Summer birthday, heavy reader, occasional painter with an inverted sense of day and night and a paper fetish disguised as a writing habit.

I never want to grow old, and I never want a mortgage or a career or a car that’s never been driven before. I never want to wake up in the morning next to the same person more than twice in a row and I never want a wedding ring. I don’t want to lie awake in the middle of the night wondering where all those years of mine have gone, and if there is a secret drawer within me that collects them, or if they have scattered in the wind, a waste, for what have I to show of them? I don’t want to regret big decisions, and I don’t want to have to pay full-fare on the bus. I also never want a senior discount on anything. I don’t want to waste another year at school, or shave away another month at home. I don’t want to feel wonderful one moment and shitty the next because of front door shutting behind me. I don’t want to learn how to cook real meals, or balance a checkbook, or do my taxes. I don’t want to get familiar with the side-streets and highways around my home, and I will never commit to a gym or a church or a sewing class. 

I want to walk everywhere, run everywhere, bike everywhere, drive an ice-cream truck everywhere. I want to have time to read all the books I’ve been recommended, and go on road trips with all the hooligans I’ve met. I want to keep a journal, and draw portraits, and stay the way I am right now forever. And not because I think it’s perfect. But because it sort of works. And because I’m afraid nothing else would. I like waking up and not being sure what happened last night, or the entire weekend, only to relive it through word of mouth. I like being frustrated at not feeling anything, and not being able to apologize, and not knowing when I’ll see someone again. I like emotions that depend on the quality of light, and the density of musty air and greasy hair. I can’t imagine not taking risks. I can’t imagine being in bed asleep at 9 pm. Or even 10, or 11. I don’t see myself sleeping other than during the day, in class.

Not because I hate school, and not for some silly rebellious reason, but because I can’t imagine not lying awake at night, unable to sleep, because all I can think about is who I shouldn’t have said what to. Or whose feelings I hurt, and how, and why. Which relationship have I beaten beyond repair today? What will happen when my parents expect me to apply for college? What will I do when it’s time to get a job? What about when there aren’t enough hours in a day to read a book, or sketch a portrait, or write a poem? What will become of me, and how can I stop it?

What if I can’t stop it?

(And what is it about the way his hair falls across his face, and neck, that makes him so beautiful? What is it about his unwashed scent and dirty clothes, and silly, charming rhetoric that makes him so different? And yet so painfully not different enough. What is it about me that won’t let me love him longer than a day at a time? Or without breaks in-between? Or without his hands on me, why can’t I love him without him being within arm’s reach? And why do I think of him now, and not the others? Why not the neighbor, or his brother, or an old friend in Ohio? I sometimes love each of them equally, and other times none of them at all.)