Up in the night sky, you see what appears to be a very bright star. A beacon in the dark shining directly down on you. A glow that has the power to justify significance.

And then it moves. The ‘starlight’ morphs into fluorescent glare slowly gliding across the sky. It’s a plane, you fool.

And it’s just you, standing in the dark.

Luciana, 31

On a rough day, I can feel my heart collapse vein under valve beneath the surrounding rib cage as if it were trapped in a rapidly decompressing airplane cabin. I implode at the sound of internal doubt that hisses, “you will never,” to all of the things I hope for.
How could I never when there is still time? Time to fall in love, time to write a book, time to become the person I wake up every day wishing I already was. There is always time, and yet…you will never.
In reality I know that every very true ‘never,’ is in the past. Moments with those loved and lost that are locked in time. They are finite, and do not haunt me. This taunting, hypothetical hiss that slithers into my dreams is something else entirely, as if all of the things that haven’t even happened yet are over before they could begin.
You will never fall in love; it takes time, takes another person, they are all taken and you are out of time.
You will never write a book; real writers publish early and often are you’re far too late.
You will never be who you want to be, because you have already become someone else.
There is no anecdote to this defeatist voice, other than to mentally move forward into the future where never dissolves into now.
And yeah, I’m not the person I thought I would be by now, but maybe I’m better?
Maybe.
Maybe Never.

Luciana, 30

Constantly chasing what I used to believe could fix what was broken.

The cracks remain inside the glue of a messy reconstruction,
unreliable.

Stronger in many ways than the original…but not the original.
Not quite me, anymore.

Luciana, 30

Click click click

Delete draft
Pending forever
Not good enough
Never good enough

EDIT EDIT EDIT
Minimize

Read out loud
EDIT

Read silently, lips moving.
Close eyes, shake head.
Whisper, “whatever”

Finished.
Never finished
Not good enough
Never good enough

Luciana, 30

(back up to that signature)
THIRTY
THIRTY
UN-PUBLISHED
THIRTY

I hate time…the way time moves forward while you are frozen inside of it; the rest of the world never having stopped. Whatever you were just looking at has been behind you. You’re stuck and no one can see, and it shouldn’t matter anyway. If we were all personally consumed with each other’s pain, nobody would be able to move. A stagnant society suspended in a spider web with the predator at our feet that we cannot see, because we are not looking forward. As long as you’re alive, the only thing that’s yours for certain, is the present, and what you choose to do with it.

Over a decade ago I lost a friend to the ground that I will never reconcile. No amount of time could compensate. At 19, there is a vague understanding that all humans must die at some point, but not so young…except that some of us do.

Time works hand in hand with death to chip away at everything we cling to in the aftermath. Faces blur and memories warp into what we want them to be. The departed are either immortalized of vilified, depending on their lasting impression.  Either way, forgetting anything concrete becomes synonymous with “moving on,” which seems like something you shouldn’t be able to do if you ever cared at all.

As his death started to sink in, a dark tunnel had formed in front of me, and I came to the conclusion that avoiding that darkness would be avoiding what happened, and so I stepped in to face it, and come out the other side with an understanding of grief and death. That was ridiculous, and the only thing I learned from being in the darkness for ten years was how bright the light can be once you finally let yourself out see it. And the only thing that bolted that reality into me was another shattering loss. A literal light of white fur and brown ears who vanished into ash in a tin that I still can only acknowledge out of the corner of my eye.

The profile I came across on Petfinder had her cleaned up for a professional photo, complete with a pink paisley bandana around her neck. Yes, she was adorable, but it was something in her eyes that grabbed on to me. They were wide, and beyond sadness and fear. It was a look of defeat, demanding directly, “what will happen to me?”
I have a picture of her the day after I brought her home, laying next to me and looking at me with different eyes, and I never again saw that look of desperation and despair. Everything she had endured before was gone, and her life began again, and so did mine.

I am left behind now, and when I look in the mirror I know what my dark eyes are saying. I also spent the last three and a half years watching this little dog living in the present, and loving every second after she began again with me. She taught me how to move forward, and I didn’t even realize it until I needed to know how.

Luciana, 30

For a second it’s the sound of waves instead of a car;
A jet ski motor,
I am on a lake with ghosts.
You can see right through everyone
Even me
Especially me.

Everything is in question…is this me? Is that him?
Separated from my memory, I’m left in a fractured, frightening dream.
People fall apart,
Mutilated and malfunctioning,
Circling around the lake, not sure where they are,
Or if they are…
or ever were, at all.

Luciana, 30

December 1, 2006.

I was a freshman at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. It was 31 degrees outside, with one inch of snow sticking to the ground. In Oakland Michigan it was 34 degrees out, and at some point during the day, a little white puppy with brown, radar-cone ears was born.

On December 16, 2013, she was surrendered to the Oakland County animal shelter, later obtained by the Canine Companions Rescue Center and placed in a foster home on March 8, 2014 to prevent euthanasia due to her age.

On March 31, 2014 I sent this email to Petfinder that was forwarded to the CCRC:

Hi, I saw the posting for Lady and she is adorable! I am looking for a little bit older of a dog, like she is, and I have a cat that gets along with dogs. Would that work with lady? Any additional info would be great :) Thank you! Lucy

On April 5, 2014, I drove to Oakland, Michigan to pick her up, sight unseen. I agreed to meet the foster family at the Petco in Oakland, and waited by the door until I saw this tiny, bright little dog hop out of a truck and eagerly drag her fosters towards the door. We signed the paperwork while she sniffed around and raced back and forth in the store. They handed the leash to me, and took this picture of us in the parking lot.

