I want you.

Yes, you.

You over there with your beautiful brown hair, and curvy figure. Your melodious voice and the way you sound like a perfectly played guitar. You are my La Vie En Rose, my paragraph of Charles Bukowski, my scrumptious chocolate chip banana bread.

I want you.

Yes, you.

I was clueless when this was going on of course. That’s all i wanted to do. Just lie there motionless in bed and stare brainlessly at the TV. Oh, it did suck my creativity and motivation out the window. It almost disgusts me to think how bad i was — so uninspired and lacking. I liked it then, i did — I liked being blank and numb and depressed because when i stared at the TV i didn’t have to think about what i was running away from. There was only the characters i was watching and my brain that thought of nothing else and a body that did not want to move.

I never realized how much music changes my life — How much a good song can make me write paragraphs of silly thoughts or short stories or even make me want to draw. How a song can make my heart ache with love or longing and make me want to escape to somewhere where i dont have to be responsible, and somewhere where i am not me.

Music makes me feel good again.

I’m angry, i’m sad, and i’m lost. I’ve convinced my brain that i am in so much emotional distress that it has told my heart to start hurting. I feel it tightening into a crumpled pile of nothing. I ache for better things and better places. Everywhere i go i feel i don’t belong and somewhere out there is a place that will feel like home.

This city is beautiful, without a doubt, but sometimes i hate it. I hate it for all the memories and feelings it comes attached with — those are the feelings which make my heart ache so fucking much i want to rip it out of my chest and let it be over with. Sometimes i really want it to be over with, but i don’t tell anyone.

I want to belong again.

Okay, so i was being melodramatic. There were no zombies or serial killers with chainsaws out here, or at least none that i knew of. I was here inside this tent alone, in the dark, and scared — because the silence and darkness of the forest scared me. You would think living in the mountains your whole life would erase the fear of it — apparently not.

Breathe, i say to myself as i start to panic again as visions of horror run through my head. I notice that my thumb has become raisin-y, like after taking a long bath or swimming for hours. I try to listen to my iPod to block out the noise i think is coming from the horde of zombies (which is just actually the pack of dogs owned by the old lady down the road and really loud crickets) but it doesn’t help. I remember my sisters telling me that they would rather have silence when they were scared so they could hear something coming to attack them. I listened to music and covered my ears my whole life when i was scared because i thought i could just block everything else out and transport myself to my own little world.That impulse was crushed as i remembered what my sisters said and began to once again, have visions of evil things that i could not hear stalking me outside my tent.

I pull one earbud out of my ear so i could partially hear what was going on around me. Silence. I panic again. I realize the only reason the silence is scaring me is because it is not silence i can control or was something that i did not create myself. This thought eased my fear a little, but i realized i’d rather be inside the well-lit house then out here alone scared.

So i quickly unzipped the tent, re-zipped it and ran for my dear life, hugging my coat like it was a security blanket, for the front door. When the boy i feel most safe around answered the door, instead of jumping into his perfect warm and comforting arms, i told him nonchalantly that i just needed to use the bathroom.

I locked myself in the bathroom and caught my breath. Telling myself what a chicken i was being. Soon, i could go back out to the tent and fall asleep in warm comforting arms instead of being alone, in darkness, and scared.

Eleanor walks to the middle of the roof, stands there her red dress fluttering with the wind and as she stretches out her arms she feels the chilly wind graze her skin gently, she feels special that the world would grace her with such beauty. She takes a deep breath and breaks out into a run, she runs with everything in her body, she runs with the speed, agility, and passion that Olympians only dream about, she runs with all she has just this once. She reaches the end of the building and takes a giant leap. There is no concrete below her now, she begins to fall.

“What do you think Eleanor?” Carlos asked her from the driver’s seat. Eleanor snapped out of her daze and looked at them.

“What?” She asked and her friends laughed, they accused her for always being in her own little world.

They are driving down the coast on the cliffy highways with the windows rolled down. The smell of cigarette smoke and oranges, the sound of the radio and her friend’s laughter litter the air. Alex continues reading the book out loud, a tradition they had during road trips. Sometimes Alex read Shakespeare, other times it was Dahl, Cisneros, Coupland, or Gaiman. He would read the book expertly, with different voices per character that would always make them laugh. His voice had such life and conviction it dripped thick and syrupy like honey as he spoke and it would only make them admire him even more.

