Hi, I'm Cody.

I can’t recall the color of your eyes, but I will remember the shape of your lips. I won’t forget the way shadows played on the dark side of your nose, or how your chin felt pressed into my cheek. There is a truth in the way the light splashed across your face, a burning satisfaction when I smell something that reminds me of you. I don’t know when or where, but I will see you smiling again, not through some computer screen, but when you are across from me at a table, or in a room, or even outside across some vast field. 

A past tense resurrection, it’s how I feel sometimes. I’m wasting time with this second chance, but I don’t mind, I rather like waiting around. I think about the ways I can make a difference in someones life, and I just shrug and light another cigarette. I don’t want to be a hero, I just want to do something heroic once and feel some sense of greatness. 

I’m gonna stop posing and posturing, I’m a fool and a screw up but I can make people laugh, I can make people smile and that isn’t so bad. I want to hear you laughing and I want to feel your breath in my ear. If I can’t have it though, it won’t be the end of the world. I’ll be glad knowing your happy and enjoying your life and if you can still smile, it’s not so bad. I doubt I’ll find someone who made me feel that strange jumble of emotions you stir up inside but I don’t want a replacement. You are you and that’s why I care, that’s why I think about you and worry and wonder and hope and dream. 

I don’t know if I can be who you need, but I can at least be there for you, whatever it is, whenever, if I still breathing, I can make the time. If the world were ending, I’d probably try to reach you, just to find out, to make sure you were safe. That’s the kind of idiot I am. No apologies, just a big, dumb goof who loves someone. 

I don’t know but I love a lot of people and I won’t feel shame for it. No one should feel shame for who they love. I am a coward and I don’t talk about real things, and all I do is stare up at the stars sometimes and I cry. I want to make people happy, but I don’t think I can, so I just take my frustration and run away. 

I want a lot of things, but in reality, I don’t even care about myself enough to reach out for them. I’d rather not get hurt so I just sit in my room and smoke cigarettes and waste away. I decided to do something with my life, but I’m so scared that sometimes I stare at my textbooks and I want to cry. I don’t know and it’s scary and I just want someone to tell me that they love me and they are proud of me.

I want childish reinforcement because I am weak. I’m drunk, what is wrong with me. I falter way too much. I need another drink. 

It is dark deep down inside the cave, but it was dark in the mouth of it as well. It seemed to take what little light that spilled into its throat and swallow it whole. The first few steps inside seemed easy enough, but now the torch I had seemed like a pittance. They claimed there was a dragon down in the bowels of this dark place, in this old place. I could’ve sworn that all the dragons were dead. 

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I’m not unhappy, but I’m not happy either. School is okay, but I want to get my degree and get a job. I want a house, I want a dog. I want a back porch that I sanded, painted and varnished myself. I want get drunk out of cups I bought myself. I want to watch the sunset on my tiny little plot of land with my dumb name on it; and I want to share it all, with someone I care about. 

I’m just not here.

They handed me what looked like the smallest tab of acid in the world and I placed it on my tongue. It melted in my mouth and I could feel heat spreading all throughout my body. My arms hang slack to my side and I drop my cigarette on the lawn and start walking away from the house. 

My head is swiveling around on my neck and soon I can’t stop staring at moon, it’s big and it seems to fill my eyes, seems to fill the sky up. A beautiful and cold morning as I wonder the streets of the city, the city of medicine, the bull city. I’m lost and wandering through parking garages, under bridges, around churches that seem to leer at me from their manicured lawns. 

I can hear a heart beating far away and it’s drawing me from my comfort zone. Somewhere close by, I hear voices and soon I’m walking through a group of people as they exit a bar. I place my hands slightly away from my body so I can brush my hands against the fabrics of their jackets, so maybe I can snag someones finger and we both turn around. I’d gaze into their eyes and soon the moon would fill their vision up too. 

I wake up on a friends couch, feeling like I was worked over with pumice stone. She’s drinking a cup of coffee and talking with her girlfriend. They look at me and laugh. I’m croaking out an apology and they tell me I showed up last night and asked to use their phone. I fell asleep after I lifted the receiver to my face and they moved me to their couch and went back to bed. I thank them and ask them if they want to hang out soon and we make plans. 

I’m home again and there are a couple people asleep on the couches, a couple on the floor and a few people in my bed. I make a pot of coffee, smoke a cigarette and wonder how soon until I can kick them out. I want to clean the house and work on my plans to rotate out some of my flowerbeds.  

This weather is giving me a certain disconnect. It was mild and sunny, more like a beautiful autumn day when it should be cold, it should be snowing. I should be burying my face deep into a snowdrift, but instead I am fretting over my flowers starting to grow early and getting killed by an upcoming cold snap. Watching this strange sun crawl across the sky, I wonder where I am sometimes, is this the place I need to be? 

Sleep is harder and harder to come by these days. I wake up from dreams and there are vague remainders of what happened in the deep layers of sleep. I think you were there, and so were you, and we went here and did this and some terrible thing loomed over the horizon. Vague portents that make me clench my jaw and scratch the back of my head in anxiousness. I don’t like these feelings, these dreams, so I stay up late as possible and drink cough medicine so I don’t dream, I just slip beneath the strange green waves of drugged sleep. 

My teeth hurt, it feels like a fist is in my mouth and it keeps opening its fingers, pressing on the backs of my teeth and forcing them out with a slow, steady pressure. It’s not pleasant, but I have to bear through it, I’m getting better and not every little nuance of my imbalance can’t keep me from careening off the road. I’m going to stand firm and commit, I want to become better, to become a more reliable human being. I want to be someone people rely on, instead of some fair weather person they know, I’m tired of being a shape behind a curtain of rain. 

Pleasant textures, soft lighting, the perfection of memories. Even when I feel guilt from certain reminders, they still are nice to look at, my brains construction of how things should’ve been when I made myself into an utter fool. Making the set pieces seem nicer to focus away from my own short comings. These are unpleasant but strangely alluring, is that why I keep returning to those points in time, not to scrutinize my own mistakes but to marvel at how nice that bookshelf looked, how well put together the room looked? 

I’m jamming my fingers down my throat and soon I am retching into the toilet, wracked with heaving, I feel some sense of balance, some sense of control. When it feels like things are slipping from my grasp, I do this, I have to, I need this control over my own body, my surroundings. When I am almost touching the tip of my nose to the water of my toilet, crying uncontrollably, I am the King of my Castle. The bile and spittle hanging to my lips is an ermine lined cape, the blood I can taste and smell in the back of my throat is my diadem, the sense of peace when my diaphragm ceases to spasm is my scepter, this sad room where I take care of bodily functions is my throne room. This kingdom is built by my own two hands and it is beautiful and I hate it.  

Steampunk is racist.