For 3 years, 7 months, and 11 days we restored each other. (Lady) Edith was a whirling combination of neediness and unconditional crazy love. For all of my efforts to understate it, I have that same crazy heart.

3 years, 7 months and 11 days puts us at November 15, 2017. I had whispered a promise in one of those big brown ears back in April of 2014. I told her she was home forever, and I would never leave her, and I never did. The last thing she heard, saw and felt was me.

Yesterday, November 30, 2017, I walked into the vets office after work. I asked for Edith. Instead of my dog dragging the vet tech around the corner towards me, I was handed a small box filled with ash.

Today is December 1.

Luciana, 30

In a moment alone in my car, I turned my chest inside out screaming. I did not stop until I tasted blood in my mouth, and screaming was no longer an option.

I blew out my vocal cords in a sort of self exorcism, trying to banish the void inside me. To stop the sickness and shock. Of course, it remained contained.

Like a tornado inside a titanium vault, my broken voice whipped fragmented emotions against the walls of my chest. Capturing, for no longer than a second, how I truly feel without my dog.

Luciana, 30

There’s an expression saying that writers get to live twice, one on earth, the other on paper. These lives envy each other, though, always living vicariously through the other. Reality will always want to be better than it is, and stories just want to be true.

I get stuck in these stories while the world goes on around me. Memories are hard to hang on to, even harder to validate. The one constant bringing me back to the moment  was a little white and brown dog with eyes that did all the talking. She slept next to me in a line with her cold nose buried in my side. Followed me into every room of the apartment (to my frustration, because I just wanted to her to relax on the couch and kept hearing the click of her nails on the floor coming my way). Every time I ate anything, she watched the entire time. On our walks she would lead the way with radar ears, lashing out with her “smoker’s bark” if there was another dog within a block of us. Her love was so real that I could never find the words to capture it. I never imagined that one day I would only have those memories. Those fucking memories that I love to live in so much. I never thought she would be one of them.

I am alone now, and unmovable. There is no one to lead me. No clicking nails from room to room. No reason to get up early in the morning. Everything is different, and I am curled up holding my knees rocking back and forth in between these two worlds that a writer “gets.” She is in neither of them, and I am all over the place.

Luciana, 30

In an instant, the lights went out everywhere. I live in a dusty, quiet existence like an abandoned summer home, with the silence ringing like a siren in my head, and warmth eternally beyond my grasp. I don’t tend to the festering wound inside my chest. I had a heart there, and it ripped itself from me to follow her as if they were one in the same. Edith caught it gently in her mouth before racing off. Whenever I couldn’t find something in my apartment, like my keys, I would look at her and ask, “did you take it? You took it!” and she would follow me around and help me look.

I took eet. And she curls up somewhere bright and warm to take a nap. That cancer would come for a dog, my girl, and riddle her with tumors is beyond me, but I didn’t let it get that far. She would not deteriorate while I attempted to deal with what was happening. I can reconcile all of that…It’s just that I am here now, and she is not. The moments right before and after were so absurdly close, and I am continually dragged away from their intersection in disbelief, by time, that only moves forward.

I am alarming robotic in my response to people who only want to help. It’s as if I learned overnight how to turn off my emotions and replace them with a facade that makes people more comfortable. The robot cries silently on the train because nobody bothers you. Dries up before going in to work. Functions, and does not feel.

Back in my quiet apartment the shell around me falls away in an environment that seems to have less oxygen in it than a coffin underground. My cat waits by the back door for her friend, as if I have forgotten to let Edith back in. As if I would ever leave her outside. As if I would ever leave her at all, and not come back.

Getting back to Edith was my life. She was left at a shelter after having been with the same family for eight years, abandoned because they simply didn’t feel like having a dog anymore. I adopted her three months later, and she looked at me sheepishly before falling asleep in the sun in the back of my car. When it was time for bed she dug her way under my covers and curled up in a ball by my side. And every day since she was by my side. No matter where I went, I always came back. She would never be abandoned again.

I was the last thing she saw and heard and felt, with her velvety little head cupped in my hands telling her she was a good good girl.

I don’t know how to end an ending…other than to repeat what the vet said to me when I had to bring Edith in one last time. “She was an older dog, and this would have happened three years ago in the shelter. She would have gone out of this world alone and scared, and she never would have met you or have had these extra three years with you. But that didn’t happen. You gave her that time, and now she’s loved, and now she knows.”

Luciana, 30

I remember more about the First Grade than anyone should.

The 5th graders had an intimidating status. These punks would play Pogs in the hall and throw slammers at one another, which was against the rules and eventually ruined it for everyone when Pogs were deemed “illegal” on school grounds. Those rebels played anyway, continuously getting caught and served colorful discipline slips.

I knew that my brother was somewhere in the building, only a year and a half older than me but somehow two grades ahead. I never bothered to try and figure out where he was because he was some sort of book-smart genius and our paths never crossed. I was street smart, and spent my time hunting for small animal skeletons on the playground.

One day somebody found the skull of a squirrel perched in a pine tree along the back fence of the lot. I became part of a bone collecting team that scoured the area for other tiny skulls, rib bones and whatever else we could find which, in retrospect, was a disturbing amount. I took some of the bones home and kept them in a bucket in the garage like a psycho.

My best friend had bright green eyes and light brown, curly hair. She was missing her front teeth for the yearbook picture, and she was hilarious and loyal.

I remember the girl who used to steal stuff out of my desk, or ask to “borrow” things, and never return them. I called her on it, and she fired back at me with some kid-level swears. I told her open her desk to prove her innocence, which she would not do.

