wake up.

Sometimes I want to run away like Igby Slocumb. Not from family and friends or military school like he does, not from anything really at all, unless you can count myself and everything I am afraid of. I want to run to something, or in fact just have a something to run to in the first place. Misfits and bohemians and people with mattresses on their floors, vague job descriptions and vaguer plans. People who party, people who don't. People who love libraries as much as I do, who love coffee and and drink it all the time without feeling sick. People who will take anyone in just to have some company and create a miscellany of vagrants and artists that make joyful cacophonous noise with instruments they can't really play, but try anyway because the sound makes them feel less lonely. People who like bare floorboards and empty cupboards because it makes them think of simpler times, or maybe just because they like to have real reasons to feel sad and emptiness can be a real reason as much as any. Empty houses, empty hearts, empty thoughts.

A place where it's okay to sit all alone in the dark thinking about nothing, where the television is broken and sometimes the only light comes from lit cigarettes and stars. It's okay to write on the walls too. Write your lists, your words, your quotes, your thankyou notes.

"Thankyou for the sleep and the smiles, for the smokes and the cereals, the milk was off but the heat was on. In short, misery loves company and it thanks you for your time." In eyeliner, on the west facing wall, under the fairy lights.

ghosts a glowing.

Sometimes you forget how long ago songs were sung. You forget just how long a long time really is. And you forget that nobody ever sang them just for you when the drum sounds your name on every beat and the words are whispered into your ears. Because maybe you want it too much and maybe nobody ever said the things that you don't really understand in a way that made your stomach ache, quite the way it does when you hear them.
Ache ache ache.
Like ghosts in your belly.

An Autumn Playlist {in last.fm & youtube links}
I want to roam empty hallways of broken down houses, bare feet on floorboards, singing these songs. Painting the windows with bright flashing colours, that glow with the sunlight and make shadows long.

Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels) : Arcade Fire
Indian Summer : Beat Happening
'Til I Hear it From You : Gin Blossoms
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea : Neutral Milk Hotel
You're Sleeping : Tiger Trap
Venus in Furs : The Velvet Underground
Blood Bank : Bon Iver
Sons and Daughters : The Decemberists
Bright as Yellow : The Innocence Mission
Oh Comely : Neutral Milk Hotel
I Have Nothing : Noah & the Whale
These Days : Nico
Wake Up : Arcade Fire
♥

twilight moonlight inbetween

An open letter to you, to me, to the ghosts hiding in the bathroom. A letter in barely legible handwriting.

These are the things I know. I know that Autumn is coming and I will feel like an animal that needs to curl up warmly and sleep until everything is light and living again. I know that nights will get darker and people will shout and scream in the street. I know that things have beginnings and middles and ends, everything does and always will whether you perceive them or not. I cannot write a beginning, a middle and an end for anything. There are stories that I will never write because there are pieces missing, just like in jigsaws or broken glass.

I know that if you go outside in that short space of time between day and night and look at the sky it will feel so heavy that you won't be able to breathe, you could almost drown in it.
I know that singing in the dark leads to cracked broken voices and so whisperers will be born.
I know that dreams are for dreamers (and dreamers often lie).
I know things that shake me to my bones.

berries bows beats

Summer is slipping away now, slipping through the cracks like dust. Gold dust in the afternoon, moondust at night. It is pulling away like the tides.

I listen to my heartbeat sometimes. I wonder if it should beat as fast as it does or hurt like it does when I think of the things and the people and the places I've lost. Little things matter the most. Trampolines, bike riding, cigarette smoke, eyelash curling. Sitting on cars, sitting in cars listening to the radio while sticking to the seats in traffic jams. On buses, walking, running, laying in the grass, bare feet, bare hands, bare souls.

Nostalgia fades faster than polaroids. I want costume parties in forests, lights in the sky, guitars in the grass after midnight, chlorine in my hair, glitter on my cheeks, making memories, making heartbeats, changing tides.

lullabies.

It rained for days. The mist hung low over the backyards so much that we breathed it in and out like smoke and we walked around like a passion burned inside of us, but really the gloominess of mid-july enveloped us all in it's sticky grey arms and held us tight, fogging our minds. Apathy installed a lull that no amount of dancing could shake. Days of strawberry lollies with no heat to melt them and midday light with no shadows.

It seemed like the world was dreaming, that the tides had pulled us into an endless sleep with infinite skies and hearts that beat the rhythm of the songs that played to our ears alone while slowly the grass grew.

I wish, I wish. But it wasn't like that at all. It was the summer of no sleep. No sleep and no dreams. A summer of 3am sounds and hours of the kind of silence that isn't really silent at all but instead hums, like static and whispers but quieter still. Pages turning under lamplight, papercuts, Elliott singing "drink up baby, look at the stars", thinking. Me and an old radio and the traffic in the night.

bruises.

A storm is coming and I'm eating eating eating everything in the house like I imagine I can eat away at it as it curls itself around the very edges of the sky. Swallow it whole and make it go away. And it's Summer so you know the thunder will crack louder than any other time of year (electric light-shows followed by rumbling applause). But everything that comes before is special. It's like a breath held for too long, a pounding headache, all thump thump thump. A pause like no other pause because here I am convinced that time really stops. I mean literally stops, no ticks or tocks, just silence.

The trees and flowers seem to swell and glow green and the sky, the sky is bruised, it looks like the little purple and yellow and green and blue accidents all over my legs, tiny accidents, like falling over. Dizzy skies for dizzy girls. And wondrously sleep will try to steal you away with hazy vagueness of thoughts in the humid heat of the afternoon.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if the storm never came. Would we wait forever? Would we be hypnotized by the bruises and the air that heavily clings to our lungs? Walking sleepers with open eyes and vacant expressions.

But if we waited everytime a storm was coming, would we really ever do anything at all?

my Grandma's birthday.

My Grandma taught me so many things that it is difficult to count them. Impossible really. She taught me how to knit and sew and do embroidery. Sometimes she would let me help, do a few stitches here and there. I embroidered part of a hummingbird that went into a frame and sat on the wall in the hall above a cabinet full of trinkets and curios. Little ornaments that we dusted every now and then. She had things, so many things everywhere. Most of them older than me, with their own stories and histories. A ship in a bottle, an old Singer sewing machine that didn't work but looked beautiful nevertheless, plants with big shiny leaves that we had to dust just as often as the little ornaments.

We used to bake together all of the time. She taught me how to make Christmas cake, we made Birthday cakes for my mum.
I remember she had the fanciest writing I ever saw and she used to sing sometimes while she did the housework and it wasn't singing like you hear now, it was singing straight out of a black and white movie from the 40's.

She had a talent for teaching people how to do those magic eye pictures too, all kaleidoscopic colours and shapes and patterns. I could never do them, but she taught me and just about everyone she ever met. I can't even remember what it was that she said about them, but it was like a switch that flipped and suddenly from nowhere you could see everything clearly. It was like magic, and she was too.