LOVE ISLAND MAD LIBS

I’m watching my gauche years crawl currently in a greatly unexpected direction—although my celeb lifestyle might seem worthless, northern, posh, it’s a southern sort of drink. Something sloppy and full of ice cubes. I often need a hand or two to get off. Maybe I’m more like a porn star martini—quite loud, big boobs, wide open and waiting. If we’re alone who even are we? Every day I double my nerves; who I am feels like it might stick forever or at least two years. I do worry about how bloody the world gets sometimes, but nobody asked me. I’m not this well-received type of girl people are used to receiving well. This summer I ate many pink donuts. I enjoyed being a pain in the ass. I might accidentally have fallen in love—a slip, does it always happen like that? I wanted to meet you as soon I could but I had to have fun first—why not?



I indulged for too long in an outer fakeness. I’ve come so far and really not far at all. I’ve slept too long in many rooms, but in this room I entirely disappear. Nothing ever “comes of age.” That’s fake too. I’m imagining a carpenter ant’s quinceanera, its family flying in for the weekend. I’m supposed to grow up? I have the gift of the gab but I call it selling myself, listening for a laugh in an empty field. Since I started hiking I’ve seen all kind of fucked up half dead trees still alive. Everything’s a metaphor for me. One night I was proud of how far I flew—like a bird but more like a rocket ship with curves, a race track too tired to speak. Outside there was a real one—a bird, I mean, too quick to be tamed. My will was a wild animal after years of taming. Now and again I let myself rest, hoping that I’ll meet someone who can pay for everything I want. There’s no point in being shy because what if you have something to say? What if my wheels stop spinning and there’s nobody to listen to the sound they’re not making?



It’s so funny working at a restaurant, upping your sales but knowing soon the lake will rise and all the outdoor seating will drown. I should just quit. I’ve got a handful of useful skills. I read a headline about some rapper hiring a full-time joint roller. I could do that. If the sky falls down and feces engulfs us all, at least I smoked a lot of joints. And they looked perfect, too. Of course I’d rather just smoke weed and not work—but the worm in my brain is like—DON’T YOU WANT TO REMEMBER? DON’T YOU WANT TO CHEAT THE PAST BY WRITING IT ALL DOWN? I found inside myself that yes, although most people who eat in restaurants are pricks, I do like pouring them coffee—to sort of take care of them until I fool them into trusting me, but I know I will find out one day how far I’m willing to go to be tipped. I am coming like money comes—slowly, two bills rubbing together between someone else’s fingers.

Flowers for quaking, fields to seek, birds for nesting, rigging baskets of grasses to the trees. Alas, there’s no log left, oil for the lamps, or candle to light. A clear night sky is not as spectacular as it sounds. Closed eyes adjust faster, climbing up and down ladders. The thermometer in my spine, the drum at my wrists, climbing up and down and not finding. What makes me truly afraid is the stillness. Just a normal cabin, a weekend escape from the on and off flicking of Monday to Friday. That’s what I had been promised in the listing. More than anything, I thought, that’s what I need. They don’t really want the guests to have this primitive of an experience, though, surely? Look at me, wide awake in an armchair in utter darkness, with nothing to notice but the bush in the window rustling, all the rustling a waterfall, coins falling out of a winning slot machine. Is that shotgun on the mantel for display or functional? When I hike back to my car in the morning, I need to remember to look up how to use a gun. Hoping, half-jokingly in my head, that I make it to then, past the sound of a cracking, that it’s just sticks and not a cracking body. At the end of the day, it’s only a lack of light, not worth an investigation.



I operate as an IKEA box: an industrial design with particle board pieces. Posers, I whisper under my breath at the families in the showrooms, very proud that they’ve already made it this far. From them, the hard work into my body of being as unlike as possible given the same conditions, despite the love we all share for sleek mid-century modern aesthetics. Away, I have found pleasure in my own body. Still, I keep telling people what I want is somebody who’s the human equivalent of a golden retriever, who can make my heart as big as a buffet chafing dish of baked ziti, an organ not nearly as dainty as all my other muscles. Imagine the balancing effect on my nerves, shot through with irregular trappings. Is a knowing grasp of this societal mass delusion subversion or defeat? If I hold a door open to this, can I let it sleep with me on the first date? They don’t say what winning feels like, just how it looks. In my eyes, the end of a cul-de-sac, lost in the aisles, the cafeteria, on a futile quest to find the curtain rod of my dreams.



My cruelty manifests as a state of placidity during other peoples’ explosive outbursts of anger. It’s like a breaker in my brain is permanently broken and after conflicts it’s easier to dismiss someone than engage. I have enough trouble getting rid of landmines I lay for myself. The nature of avoidance is to create distractions from the intrusive memory, which transforms each time it’s called. I fancy myself famous for it. Maybe we all have a few skeletons helping run the show. It’s hard to be an installation of yourself, a mobile spinning against the gallery’s walls. Rough edge I drag my palm along, not so hard as to scrape off skin, or so gentle as to preclude cuts. Other times, I’ve taken my clothes off and rolled down the crag. I’ve been to some quite scary places, but to tell the truth about what happened to me as a child terrifies me way more than any of that. The work of a well-constructed lie is like a balm for a wound I keep picking open.