I had a serious crush on a short boy in my class with a dirty blonde hair shaped into a bowl cut. One morning when we were all out on the playground, I pushed him, unsolicited, down the slide. He landed face down in the wood chips at the end of it, stood up and angry cried. I wanted to disappear in mortification. He threatened to tell the teacher which broke my heart and terrified me at the same time. His eyes followed me for the rest of the day, but never tattled. And I never forgot.

When the time came for second grade I was transferred to a brand new elementary school because it was built closer to our house. Some other kids in my class were transferred also, but that group did not include my best friend or my crush. I was inconsolable until the new school year started and I adapted as everything reset itself. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that first, gentle lesson in the way life doesn’t turn out the way you think it will.

Luciana, 30

Your eyes are too dark. Your hair is too short. What in the fuck are you wearing? Now you just look pissed off. Remember all the clothes you used to fit into? (soft laughter) Remember when you were so chubby you didn’t fit into anything? You wore the same outfit every day and just kept eating. And then you didn’t eat at all.

That haircut is for a slender person. Do you even look like a girl anymore? But you’re not a “girl” anymore, are you? You’re a woman. You’re old. And you’re still alone. Do you think you’ll be alone forever? Do you think it’s because of your hair and your eyes and your body? Maybe it’s just you. That would probably be the worst case scenario…you can’t really change that now. And why change to make yourself into what somebody wants you to be? You shouldn’t, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone out there who is looking for what you are.

Maybe there was, but that was awhile ago. You had longer hair and you were quieter and younger. And you can’t go back, and he can’t go forward. And when did this become about that anyway? Back to the mirror. Back away, you’ll look smaller. Maybe you’ll feel smaller for awhile. Don’t look at yourself while you walk away, you don’t look good from the side. See you soon!

Luciana, 30

There are three doors in front of me.

I open The Present, and see a sunny, quiet apartment before me. There is a little white dog sleeping on her side like a mini-horse, nestled in a blue blanket on the couch. Her legs are twitching. The white forehead diamond and pink nose of a calico cat peeks around the corner, her green eyes staring right at me. I blow her a kiss, and close the door. Be right back…

Behind the door to the Future there is chaos. Everything is suspended in space, swirling around a vortex with myself at the center. Things nearby slow down momentarily before being sucked back into the fray. I reach out for the shape of a man who is currently paused in front of me, and he dissolves at my touch. Another similar shape floats into view, reaching for me. I back away…It’s not real. I don’t know him. He isn’t real… Other phantoms float by and through me and I wonder how anyone could look into they eye of a storm like this and see anything concrete. Before I turn to leave, a small book with my name on the cover floats by. A someday author, I close the door to the future.

The past for last, I open the dusty front door to an old, white farmhouse. To my left there are stairs down and around to a terrifying basement with a pool table in it. It may or may not be flooded. I walk forward, past the craft closet and stairs to the upper level on the right, laundry room on the left. Into the kitchen on the right, dining room on the left. There is a crab apple tree outside the kitchen window above the sink, and two large trees outside the dining room window. Ahead is a sort of living room with a pie safe and piano in it, darkened by lace curtains. My parent’s bedroom is to the left. I can see a small plastic apple just outside their closet. A prize from the Happy Meal I had on the night we moved in. Ahead of me is a favorite room. It is sunny, to my left is the couch and a set of windows with roses just below them outside. On the opposite wall there is a TV and a stereo in a huge, wooden entertainment center. The front of the room seems like one big bay window, shrouded on the outside by pink, flowering bushes. Hollyhock’s, maybe? I never knew what they were. There is a love seat with a golden velvet cushion by the window.

Nothing in this room is swirling. Nothing in the house seems out of place. I know exactly where I am in my mind when I walk through it, and things materialize along the way that I had forgotten. I could do this all day. I could do this for the rest of my life…walk back through time and just keep remembering.

I hear a faint, frantic barking in the distance, but we never had a dog back then…
Bep! Bep Bep!
A raspy little bark behind a different door. Everything around me turns to ash. First it’s just the house, but the trees and flowers follow as the little world inside of me goes dark. In front of me, once more, are the three doors. I open the door to the Present, and the small white dog that had been sleeping previously races out to greet me.  I find this odd, because technically I was there the entire time. I am always in the present, but not nearly all of me.

Luciana, 30

The pill is a triangle, and the dust of it sticks to my throat despite the water. It dissolves and floats into my brain like a storm cloud. The targeted migraine pulls together every ounce of pain that it was planning to ration out over the next few days to rally against the medicine. They fight to the death while I get ready for work, suppressing the urge to vomit. The back of my head splits wide open, and a pair of hands with long, sharp claws rip around furiously as if there were buried treasure at the center of my brain.

Nothing found there, the pain explodes angrily out the other side, through my forehead. I apply mascara to my eyelashes while the gaping exit wound between them drips hot tar. Half an hour passes, and the pain continues to swirl around my head. I am on the train with my head down, preparing my eyeballs for a day of being target practice for invisible knives, when suddenly, like a demon being sucked suddenly back down to hell, the migraine is gone.

For the rest of the day, I remain in the cloud of the pill. Everything is hazy, robotic and post traumatic, waiting for the migraine to resurface. Nobody wins, really. I go about my day like a functioning crash test dummy, and the migraine licks its wounds and plans the next attack.

Luciana, 29

When the brightest, strongest light is slowly, but surely, shrouded. Darkness has everything underneath its thumb, and things start to make sense. The darkness we feel everywhere is suddenly in the sky, hiding the light we once felt entitled to, and lost along the way. And why should the sun ever come around again? Since when do bright things come around again?

But it does.

As sure as the darkness has its moment, the light will come back, always.