Carlos, Suzie, and Eleanor returned to their own little worlds as Alex continued to read Eleanor’s favorite book. Charlie blew cigarette smoke out the window, Suzie munched on Oreos, and Alex put his hand nonchalantly on Eleanor’s . She smiled widely as she felt her heart skip a beat or two, and watched the cigarette smoke from her and Carlos’ cigarettes disappear into the salty sea air.

“And what I don’t say is this” He reads slowly. “That this is also the same sun that makes me think of regal tangerines, dimwitted butterflies and lazy carp. And the ecstatic drops of pomegranate blood seeping from the skin fissures of fruits rotting on the tree branches next door – drops that hang like rubies from their old brown leather source, alluding to the intense ovarian fertility inside.
The carapace of coolness is too much for Claire, also. She breaks the silence by saying that it’s not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments “either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.”
I agree. Dag agrees. We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert – to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process.”

There is silence in the car, the four contemplating what Alex had just read. If one listened closely, you could hear Eleanor smile. It may not be healthy to live life as a succession of isolate little cool moments, she thought, but that’s what makes life beautiful. We go through the suffering, the crap, and the shit life throws at us, and this is what gets us through them: the thought of these perfect, irreplaceable moments and the promise that there will always be more.

She hears the wind whistling as she fell, oh the sensation of falling is the best feeling in the world, she thinks. The whole world seems to have gone into the slowest slow motion there was. A woman in a fur coat and red shoes turns the corner and crosses the street to Pine, and a serious business man folds his newspaper on the corner of Sansome. The sky is orange, and somewhere in the world somebody else was falling too, she thinks.

“What are you thinking about?” She asks Charlie.
“That I am lying on the roof of a chicken restaurant, under the stars, with a beautiful girl” Charlie says. Eleanor feels her heart swell. She kisses the forehead of her first real boyfriend, and returns to the embrace of the warm gentle arms she never wants to leave.

“Run!” Nick screams, and she begins to run as fast as she can. Nick is holding her hand as they run, their shoes making a clacking sound on the cobblestone streets of San Antonio. She shrieks and giggles at the same time, no idea why or where they are running to. It is 3 o’clock in the morning, and Eleanor is sixteen.

“Nick!” Pleading to him for answers. “Where the hell are we going?”

He only laughs and continues running. They run faster, and faster, and he stops abruptly causing them both to fall on the ground. She falls on top of him and they laugh for no reason, he kisses her on the forehead. Nick and Eleanor continue to lie in the middle of the cobblestone street laughing at nothing in particular. As the giggling subsides, he pulls her into his arms. “Run away with me Eleanor” he whispers into her ear. She says nothing. He gets up and reaches for an arm to pull her to her feet and into an embrace. “Run away with me, Eleanor” he says a second time. “We’ll live by the beach and have a cat named Horatio, we’ll have a garden of tomatoes, a library full of books, a balcony that overlooks the sea and we’ll build sandcastles all day long” Nick continues to dream out loud. “We’ll catch crab and fish and roast them on a bonfire, and we’ll lie on the beach – your head on my lap and I’ll read to you as you fall asleep, just you and me”.

She begins to cry, wishing she hadn’t jumped. Wishing she could take it all back. It is too late, the ground is approaching, and soon it shall be painted with her blood like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Eleanor sat in the front seat of her Parent’s car with her nanny, her mother driving, and her sisters asleep in back seat. She is eight. She watches the rain drops trickle down the window one after the other, and notices how the rain makes everything just a little bit blurry, like a dream. She stares at the billboards; one for shampoo, the other for instant noodles, the next for cheese ice cream.

In one swift moment, her mother slams on the brakes of their new Isuzu trooper, the breaks lock up, she swerves and hits the island, the car flies into the air landing on its back, Eleanor tumbles through the windshield and lies in a field of broken glass on the highway, she feels the rain rolling down her cheeks.

She wakes up in the back of a truck that she had never seen before with her mom, her sisters, and her nanny. Her favorite shirt – a white one with fishes on it, was no longer white but red from her blood.

She wakes up next in a hospital bed, doctors operating on her wrist, removing shards of windshield glass from it. She sees her wrist cut open and begins to scream. She screams and cries, and thrashes her legs about. The doctors try to calm her down, but she won’t. She is eight, and she is scared. They inject her with something and she falls asleep again. She remembers dreaming about rain and cheese ice cream.

