august is over

August is over. Should I exploit myself again or sit with it? I have a drunk cigarette and think about how my friends are beautiful, how many people have hooked up on this grassy hill we’re sitting on, how terrifying it is to see so many stars without the cape of light pollution putting them to waste, and how twenty is too many numbers. How the two takes up too much space. How the zero is a void. I sit in it. 20. 

August is over. There are train tracks, and there’s a girl. It’s summertime, and there’s a fox. The fox pounces onto the tracks, chasing its tail, blissful and unaware. The girl is already a pile of bones next to the tracks where she was killed, flowers sticking through where her flesh fell off and sunk back into the world. The fox doesn’t care. It takes her femur back to its fellow fox lover as a gift. Nobody goes near the train tracks again. I want my body to be a gift like this. 

August is over. Stories make me want to live, and I fight the urge to let autocorrect win. Fix this piece of work into something digestible in someone else’s stomach acid. Maybe I already did that here and maybe you can tell. They wrote the Bible without autocorrect, and that’s impressive. I sit in silence for hours when I think of how Mary’s womb was also a grave, and what music she would like listening to on her drive home from work. 

August is over. I find out why I want to be a writer. When I look into the crowd after reading at a vigil, I see the sunset on each person’s face. I see their tears, and they are so beautiful. I readjust the microphone and sit back on my bench, bow my head toward my flameless candle, listen to the stories of others, and feel warm despite the sun shrinking down and down. I hug a man who says my words make him feel seen in a way he never has before. I don’t cry then. But I cry later in the silence of my bedroom, when my roommate steps out. This is why I want to write. 

August is over. I want this to be something so beautiful—something you quote and listlessly whisper to your friend or lover. I would bleed into every word to make it live in someone else’s life. I don’t even like adverbs, and I just wrote one. Did you catch it? I learned from a friend that you shouldn’t use too many adverbs. I’m writing this in my notes app, and it doesn’t feel beautiful or listless, and adverbs are taunting me from the prediction bar.  

August is over. I don’t think I try so hard, but I know I do. I want to be spilling over with scripture even when my words don’t come to meet the knife’s blade. I want my fingers to find their home on the keys that will write the next beautiful, lovable, listless thing. I want to love for real and without a thought to go against it. I want to find something abroad that is finite, learn to leave it behind in three months, and write about it like a sick poet a year later. I want so much that I feel like a thief. I’m so heavy with words despite all that comes out. I love for too long, and never at the right time. Now, I moved this piece to a blank document because I can’t see very well, and I can zoom in over here. My words are massive now. I could stand not editing them when I couldn’t see very well.  

August is over. Should I exploit myself again or sit with you? I think about how I would make myself sick to make you feel better, and on the contrary, I would turn my car around and drive back to you even though I just came from that direction two hours ago. The girl on the train tracks is my eleven-year-old self, the fox uses her body for something other than its flesh, and I keep writing this because I find comfort in the thought of changing the past.  

August is over, and each time I find Orion’s Belt on the hill, it feels a little closer. With each hit I take, I’m farther. Each time, my friends are more beautiful, and we are more lost, and I am more and more and more.