Luciana, 29

My family lived in the middle of a farm for a good decade. The large, old white house with crazy carpeting and character will always be home, even though it doesn’t exist anymore.

I ran around that gravel paradise, falling on my knees and busting them open at least twice a summer. Tamed the wild cats which was relatively easy to do, with food. On separate occasions, fell straight through the hayloft, and had an entire wall of 100 pound hay bales fall directly on top of me when I noticed it starting to lean, and immediately tripped trying to run away. Spent all day waiting for frog heads to pop up in what I am now sure was some sort of sewage drainage ditch, grabbing their slippery bodies, staring into their huge eyes. Lay on my stomach in the grass and pulled it up blade by blade, nibbling on the white root bottoms. Sat on the swing we had attached to a tree in the front yard, wound the rope as tight as I could, let it go and whipped around, falling over into the grass from vertigo. I would come home at the end of the day looking completely destroyed, proud of every smear of dirt, scratch, tear or tiny line of dried blood that I had accrued. The battle scars of a kid living her best life. I remember, though, one specific day when I seriously considered never returning again.

There was this one particular barn for the calves that separated them out in sections by age. In the outdoor portion of the pen where they could wander freely, the cement was angled gradually downward along the barn to allow for the pooling of their sewage. Walking past this on an ordinary day, I happened to notice a bee floundering around in this accumulated pool of shit. I remember thinking that would be a terrible way to die, and set out to save it. The little cows stood nearby, licking their pink noses and staring as I swung one leg over the fence, and then the other. I hung on to the metal with one hand, and leaned over as far as I could, reaching desperately for the bee. He was within my grasp, and I don’t remember what it was that ultimately failed me; if my legs had slipped out from under me, if my arm had given in. Regardless, I fell right in, straight on top of the bee (who did not survive) with exactly half of my body instantly covered in cow manure. This included my face.

I started to cry hard, not because I was in any way hurt; merely from the utter shame and disbelief that I was literally covered in shit. I stood there for a long time, both feet in the manure, contemplating my life choices. Leave and never return. Sneak back to the house and hose off outside before anyone could see me. Or, just be who I was and ring the doorbell, which I did. I stared down at my feet, admiring the contrast of the brown manure against the light gray concrete. my mother’s face appeared in the window of the door, and it opened slowly to the sound of explosive laughter. I was hosed off in the yard like a dog that had just rolled around over a dead animal, and brought inside to tell my story, my only solace was that I had a story to tell, and that’s never a bad thing.

Luciana, 29

Butterflies spring up and scatter. A billion party poppers explode inside your stomach; their curly tissue paper innards flying about, spontaneously catching on fire. A tarry stickiness slides down your throat and traps anything good or clever you might have thought to say, dragging it back down inside of you to be lost forever. These clever thoughts are replaced with endless, awkward silences, insane laughter that sounds like it’s from another world, and stammered, idiotic thoughts that you never would have uttered in your right mind, and now cannot gather back into your mouth to be unsaid.

Under normal circumstances you are Beyoncé, whipping a baseball bat into the window of a car. You are Hillary Clinton calmly taking her dogs for a walk in Central Park the day after the 2016 election results. You are every inch the confident woman Amy Poehler wants you to be according to her book Yes, Please. Instead, a simple hello or 30 second conversation has you morphing into the human equivalent of a brightly colored Weeble Wobble, swaying gently with a stupid smile on your face, silently screaming and questioning your existence.

There is nothing you can do about it when someone accidentally kicks the Achilles Heel you didn’t know you had. Every ounce of your chill is dissolved. Luckily, the butterflies, the party poppers, the flames, the tar, and the wobble of a Weeble all stay hidden within the imploding you. Nobody knows, including the one who got your heel.

Luciana, 29

For weeks after, this was a nightly dream:
I am a zebra, haunches poised to spring away, but the danger is so instant that my adrenaline hasn’t even hit yet, and I am already down. The lion from nowhere has his claws deep into my striped haunches as the dust rises around us.
And the picture tilts slowly to the left. We are whirling upside down, swirling slowly off into utter darkness.

Windows shatter, objects fly around me like bullets and my blood feeds into a puddle so dark that it is as if there’s a spiel tapped into my skull, pouring out thick, toxic tar. A minute or two more, a slightly bigger puddle, and the zebra dream would have been the last thing on my mind, forever.

Instead, it was a dream, until I realized it was all I could remember from the reality. Why a zebra? And a lion? Why did I wake up at all?

Luciana, 29

I turn the corner and an electrifying chill runs up my spine. A warning without specifics. I stop walking and Edith continues along ahead of me, sniffing the sidewalk, running out her leash. Do I turn around and walk the other way for no apparent reason? Do I brush this off and brace myself? Did I just happen to walk through the mist of something bad that happened a long time ago? Edith is pulling on the leash and looking back at me with those big dark eyes, sonar ears perked with eagerness. We keep going.
I like to take note of the little houses in my neighborhood on our walks; they all have character. Many have very dilapidated first floors and entryways, with the next two levels set with large, open windows to let in the sun. On occasion the windows at every level are loaded to the brim with old toys, laundry detergent bottles and straight up garbage, and I wonder if there is a person in there somewhere.
I am studying the row houses across the street as we walk along, and my eyes fall on a very ordinary faded blue three story building with the shape of a man standing in the top window. He is wearing a button up that matches the color of the house, and a pair of glasses with near opaque lenses, hiding his eyes, but I feel them on me. How long has he been there watching? I see him start to slowly raise a hand, and that specific chill jolts up my spine. I swing my head forward, eyes on the ground whispering NOPE NOPE NOPE. Edith and I are almost around the corner, and I hear a noise that makes my skeleton split out of my skin.
Tap
Tap
Tap
The sound of a hand rapping on the glass, ringing out across the space of a quiet street, to my ears specifically. Curious to a fault, I cannot move forward, I have to look back. And there is that man in the window, waving his arm mechanically back and forth as if it were powered by a dying battery. Waving at me…
And there is something terrifying in the space between that mysterious instinctual fear, and the quiet nothingness of the situation. Something you can’t quite put your finger on, nor look directly at to find out why.