There are explosions after explosions in the sky, this part of the province that is usually silent and tranquil is interrupted. It is New Year’s Eve and Eleanor is ten. The Beach Boy’s greatest hits CD that Eleanor’s parents had given her for Christmas was playing on the stereo loudly. They drank hot chocolate and sat by the window on their house on the hill and watched the city’s fireworks explode and create pattern after pattern from every crack and corner of the horizon. Her two sisters giggled as they sucked the marshmallows in their hot chocolate through their teeth. Eleanor sat between her parents, tapping her feet and singing Good Vibrations. Her father pulled her off the window and they began to dance to the beach boys, her father twirling her around in her red polka-dotted dress, her sisters doing the twist, and her mother watching them and smiling. Midnight rolled around and the whole family picked up their pots, pans, and ladles, and paraded up and down all the houses on the hill banging them loudly, deafening and scaring away evil spirits (and the cats and dogs) with the noise.

“I’m so fucking happy!” Suzie shrieks. They stand in the middle of the crowd at a concert jumping up and down and enjoying the music. Suzie is wearing a green shirt she had just spent 30$ on at the stand where they sold the band’s merchandise. It was a nice shirt, Eleanor and Christian agreed that it was worth the 30$.

Eleanor will remember the smile on Suzie’s face, the biggest one she has ever seen, for the rest of her life. She admired Suzie’s childish excitement and innocence and wished she could be like her sometimes.

The band begins to play Eleanor’s favorite song and the smile on her face almost matched Suzie’s, she feels goosebumps on her skin. She stands lost in the crowd, stuck in a moment, with the music playing in her ears – pleasantly deafening, and an excited crowd of hundreds bouncing up and down around her. Everything is in slow motion. She snaps out of the moment and begins to bang her head around, dancing and jumping up and down like there is no tomorrow, her friends laugh and join in, they all go crazy and let go. They forget about all the things dragging them down in life, relationship, school, and work. All that mattered to them in this moment was jumping around like a bunch of idiots and escaping from the world. Like Christian had said earlier as they lined up to get in to the theatre, this was their escapism. There was something therapeutic about standing in the middle of the crowd with a soundtrack as you just let go. Eleanor agreed.

The band’s lead singer stopped singing, but the horns, guitars, bass, and drums did not. He told the crowd to scream, he told them to scream like the last time, he told them to scream for everyone they knew, he told them to scream for their friends, family, lovers, enemies, and the man at the grocery check-out counter, he told them to scream for everyone in the world who could not, and they did. They screamed so loud and long that their voices would be gone in the morning. They screamed deafening everyone around them, they screamed to let go, they screamed to fall apart, they screamed for every single fucking person in the world who could not, they cried too, the moment unnervingly beautiful and touching, Eleanor could see tears not only on Suzie and Christian’s faces, but on the faces of the strangers around her. Their last scream was the loudest, they screamed with every single ounce of fiber in their being until their voices rasped and died.

Eleanor was mere feet from the ground, she had stopped crying. The sensation of falling calmed her and made her feel like she was flying. There was a smile on her face now and she was content and ready for whatever came next. The sky was orange and it was a beautiful day. Somewhere in the world, as she fell, someone was sailing a boat in the ocean, dancing pirouettes on a marble floor, eating ice cream and letting it melt down their chins, there were people falling in love and out of it, and their were people rolling down grassy hills and sitting in the rain. In the last few seconds before she hit the pavement on the northwest corner of Pine and Sansome Streets, she thought about more of the moments and people in her life. Her and Alex curled up beside each other on her sofa eating strawberry pop tarts and watching old black and white movies, Resting her head on Charlie’s chest as he read her a story with a girl named Jay as she fell asleep with a smile on her face, going on roadtrips with her sister with the windows rolled down singing loudly and flirting with boys in cars, her adventures with Suzie and Cecilia in the vast beautiful city that was unknown to them, falling in love with Nick in San Antonio, sitting on the rooftop of a building back home with Carlos and Maria stoned out of their minds watching the bustle of the city life go on around them, crying in the security line of the airport as she said goodbye to her family to move to San Francisco. Memory after memory played in her head.

She hit the ground, and everything went black. She painted the sidewalk with her blood like a Jackson Pollock painting. Her fragile bones cracked and shattered, sprawled on the pavement like a marionette. People screamed, but she could not hear.

