A pen is never enough to say all of these things, these words swimming through my head, and if they ever leaked out, I'm sure they could make a movie from them--something dark and unimaginable, terrifying if you caught it in the proper light, squinting and searching out and finding.

I press against my skin, seeing the veins both brown and green, sick-filled with my milky, red life. If I were to cut across the wrist, it would spill out and cake the page with rust, eating away the paper, chewing through--acidic, digesting too quickly. Slice open the rice-paper skin to peer underneath: one clean slit, and stuff it with lilacs and crocus until the world stops turning and stops smelling of this death--too much death, too much winter, and if I refuse to lie in the bed I have made for myself, does that make me a coward, or simply a fool?

I am human, I am human, I am a woman, or am I just a girl? A child, lost and foolish, pretending to be something she's not, dodging bullets and questions until she is nothing but a sham, and I can tell you that I love you, but if I tell you hard enough, it will never be true.

I'm headed north, headed west, and maybe if I run far enough, long enough, maybe I will find the heart I lost somewhere along the path years ago. Loss, loss is a funny thing, coming and going like the tide or a former lover, always escaping my grasp, but always there, lingering. Loss lurks under my skin, laps at my nerve endings like a soft, tingling flame, a memory of pain known well from nights long before, nights of waning away beneath cooling bedsheets, waiting for the monsters to come and carry me home--where I belong.

Carry us away, somewhere wet and warm with rain and the promise of springtime to make our blood boil again, so that we may feel the familiar sting of want again instead of longing, hope instead of sorrow, life instead of so much death, and if I died in my sleep tonight, promise me you'd stay with me until the morning came, soft and beautiful, bearing sunshine and wind and the early morning smell of bluebird songs and fresh dew on each malleable blade of grass. Sometimes I wonder, if I laid down amongst the elvish green, if I would be swept up, spirited away as I viewed the dawn set in like petals, like old lovers, like angels dressed in their pristine whites and golds.

As a child, I always knew, I always knew good from evil, right from wrong, but now (with all those wolves in sheep's clothing) that I've grown, the shadows have as well, and I can no longer tell demons from humans and angels from demons.

As I write this, the room smells of turpentine, and each breath fills me with it. I love it--this odor that, like nothing else at this time, seems so familiar and so very safe. I remember painting, how it made me feel alive and free, how it released me--the height of my time as a child, as an innocent, when I had no judgments, and the spread of paint beneath my hands seemed to me the most beautiful, immutable fact of life. The silky, colorful oils spread with ease, brush fanning out and I was hypnotized, mesmerized by the splashes of color, of joy and sorrow and mortality (in a time when I did not yet understand what it meant.) I recall the way in which the canvas would sigh sweetly with the pressure, at the rememberance of its old acquaintance, its old friend spreading its love in pastels--creamy iced mints, lilacs, mochas to bring to life a tree, a simple tree. I always hoped that if I stared long enough, I would see a ripple, and be able to reach out and sink through the fibers; run through the field planted with two crumbling, sea-glass hands until I reached whatever place I was meant for, and if it is that place that I finally reach, I will know it. I will lift myself up, climb each branch until I can rise above the smoky, thick fog and finally forget pain and remember breathing again. I will close my eyes, stretch out my arms to the full span of these wings and wait, palms up as if in silent prayer, wishing for the rain to come and wash away my sins, and if I am granted this absolution, perhaps...

perhaps I can learn to live again.