Luciana, 29

It’s 4:30 on a Friday, and misty outside. The tops of moderately tall buildings are stuck in an overarching, wet cloud. A fine rain spits from the sky and the cars down below have their lights on in the darkened daylight. The air has been balmy for the past week, before blowing out of town at the whim of the lake.

I can feel the dark weather reflected on my face. half an hour away from walking through the spitting rain with narrowed eyes. Swaying with the jolt of the train, staring forward with all of the other people staring forward.

You can always tell who has somewhere to be. The guy who wears sunglasses indoors, and a tie but no jacket. Flipping through his phone as if he were searching for the answer to a question that holds his life in the balance. In reality, probably taking a Buzzfeed quiz to find out what type of cake he would be. Surprise, he’s a cupcake. And there is the business woman standing on the train in her power pencil skirt holding on to a pole, her heels staggered in a solid stance. Hair freshly sprayed before she left work to eliminate that bummer “just off the train” look for whoever she is returning to. There is even the old man who has fallen asleep against the glass by the door who shows signs of returning home. Mouth slightly agape, his sleepy hands barely cling to the plastic bag that has empty Tupperware in it.

And there’s me, somehow always wearing a vest, listening to Dashboard Confessional Pandora like a 15 year old in 2002, knowing that I am headed home to only me.

Luciana, 29

What have I been doing for the last decade? Everything is chronicled in short stories and poems, but none of it seems to make it past the head space of 2008. As if nothing new or real has touched my life since then. Where have I been?

In the hopes of finally forming a collection, I have recently been combing through my old work, finding something about the colossal mass of themed material to be deeply disturbing. As if I had been driving past a car accident that I didn’t want to look at, and instead of moving on, I pulled over, got out and stared at it for ten years. With the potential to slip so easily back down into such a dark world, why bother tell a story that I’ve worked so hard to move away from?

At the same time, while I spent forever trying to reconcile two very separate, yet similar, events from every angle imaginable, something inside of me could still see past it. Little decisions were made under the radar that changed my course until it came time to make one big decision. In a sense I presented myself with the option to start a new chapter, under the strict stipulation that I truly let everything holding me down go. To accept the difference between a fresh wound, and an old scar. The hazy memory of a friend, and the reality of a corpse that was never aware that I ever visited, or spoke to his body.

So, I essentially have two collections of writing. One is the story of something that happened to someone else, with a very abrupt and finite ending. The other is an unrelated, violent moment that nearly ended my life, but didn’t, and was followed by countless other pivotal moments that are never mentioned. How did I ever think that was all I had to say? That surviving wasn’t the takeaway?

Was everything I ever wrote just a warm up to the actual story?

Luciana, 29

“Well, look at you.”
I smell her metallic hair, hear the sarcasm in her voice. Is that what I sound like? Curled up on the couch, I open one eye and find her staring back at me. An entity that is very clear when she is right in front of me, and something I forget entirely when she is gone. That long, brown hair is eternally slicked with blood, some plastered and dried to the sides of her face. She wears a light gray hoodie borrowed from a roommate a long time ago, utterly destroyed and un-returnable.
I put makeup on that morning? Her mascara streaks unevenly. I cried?
Brown eyes stare wildly back at me, darker than I remember, with a sort of terrible light behind them. Glowing embers waiting to be lit up. She grins.
“Big city girl making something of yourself. Moving on? Look at that haircut. It doesn’t sleep well, does it?”
My pixie short hair stands up on the side that is facedown on the pillow. It doesn’t matter, nobody will see it. She keeps talking, and I listen as if it’s a voice in my own head.
“How’s the job?”
“Stop.”
At the sound of her snickering, I close the eye I had opened, hoping this is it for the day.
“NO! YOU LOOK AT ME!”
I bolt upright and pull the blanket around me. A low, uncertain growl sounds from the little white dog next to me, her brown ears perked, not quite sure where one of us ends and the other begins. The girl stops and looks at her.
“What’s her name?”
“Edith.”
Her eyes visibly lighten, holding out a tentative hand. Edith pokes at her fingers with her small black nose, licks them, and lifts her snout to take in the impossible scent of death without decay. “We did always want a dog.”
“We’ve got one,” I smile gently.
“You do. You’ve got one.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Its like…I can sense when you’re struggling, and I just need to see it,” she grins, and my mouth forms a thin line in response.
“Seriously loving that bed head.” She gives me a thumbs up.
I survey the blood stains that grow on the sides of the sweatshirt where her hair rests, fed by a wound on the back of her head.“I hardly think you’re one to comment on appearance.”
She lunges forward, grabbing a tuft of my hair and yanking my head back, her face inches from mine. “Listen to me,” she hisses. “I am a single moment in the time of “you.” I’m not even certain that when the rest of you dies I’ll be able to go too. Imagine being perpetually upside down in that metal coffin that they cut you out of. I am still there. It is still that day. I am the absorption of your overwhelming physical fear that knocked you unconscious, and everything you could not handle. I am the worst thing that ever happened to you, and the reason why the only thing from it you have to carry with you now is the idea that it happened, and not the actual memory.”
Bep! Bep Bep!
Edith commands my release, and my tuft of hair is let go of.
She steps back, eyes flickering, dripping blood onto the wood that will disappear when she does. “Sometimes you just want to see how the other half lives.”
“And words of wisdom? Am I stronger than I know, or something?”
She lifts her eyes to meet mine. “No. I am stronger than you know,” shaking her head, “I don’t know what you are.”
We stare at each other for a moment as she fades into the wall.
I stand, walk into the bathroom and turn on the shower, stepping underneath it to wash away the blood that I can both feel, but know isn’t really there. Edith lays her head down on a pillow, ears perked as she closes her eyes.

