The Cartographer

You: half-baked mapmaker
Me: half-dressed heartbreaker

You measure compatibility in terms of denial, not in terms of tranquility
And you measure closeness in terms of miles, not in terms of easiness

You: drank like a fish

Me: sank without a wish

Schadenfreude, a melodrama

2 figures standing on bridge over a rushing river. One dressed in a wedding gown (BRÜNA), the other in funeral attire (BLUNDELLE). Both women look as if they are in their 20s. The ledge of the bridge should come just below the women's waists. 

BLUNDELLE: I knew you'd turn up here if I waited long enough.

BRÜNA: I'd hoped you'd be gone by now.

BLUNDELLE: What, and leave you behind after all of these years? I've put too much into this—into you—for that.

BRÜNA: It's been seven years, Blundelle. I'm better off without you.

BLUNDELLE: And what does that mean to me, Brüna? What could seven years possibly mean to me? It's not as if I'm aging. Time does not pass for me the way it does for humans, or maybe you've spent so much time among the living that you've forgotten.

BRÜNA: I'm not like you anymore. I've gotten better. I've fallen in love, and it's pumped some life back into me. I belong to Carlomann now. We'll be married soon.

BLUNDELLE: And does your loving groom know that you're here?

BRÜNA: No, he doesn't.

Dear woman who comes to PJ's every day and sits for hours at the only outdoor table near an outlet

I hate you. I hate your unsmiling, sunburned face. I hate your cigarette smoke. I hate your pudgy hands, which aren't even usually typing away on your laptop. I hate the way that your computer could not possibly need to be charging for all six of the hours you're at the coffee shop, but you keep it plugged in anyway so that anyone who needs to charge their computers has to go inside, even though it's cold inside. I probably don't hate you because I've never talked to you. I think I've made eye contact with you once, and you had a rude look on your face, so that must count for something. Maybe hate is too strong a word, but woman who comes to PJ's every day and doesn't share the outdoor table near the outlet, I strongly dislike you and wish that you would go away because other people's computers need charging too.

Outer space is not a perfect vacuum

I am writing this to make you feel stronger. I am writing this to make your day because it's the only thing I can do to make you feel good anymore. I am writing this because I can't call you up, can't make you a mix tape, can't buy you daisies. All I can do is throw these thoughts out into space, hoping that they will find you and find you well.

We're all mad here

“How many days have you had that sweater on backwards?” my roommate Leila asked, sounding concerned.

I rolled over on the couch, tossing an empty water bottle onto the large pile that had amassed in our living room before correcting her, “Backwards and inside out.” I then flopped face first onto our hideous magenta throw pillow and sighed.

“You haven’t been talking to Olivia, again, have you?” I could tell that she was eyeing the beat-up little cell phone, which was erupting into a series of telling vibrations in my palm. I opened my hand and listened to the phone thud thud thud onto the floor. The battery popped out and put an end to the vibrating.

I took my face out of the pillow to answer Leila. “Only kind of…She’s been calling and crying and apologizing all morning.”

“Oh god.” She sighed, rolling her eyes.

I sat up and began nodding in agreement. “I know. Don’t worry, I know. She’s still a piece of shit. It doesn’t change anything.”

She made her way over to our mini-fridge and poured herself a glass of lemonade as she spoke. “Honestly, Olivia cheated on you on Valentine’s Day. It’s never gonna get better with her. You just have to let go.”

Even though her words were nearly identical to the thoughts that had been running through my head ever since my now ex-girlfriend had drunkenly confessed to fucking a stranger at a house party, it was still hard to hear. I grinded my face into the pillow and told myself I wasn’t going to cry. Leila suggested that getting off campus might be good for me. I agreed, reluctantly.

Melanoma

I wrote this for my Intro to Creative Writing class about 4 years ago. I've been meaning to revisit is because the end probably needs a lot of work. It's actually probably better than the stuff I did a year later for the Writing Fiction workshop because I think I'm better at quirky first-person narrators and really character-driven stories than I am at third-person plot-driven stories. 

My name is Melanoma.  I swear that is my real, God-given name. That is the name that my mother gave me.  I have no last name.  I have no middle name.  It’s just Melanoma. Yeah, it’s what’s written on my birth certificate.   And no, I don’t know what she was thinking when she put it there.  It was probably something along the lines of, “What a beautiful word, ‘Melanoma!’ Too bad it means a hideous fucking tumor!  I know, I’ll name my kid that, and this kid will be so goddamn amazing that she will change the connotation of the word forever!”

I prefer thinking that those were her thoughts, as compared to, “Oh God, this thing inside me is just like a gigantic tumor!  Being a parent is just like being a cancer patient.  I know, I’ll name my daughter Melanoma to show the world that she’s really just a malignant burden on my life.”

The latter is probably more correct. Either way, that’s the only thing my mother ever called me when I was a kid.  Now she does not call me at all.  Actually, I prefer it this way. “Melanoma,” obviously wasn’t the easiest name to grow up with, and my mother was always less than sympathetic to my situation.  The psychopath.  Her name is Carol. Carol Marie fucking Lovelace.  You couldn’t ask for a better name than that, and yet this demented woman in all her hilarity could not manage to bless with a benign name.  She could have named me Little Carol Marie Lovelace Jr.! She could have named me Baby Spice! Or Lula Does the Hula! Or Millie Millie McMillieson! She could have named me anything, but out of all of the stupid, fucked up names that she could have come up with, she had to brand me with the one synonymous with a horrifying fatale disease.

Incursion

My mind is fucked so hard that she can't stand up. She's sore, a little ripped, a little bloody. She hurts. She wants to be alone. She doesn't want to be examined or interrogated or pitied or patted on the head. She needs a few days for recovery, a few days of staying in bed with the lights out before she's okay enough to stand on her own again. She needs a second to herself before she's ready to face this thing. She's okay, she's okay, it's going to be okay, she's telling herself. She doesn't need your sympathy.  She's going to be okay.

Accidents

I've been thinking about it, and I'm fairly sure that I'm going to die in a car crash. I'd say I'm 85-90% sure that'll be the way I go. I can't help thinking about it when I'm in the car. I look at all the other cars filled with people, the other people filled with guts, and I think about how strange that is. You never really think about the people in the other cars, leading their own lives, driving home from work, to birthday parties, from the store, to the dentist, from divorce court, just like you never really think about the guts—unless something goes horribly wrong, and the people come out of their cars, and the guts come out of their bodies, and all you can think about is ohgodohgod put her back together this is somebody's kid, the love of somebody's life, maybe a parent, maybe a boss, maybe a total fuck up but look, here, here are her guts and they look just the same as the ones wrapped up inside me.

Night time