#but i didn't get a phone that had the capacity for those paragraph-long texts for absolutely ages

[halfdeadfriedrice]

last one for the night because it's late and honestly i'm just nostalgia-bombing for me, but i found the poem. i've been looking for this poem for years. around 5 or 6 or 7 of them, since she stopped talking to me, moved away, and fell off the internet. i had lost the future but i find it difficult to not be able to carry the past, and how often do you get poems written about you?

god 16 was hard. and everything after that too.

since i'm removing it from its original context: some CWs for disordered eating, being 16, references to christianity and the republican-moderate agenda

when jesus ate my house

by [linna], Jul 8, 2008, 3:47:27 PM

1.   do you hate me?, she asks.

my legs are in my face, pressed in the crevice, earth-break, ripping of my nose, hanging between my eyes like an extra arm, curling in on itself. i feel sick, dizzy; the world is a dribbled basketball, a honeyed ham, an empty soda bottle, a gutter and a staircase. i could grab her face, stretch the skin, vomit.

no, i want to say. no, no, no. please, don't think that. why would you think that? no. no, no, no. please, no. never.

i sob and shake. she wracks her brain for reasons to hate herself. i can't respond. my mouth slows and my head fevers, paces. i shiver. her eyes melt.

i am silent, fitfully, regrettably.

2.   my head is the new batcave.

he starts up his car; the engine rears. my stomach roars with fitful delight. my gut cooks up a tornado against fasting, against eating, against being awake.

she laughs at my stupid jokes, my silly words, my bad metaphors. she laughs and she smirks and she smiles and she grins, and she laughs, she laughs,

she laughs. it is enough.

3.   at the books-a-million at the local outdoor mall, we sip drinks and i anxiously count the minutes to closing time, searching for the words on the table. it will not hand them over. i look at her, blank, unsure.

you listen, she says. i'm not leaving. emily isn't leaving and i am not leaving and i don't care who left you before, because i am not going anywhere.

in the middle of the night she is telling me about gay men and a fire and her father's coffee maker, and i am throwing my legs in places i don't understand and my brain struggles with the idea of not-sleeping, while she smiles and begins to dream when she is still awake, and i know that she will for long after.

oh, i want to say. don't you understand? you're going everywhere.

4.   the sky promises thunderstorms. i crack my fingers and bury my head between my knees, the epitome of safe.

she has been underlining things with her voice. i italicize, emphasize. she emboldens, brightens. i shrink back, slowly, step by step. she reaches out.

5.   we are laying in my driveway. david jennings   (my arch-nemesis, my rival, my enemy) rests at my side, crusted in my palm, and she is absent-mindedly watching the moon chew.

i am still babbling about my anorexia; it is the day of my diagnosis. she listens. i silently ask the stars to let the moment never end; however,

i am the one who stands up finally and says, it's getting late. let's go back.

6.   my dad does not understand why i had to sit in the car to talk to her on the phone. his eyebrows constrict, contract, become semicolons and dashes and questions murdering his forehead. there is a contortionist living in my father's brow.

i tell him he does not understand. the telephone is like a dead rock in my hand, echoing her words, her sighs, her ums, her giggles.

he shakes his head, mutters something about teenagers. i recoil.

7.   i want to, but

i do not tell her that i am afraid. i am strong, like milked bones and tightened rope and prisoner biceps. i am indestructible, i am clean, i am fortified, i am unbreakable.

i am too much.

8.   she makes me try on nicknames. they fit like worn jeans, ballet slippers, ugly bathing suits.

lee is the first one she tries. i unsuccessfully try to convince her that leeann is a name on its own, that doesn't need to be shortened, altered, modified, bloodied, pulped.

lunch comes next. i give her mine with a reassuring glance and she smiles, sad, and works her way through it, rhythmically. she senses the awkwardness and drops the name; it sticks about as well as her trying to shove food down my throat.

linna, she finally settles on. it comes out of nowhere: no backup, no story, no explanation. it is simply there, attached onto my back, hanging off my nose. she reads it in my eyes.

she does not let it go. and after a while, i don't know if i want her to.

9.   i don't feel real, sometimes. like my feet are simply weighted leaves, and my hands are lightened bricks, and my head is an empty balloon, about to pop. sometimes i feel like i am the burden of someone's imagination, a figment of someone's unsympathetic hands. a clay figure, a doll, a wooden statue, a house, a wall, a child, a corpse.

i hope she feels skin and bones, tissues and nerves, solidity and liquid, earth and water and air and form. i hope she realizes, and i hope she always

remembers.

10.   this is a fic in which rodney is a unicorn and john is a rainbow.

my face is lost to the curve of my elbow. it is three-thirty a.m. and i cannot breathe. she spoons her ice cream and smiles, laughing dryly, quietly pleased.

there is nothing more. there doesn't need to be.

11.   only you, she is cracking up, speaking through the giggles, can listen to this song while reading romantic fluff.

i grin. oh, be quiet, i say, and go back to your bdsm and bloodplay.

with pleasure.

12.   she is my first victim.

i am practicing telling people i have a problem. it comes out hasty, undefined, nervous. oh, i have a disorder.   oh, that's just my anxiety issues.   panic attacks? yeah, i get those.

she does not know what to do with this information. i can tell. she has her legs bunched up underneath her, crouching to look at me not-eating lunch on the cafeteria floor, burrowed in the corner.

what are you doing here?, she says, instead. she does not know what to do, so she smiles.

i open my mouth. i think i like her already.

13.   i'll walk with you, she says. i stare.

my voice cracks when i attempt to speak. really?

yeah, really, she says, laughs. why not?

14.   there is a voice in the back of my head that tells me to listen to her when she talks about god, jesus, church. about belief. there is a voice in the back of my head that says to listen to her conservative views, her republican-moderate agenda. there is a voice in the back of my head that says,

shut up, for once, and listen.

15.   in a pool in north carolina in a smelly hotel with a full set of clothes on each, we talk about our lives. we explain ourselves, quietly, shyly,

unapologetically.

16.   eat, linna, she says. please.

    i don't know how to tell her where i would be     without her. without her telephone calls,     her pokes and her prods, her questions; her asking     of my writing, her encouraging me on, her     awkward silences and comfortable speeches; the way     she sometimes sounds distant on the phone,     the way she inches in closer; her ethical debates, her     historical trivia, her moral inclinations, her     nocturnal sleeping schedules and     her overloaded eating habits, her addictions and her     favorites, her confessions and her not-secrets, her     wish-secrets, her honest-secrets.

no, i say. i'm sorry. i can't.

    i don't know how to tell her where i would be     without her.     i don't know how to explain, to convey,     to write and to picture         nowhere.

if you told me to stop,                         i would.                             anything.

17.   do you hate me?, she pleads, begs, wonders and fears.

i am silent.

and i promise myself that i never will be again, for her.

#half dead fried life #not to be glib or whatever but god how grateful i am to my friends who helped me out of who i was and into someone else #i hope i helped too #a little bit #i was like 'dang i can't find any chat logs about this' and the answer was i was just constantly phoning my girl up #and texting some probably #but i didn't get a phone that had the capacity for those paragraph-long texts for absolutely ages #LOLOLOL i just remembered i did have some stupid boy text me a poem he had written for me and then asked me to text it back to him #he had got a new phone or something #and i had to do it laboriously #like 6 little barely-connected format-lost pieces of poem #anyway #sometimes the poems people write for you are good #anyway x2 this is also very appropriate i think to dip my toes back into the knives feelings of HS for this reading of h.omestuck. #nice to see where i was at while all that was happening #i was backreading SGA fic and worrying about everyone #i had ever met