Luciana, 29

What is it? That feeling you have when things are going right,
and one that you often lose when life turns around and goes the other way.
Confidence is the process of remembering when you were last confident,
and replicating that strength to a believable degree until it sinks into you,
not when you need it, but after you’ve earned it.

Luciana, 29

Sinking is familiar to me as I feel the water fill in all the gaps. I come to rest on the bottom, bouncing slightly up as if I were on the moon, before settling in to the silt. I am comfortable there, on the bottom of the lake. Every once and awhile there will be a day where I drift up to the surface and breathe the air like everybody else, but it has become clear that this is not something I need to do. My lungs fill with oxygen as I am reminded what the outside of a lake smells like. I feel the unyielding heat of the sun on my face directly, without the barrier of water in between. I often stare at it, the distant orb, far above the bottom of the lake.

And when I am done with the air and with the sun, I float right back down to where I came from. Far from the light, but not apart from it. I look around and see different plants gently billowing in the water. Little fish dart around one another in small pods. I am the only human, as far as I know, and I wonder if anyone else had ever remained on the bottom of this lake like I do, as if it were home.

Because that’s the thing. Maybe the sun, that closest and most obvious bright and glittering target isn’t everything. There is the blackness of space and the brilliance of other stars and planets with moons encircling them. And the equally mysterious waters where I now find myself. A place where I can neither breathe, nor die, rendering me with a simultaneous sense of uneasiness and belonging as I land again and again on the bottom of this particular lake.

The people I know are not far away, on the land and nearer to the sun, where it seems like we are all supposed to be. What does that mean for me? What am I doing down here alone, or am I?

Questions I might have answered a long time ago had I not spent so much time reaching for something that was never meant to be mine.

Luciana, 29

What’s the use in trying to peel the layers away from a rock? You know the only thing that works on that? Water, wind, other rocks, time. Definitely not words. It shouldn’t be this hard. It’s a rock, not a diamond. Put it back where it belongs and keep going.

Luciana, 29

Wandering back into the dust
the wasteland, wondering where it all went
all those things you returned to be
the things you wanted to do
finding nothing there besides the current, lonely you.

-Luciana, 29

It’s 8:14 am on the train, and I am sandwiched between a sleeping, middle aged woman with her head lolling in my direction, and a well-dressed business kid with shiny brown shoes, holding a phone connected to wireless earbuds. I’m nosy, and glance down at the screen he leans over as the train goes around a curve and we are all drawn forward. In iTunes, he scrolls through his songs, tapping, “He Was Alone,” rhythmically nodding his head to the music that swarms in to his earbuds from cyberspace.
A text message pops up on the screen in Spanish, and is instantly translated to English when he opens it up. He responds,”Get ready for a long day, my friend. We have that strategy meeting,” with a distraught emoji face at the end. He taps “Translate,” before sending to give the impression that he can both speak and write in Spanish. The emoji remains the same. He watches for a minute for those three dots, but no reply surfaces.
I feel a head on my shoulder and the woman next to me is closer than ever. I wonder if she missed her stop. Her long black hair hangs down in front of her eyes in a sleep that is far too deep for public transit.
I shift in my seat and look back over at business kid’s screen. iTunes is open again, and he turns off the song and closes the program, leaving the earbuds in. He opens up a notebook and begins to type rapidly with his thumbs.
“You did the right thing. Now you can move forward and be your own person. You are on your own now, and this is what you needed to do. You need to be alone right now.”
The train stops briefly and the woman next to me lifts her head as if an internal alarm went off. She arises from her coma and walks in a slant towards the door, and out of the train.
Next to me business kid is still typing a message to himself, but I don’t read over his shoulder anymore. He wants to be alone, I get that. I wonder if he will read what he wrote back to himself later, or just needed to get something off of his chest and there was nobody to listen? God, do we all feel that way?
An animatronic voice announces, “This, is Clinton.”
I exit the train, fully aware that the narcoleptic woman who had been next to me was quicker on the draw at her stop than I was. Standing on the platform I watch the train pull away, suddenly aware that there are individual humans inside of it. Feeling slightly less alone, because of a stranger’s loneliness.

Luciana, 29

A door opens, and the blind, slippery creature materializes. It slithers rapidly up the inside of my chest, rib by rib, clicking over my bones and digging into the muscle for balance. In one swift leap it latches onto my furiously beating heart.

Calm down, it hisses. Calm down.

A claw is lifted and raked across the side of my heart, creating the slick kind of invisible wound that doesn’t hurt until you start to see the blood flow.

A slender, slick arm reaches down, through the veins and the bright blood flowing in all guided directions. Down into the light that has burned so bright for so long that is has become something solid and tactile.

Callous claws close around the glowing orb and pluck it away. The heart skips a beat, just one, and then continues on directing the blood aimlessly like the machine that it was designed to be. The creature scrambles back down into haunted depths, in it’s clutches the light flickers.

A chill settles over this new darkness. Something I will forever fight to re-light, without any idea how.

-Luciana, 29

Ideality is as thin as fog hanging in the air. Never materializing into rain, or evaporating away to let the sun out.
It merely is, and then is not.