He says it again and still he holds me. I want to unleash the maggots on him. I want to bash his head in the wall, again and again until he stops. All i want to do is get out of here, but he wont let me go, and he wont stop saying it. So i wait, i wait for these creatures to finish eating my brain, and i wait until i collapse on the floor into a heap of nothing.

On Nob hill, i am joined by C., We stare at beautiful british boys with graceful clouds of smoke constantly billowing out of their beaked lips and tangling in their curls. We sit on the wrought iron cafe tables on the sidewalks and sip our exotic teas, perplexed and jaded, making plans of company and sorting life.

The mission, populated by indie kids and spicy passionate hispanics is filled with the promise of great love, good weed, and even better taquerias. I roll down the dewy hills of dolores park and watch people lose control, wishing i could do the same. I smoke cigarettes and curl up in the grass with Murakami as he tells me of two sisters, connected and disconnected, finding their way in life.

I find myself lost in chinese restaurants and herb stores near home, the Parkside, walking through the streets and staring at signs in different languages. Asians and Irish left and right, though i am asian, i do not look like one. I understand now what my father says about being a mutt of different ethnicities — you never really fit in anywhere. I reach home and curl up under warm rusty blankets in the safety and comfort of my own world. Graceful grecian beauties on my wall, smoking cigarettes, drinking absinthe, and lying in flowers, and a former life and my past smiling at me from behind glass and frames. Matt Beringer and Amy Millan whisper bittersweet lullabies as i watch the rain and fog outside, thinking about how miserable and wet everyone else is.

When the sun comes out, i run, i run to the ocean in the horizon. I run to lose this weight pulling on me and making me feel bloated and ugly, i run to forget, i run to remember. I run to feel the sweat rolling off my skin in beads, soaking my clothes in salt. I feel the sea air brush against my face, biting and cold. When my legs begin to feel like jello, i collapse on the sand and watch the sunset. I feel the sand crawling under my toenails and in the small folds of skin. My breath is heavy as i light a cigarette, the smoke in my lungs make them feel like they will explode, but i smoke anyway.

Melocoton crawls in bed beside me and squeezes my hand reassuringly, he holds me close and tender and says things that make me swoon. Guitars, pianos, trumpets, and violins are the soundtrack to our romance as my arms are wrapped around his warm bare skin. We hurt as we lie in each others arms and trace shapes on the others face gently with the tips of our fingers. On this bed, our bodies break, our hearts break, but we are masochists and still return to it nightly for more.

I walk through most of the city alone, but most days i do not mind.

She throws her head back just a little bit everytime she laughs and smiles with her whole face. When she hears a song she likes, she looks like a child on christmas after they finished unwrapping each gift carelessly, happy and excited and lying on a little mountain of disheveled red and green christmas wrapping. I could go on and on.

Elizabeth starts singing along to Billie Holiday in that quiet sultry voice of hers and begins to sway her hips oh-so-slowly and spins like she’s doing pirouettes in slow motion.

“I want someone who won’t run away when they find out what’s wrong with me” She says sadly. “For once, i want someone who will stay”

I want to tell her that i will stay, but i’m too scared.

Elizabeth is a warm chocolate souffle with raspberry filling. She a vase of sunflowers in a white room. She is a thousand origami paper cranes and a wish. She is the happy memory you recall on your deathbed. She is a pomegranate sunset. She is the trumpets in La Vie En Rose. She is Morrisey’s voice. She is the last cherry jellybean and your favorite book.

She is all these things, but not mine. Never mine.

She stares blankly into the darkness of the room, there is a long pause before she replies. “I’m sorry, Everett”.

Everett stares at Anna longingly for a moment and he shakes his head in frustration. He tries to speak, but cannot find the words. He gets up to leave, walks towards the door, and stops as he is about to exit, slowly turning back to her, still trying to find the words. “Anna, i love you, but sometimes, i dont know if you’re worth all of this”.

He breathes a heavy sigh, stares at her like his heart had just shattered into a million tiny fragments and walks out the door.

Anna sits in the armchair speechless her eyes still upon the door Everett had just exited through. She realizes that she had just made the biggest mistake of her life, but he was gone, and it was too late. There was going to be no chasing, or begging for him to come back. It was over, like summer was now, the warm air had gone, and now it was just chilly and dark and the leaves coated the dully grey pavement in a carpet of fiery foliage. Winter loomed in the distance, bringing with it the promise of rain, fog, and the unforgiving chill in air. It was going to be a long December indeed.