february

Fine. I walk through damp streets in the dark and go to all of the places I've heard you're not supposed to go, except the ones where I really think I'd be arrested or accosted or something. It smells like wet papers and tobacco and tin cans. Seeing a building I swear I've never seen before off in the distance from the little room where the Russian doctor takes my blood (iron deficiency; I have all of the pick-me girl ailments but for real) I amble out to it only for it to dissolve somehow into the foggy mountain horizon line.

I don't understand how it's possible, but it's like the other day I dropped a pill on the ground in the bathroom and it disappeared, no for real, I got down on my hands and knees and looked and looked and then I swept and mopped and it's been weeks and that pill never showed up. There aren't any holes or surfaces or even a divot where it could escape, I swear, it's just one of those things that happens even though it's not possible. Like how when you remember the events of your adolescence their sequence doesn't make sense anymore; I know this happened before that, but then how could this have happened after?

I don't really believe in depression and I definitely don't have it. I have water dragons that live in the fluid pools of my brain grooves and moths that nest in my skin and a long thin tapeworm in my stomach that keeps me thin, probably. My hair smells like baby shampoo no matter what I do and even though I know I'm smart I can't tell time or remember left and right. But I know more about the Protestant Reformation that I realized and sometimes when I'm talking I know things I don't remember learning.

Ducking under umbrella leaves on spiral staircases outside by the college and finding notes on the ground, talking on the phone to Lucy and she thinks everyone I've ever met is my soul-mate (I love that), sitting on the dock in the freezing cold in February so I can smoke cigarettes away from my neighbors and send the texts that feel bad to send if I'm at home, making broccolini again and again and again. Watching the neon sign blinking on the beach while Olive tells me about a night out; I can hear the taffeta ruffle and smell the car and the drugs and I wanted to be there but I'm glad I wasn't, because I was running weaving in and out of thick red velvet curtains that clatter when you misstep and meeting by the bench and looking out at the water at the end of the street. I found a path with berries and a photo I forgot about. I remembered a day I haven't thought of since it happened. Every day is a party and it's always ending.