That’s all a dream will be, until you believe it is something worthy of reality,
and you work hard towards that idea in your head of how it’s going to be.
Inevitably, something entirely different will happen instead.

But at least it’s raining; at least you feel the heat of the sun breaking through the clouds.
Sore and broken, you can finally see what’s in front of you,
And know that not all dreams stay behind that impenetrable veil of what could have been.

-Luciana, 29

For someone who is not a follower, the term “leader” can become a mindless buzzword. In line with “synergize,” throwing somebody “under the bus,” and worst of all, “circle back,” they are mere words and phrases that float around the air void of meaning, in and out of our ears and back into nothingness. Unlike other business jargon, though, the term “leader” has an all encompassing quality to it, describing both the good, the bad, and whatever the hell is in between. Teddy Roosevelt (according to the history books) was a goddam magnificent leader and example. Harry Potter was an extremely hormonal, reluctant leader, but he did a decent job for a 17 year old. Hitler, too, was a leader. A sickening, demonic, publicly elected leader.
Leaders are people with power. It can mean nothing, or everything depending on how they use it and who they reveal themselves to be once they have it. Stronger than the power, though, is the influence that comes with it. If Harry Potter can throw a little fit in the fifth book every second of his life for no reason whatsoever, what’s to stop the rest of us from doing the same? Harry Potter did, and so can we! And if the leader of the free world as of tomorrow can “grab ‘em by the pussy,” so can we.
Again, I’m not much of a follower. The president has always just sort of been there, and I’ve been passively glad that the position was elected, and not a right of passage or a dictatorship. I have been poor, and lost, and challenged, and time has moved on regardless of what they have been doing with the big picture of our country, until recently.
Temporarily paralyzed by the election results, I had to remind myself that just slightly over half of the country is seeing things unfold differently. They made their choice, and I made a different one as we are all allowed to do. My choice didn’t end up panning out, but the impact it has had on my life has been astronomical. When seemingly all the power in the United States was grated to my waking nightmare, I suddenly felt more powerful than ever.
Starting tomorrow, in front of us there will be a new figurehead, and he will have as much power and influence as any president before him. Maybe more than ever, simply for the person that he is, and how he treats others. Americans will be impacted by that. I vaguely remember Bill Clinton, and definitely George W. Bush. Kids will remember this, and for some it will be a first impression of what the personification of leadership looks like. I don’t even like kids, but they deserve better. We all do.
But you cannot sit around saying, “I deserve better.” The only thing you can do is be better. You be a leader, and use your influence. Know that you can have an impression on anybody you meet. You could change somebody’s day, or their life, or simply be the first face that they associate with a leader, and an example of how a good, admirable human with a big heart is supposed to treat other people.
At the end of the day we are all just humans, and a “leader” is just a buzzword as he continuously throws the people around him, and perhaps the entire country, “under the bus.” We all have a heart, and some semblance of a conscience, and we can all be better for each other’s sake. We have to be.

Is there a word for something
that’s almost there?
Almost real

In between everything and nothing,
neither within reach,
Where is that?

Where that something lives nowhere,
wondering what it is.

Luciana

The mark of a blood blister appears
A phantom wound, waiting
And you just have to release the blood

Not unlike a notification on your phone.

A bright, numbered blood blister soaking in underneath the screen
You tap the flag and it bursts, red and stale;
The sharp words beneath it sting as they reach the air.

Words that would never dare be said to your face
Things that people used to keep in their own heads
Thoughts that, a decade ago, were wisely left unspoken

But here we are…

In a world where you can breathe fire into a tiny keyboard
And create a blister on somebody else from a million miles away
Those cowardly words swarm momentarily in a cloud

Then drop
Blister
Pop

Never to be unsent
unread
unsaid

Regardless of whether or not they were truly meant.

Luciana, 29

In the silence it appears next to me; a rabbit hole.
I lean back into the darkness and begin the fall.

Pictures appear on the walls
Old songs begin to play
Memories float in and out of my head through closed eyelids.

And the faster I fall, the more blurred it all becomes
the songs are screams as I fly past them
as if I were turning away from someone who was calling for help

But it was me, then…
and there was nothing to be done.

And nothing to do now but fall into the unknown,
maybe hit the bottom,
and find a different way out.

Luciana, 29

Waiting for the rain
but it’s just darkening clouds
and bottled up air

I listen for a voice
Scan crowds, look behind me
where there are people, and no people at all
And there is nothing left to find.

In my dreamland
where anything can happen
and anything can un-happen
even if nothing ever happened at all.

-Luciana, 28

Someone new.

Not old.
Not borrowed.
Not blue.

-Luciana, 28

The Story is The World
and you are a Character,
One of billions.

And if you are one in
and not of A billion,
You can write it.

The record player loops a narrative,
the tonearm skipping over deep scratches
detail is lost in garbled tones
conversations resound, indecipherable
A memory of a memory.

On the wall a stagnant portrait hangs, quietly
Staring with wide eyes through layers of dust

I listen to the scratchy words,
streaming from the mouth, painted shut.

Luciana, 27

I used to primarily write fiction in middle school. This was a snippet from a short story I came across. I have no idea what corner of my brain this is from…

Marion stood on the edge of a trench, watching the smoke clear. Fat drops of blood had begun to soak into the thick fabric of his uniform. It’s not mine, He knew. He could smell the blood on his hands, more potent as he ran his fingers through his blonde hair, smearing it with red. And for what?

