonous motions of my day and I feel nothing

Even when I don't feel happy I paint on a smile

I try to cry when I know I should be upset

But I know I feel nothing

Then, as if by some force beyond what I am capable of controlling

I feel it all

All at once

It washes over me and I am thrown back

Into this restless cycle of wishing I could call

Wanting to touch your face and feel the curve of your spine along your back

I cry because I don't even know her anymore

The girl I once was

The girl you used to love

I forget you and I feel nothing

I feel you again and I can't control myself

Is it better to flat line

Or to feel washed away in someone else's sea?

Hi, I'm in the air.  I'm following you home after another night that lasted too long in the darkest corner of the most seedy bar on the street you grew up on.  The bar across from that empty lot where you kicked rocks at the other boys and made out with that girl Susan, the one every other boy loved in junior high but only you got to kiss.  You told me everything I wanted to hear, shared and spared nothing to keep me smiling.  I'm watching as you stumble into bed, trying so hard to remove that sock on your right foot but failing and collapsing onto your medium-firm mattress.  In my mind I'm laughing and helping you, taking your sock off and kissing your face.  Bringing you water and twirling your hair between my fingers, taking your glasses off and folding them up safe on your bedside table.  But here we are, separated by the walls surrounding us, the miles we've put between us.  I'm alone again tonight, wondering if I'll hear the words I've wanted to hear for so long, knowing full well the silence will stick and the morning will come again too soon.  Thinking about waking up to you, smoking a cigarette out the window because you know how much it bothers me when people smoke inside.  Brewing coffee but it probably tastes like shit, light streaming in from every direction and forcing my eyes closed again.  The shadows your blinds make when you close them halfway, like they made that night, I'm there.  Behind too-big sunglasses and a hangover ponytail, I smile for no reason on my walk to work, and I know you're here.

A few words, just a few words

do you feel any better?

It seems forever ago now

that you were here

turning over to wake up

next to you.

Where else I'd rather be

doesn't matter now

drawn in lines that won't intersect.

I can't force a closeness

knit and weathered tied and

never tethered

I'll watch you float

wander into something foreign on your own.

I won't say I want you back

but I'd stop you if I could.
Watching the waves roll in and then roll out
my heart stretches wider than the screen
feels like it might burst.
I have to see you again.

Did I Hold On Too Tight? Did I Not Let Enough Light In?

An Existential Crisis of Sorts

God reminiscing makes me so sad sometimes.  I feel like I've lived a dozen lives over again.  I've spent so much time, I've been so many types of girl and so many different women.  I've been somebody's something and nobody's anything, I've had international hangovers and tried my hand at languages and tongues and twisted confusion.  I think about the girl who wanted to intern in a South African AIDS clinic, the girl that spent months sobbing over the fact that she couldn't afford it and her mother wouldn't allow it.  The girl who thought her life was ending when, after many months of interviews and processes and transcripts and letters and phone calls, she was turned down by the job of her dreams - Teach For America.  She thought there was nothing else out there for her, nothing that would sustain her and make her happy, she didn't even see the point in searching.  The girl who went to community college for three years, who didn't even have a career goal in sight by her second full year in school, who wouldn't know how to define the word sociology if it was written on her forehead, the girl that failed half of her classes freshman year because she was too busy doing absolutely nothing of importance.  The girl who was in love at 20, who thought she had it all figured out, who had met the man of her dreams and was done dating before her life had even begun.  The girl that couldn't care less about the French language then spent a summer in Paris studying it.  That summer altered me in ways that I may still not even fully comprehend.  So many strangers in such close capacity.  It frightens me that at some point in my future I may look back on my time in Korea the same way I reflect on my time in France.  I was so young and naive, fresh faced and accepting with open arms whatever life had to throw at me.  I'm much more guarded now, drawn to cynicism regarding what people want from me and the motivations behind friendships.  I'm also much more open in other regards, existing as the person I am with no apologies, take it or leave it.  Will I look back in 2016 and think of how foolish I had been in the present?

I'm just scared that this life is moving too fast and soon enough I won't be able to keep up with it.  No steering wheel to guide me home here, just a tired old bus route to fall asleep on for 43 minutes and wake up outside my front door being poked and prodded.  No bicycle to take out when I need a break, just my feet to carry me whatever direction will let my mind wander.  Creating the person I so desperately wish to become.  When will I learn from my mistakes?  Be a quieter woman, keep certain thoughts to myself.  Contained and collected, my hand cradled in the palm of someone else's.  Coy smiles without having to exchange words, being able to bite back in an argument but having the decency to hold it all in.  I've always longed to be that girl.  I don't know if I've simply given up the facade of a person I will never become, or if I still harbor those wishes somewhere deep inside of me, only allowed out when I am alone.  I'm learning more about myself as I grow, as I mature into whoever it is I will become.  It scares me to think that I can't remember the things I felt and thought last year, the year before, when I was in high school, as a young girl... I don't remember what my dreams and aspirations were.  Am I even the same girl?  I see a faint reflection of her now, but things are so much more difficult than I'd ever imagined they would be.  Growing up and moving on, accepting and reflecting... I'm just having one of those moments where the world seems too big and I far too powerless.  I'm scared to open my eyes.