He looked down at his feet at the pair of severed fingers that lay there, index and middle. Bending down, the soldier snatched up the fragments. Holding the foreign fingers in his hand, Marion pressed on the proximal bone protruding from the base of the index finger. The surrounding skin was clammy to the touch. Closing his fist around the severed joints, Marion begged to remember the last time he had held someone’s hand.

Luciana, 14

We are on the bus home from an all day volleyball tournament. Morale is low. Frustration hangs in the air, and awkward humor to fill the tension is kept to a minimum. Our quick tempered coach spent the day patrolling the sidelines, shouting, pointing and stomping his flat duck feet back and forth to no avail. We lost all of the games, and I hadn’t play for a single second in any of them.

I am handed a sheet of paper from the girl next to me. We all have one, and the coach stands at the front of the bus. Against the rules, I think, wanting nothing more than for the 80 year-old bus driver to ask him to, “take a seat.” It doesn’t happen.

“What was that?” A rhetorical question.
“Seriously, where were you all today? Haven’t I taught you anything? Volleyball isn’t that hard!”

He looms over us like a limp cornstalk. “Bump, set, spike!” he slaps the paper with the back of his clammy hand for emphasis, “Bump, set, spike! Bump, set, spike! That’s all there is to it!”

My friends are looking at the floor of the bus, ashamed at themselves. How dare we have the audacity to lose a high school volleyball game? I look at the paper in my hand and see that it is filled with little cartoon people with words underneath them. DISSAPOINTED, FRIGHTENED, HAPPY.

“Now,” he leans over the back of a bus seat, “I want you to look at that paper, and consider your performance today. Pick a character that describes how you feel, and we are going to talk about it.”

I study the characters. Is there an INVISIBLE one? USELESS? No.

One by one he calls on my teammates; the first word that is taken is REGRETFUL. Followed by ASHAMED. Someone chooses SAD and I roll my eyes. It will be my turn soon. Looking back at the paper, one of the cartoons catches my eye, and I wait.

Bump

“Lucy?”

Set

“How would you describe your contribution today?”

Spike

I point to a character on the corner of the paper with narrowed eyes, and read the word beneath it.
“Observant.”

Luciana, 27

If you listen to someone’s words,
how they are said,
the way they do, or don’t, look at you…
people will tell you exactly who they are,
and what they want,
Even if they barely speak.

Luciana, 27

What if?

What if there is no storm?
Just the calm, before the calm
before the end.

Luciana, 27

Two bottles of wine clank together in my otherwise vacant shopping basket at Family Fare. I am staring at a can of coconut milk, wondering what to do with it. I turn to leave the aisle and in front of me is an older Romanian man; my favorite language professor at Hope. I remember sitting in his class years ago, wracked with nervousness that he would call on me to actually speak Spanish, which I was very bad at.

I stare at him for a second, wondering if he knows who I am.
“Hi,” I smile, “do you remember me? Lucy, from Spanish…”
“Of course I remember! How are you? What have you got there?” He looks into my shopping basket of wine, raising his eyebrows.

He reaches out to give me a hug. I used to see him walking around the campus when I worked on grounds keeping crew during the summers. He would often stop nearby and motion for me to turn the mower off, wait for me to remove my earmuffs and goggles and then give me a hug and say it was good to see me before waving and going on his way.

“So what is new in your life?” he asks.
“Well…not much really just climbing the ladder, I guess.”
“Ahh…Aren’t we all?”
I nod.
“Well, when you’re rich and famous don’t forget us all, ok?”
I can only laugh.

He waves and walks on with his shopping cart, and I go to turn the corner towards the checkout when I hear my name.
“Lucy?” He stops as if just making the connection between a name and a face, and wags his finger at me. “I will not forget you.”

Luciana, 27

It starts
In  the  back
Of  my  head
The  sting  ing
Re  lent  less
Pain  chip  ing
Chip  ing  CHIP
CHIP  CHIP  ING
At  my  scalp
In  my  brain
On  my  head
You  could  be
DEAD!  DEAD!  DEAD!
Be  thank  ful
For  your  head
Ache.

Luciana, 27

I used to be very afraid of the dark. Leaping into my bed after turning off the lamp before the claws beneath my bed could catch my ankles and drag me straight to Hell. I would lay there tucking myself under the covers, waiting in a few moments of silence to make sure that I was alone.

This fear has dissolved over the years, I think, due to the fact that it was simply a misplaced fear of being alone. The name Lucy means “Bringer of the Light,” and I find that I can be my own little light in the dark now, but I have only kept it to myself. It has become my new fear now, wondering how to share it. Wondering how to not be alone.

Luciana, 27

I keep having dreams
Where people I assume would not be,
Are happy to see me.

All is forgotten, blame dissolved
Our existence in one another’s life, at some point,
Is all that’s worth remembering.

Only in a dream, though.
The waking world is ruled by bitterness, righteousness and memory
Pride and point of view skewing judgment,
Forgiveness
Instinct.

Even when it comes to forgiving ourselves
Making room to let it be okay
That we smiled in a dream when everything was fine.

Luciana, 27

Under the surface, identity flails
eclipsed by flaking, derelict scales
Attempts at shedding end in screams
new identity glowing inside of a dream.
and the past holds steady, but the future is ready.

Luciana, 27

If character determined the lot we were given in life,
I would bask in the warm glow of the self righteous,
searing in their own misery.

In making that kind of statement, though…
I seem to have justified a category for myself.

Luciana, 26

In early August, seven years ago at 11:30 PM there was a car accident.
CNN never came. The nation did not mourn with candle-light vigils and hand written signs. A local tragedy and human legacy were buried on the same day, never to be discussed at length again. It just happened, and time moved away from that day.

Until it’s August once again, and time seems to slow to a stop.

Luciana, 26
Sam, 19