Everyone is a moon...

Good luck, brave and beautiful strangers.
Aren’t we the lucky ones
walking into the night, all eyes on the same star?
Aren’t we the lucky ones?
We were here for a time, to dream. And we still are.

There are twenty of us sitting inside the first snowfall. It’s mid-January in Maine, and the flakes on our jackets are melting into dew as we hang them on the back of our chairs. It’s unnatural, that the snow should come so late in the winter, and I might have even stopped believing it would ever come in inches like this. I thought the world, at least this little piece of it, had broken in a new way. It seems silly now that we’re buried.

On the walk over, my black leather boots disappeared into the soft ground. I was silent as other students yelled across fresh footprints and blanketed fields at tiny friends who waved. I’m always silent. I don’t know anyone here. I write stories and run for hours on a treadmill and look for jobs online. I favor who and where I will be over this, over right now. You can’t be lonely if you don’t exist yet.

There are two big windows in this classroom, and today through the panes and white wooden sashes we can all see the slumped trees, the huge columns of the library, the dizzy snow flying upstream through gravity. I feel choked by the beauty, I feel perfect in this snow globe. I could fall in love with anyone, I think. I could love anyone in such a gentle world.

The professor, an awkward young man with a very pregnant wife and a nervous giggle, shuts the door and begins to talk about final papers and mixed up reading assignments. There is a knock at the door, and when he opens it, there’s no one there. The class apologetically laughs at the phantom. The professor shuts the door, continues to speak, and after a minute, turns his head towards another knock. This time, the boy who sits in front of me is tall between the door frame, dark brown hair wavy with snow water, hands gripping backpack straps against his chest. The class laughs quietly again, as if he was a phantom, too. The professor says, “Ah, you’re real,” as the boy slips into his seat. Though we’ve had weeks of classes and I’ve stared past the back of his head for hours, he suddenly becomes the beauty my snow globe heart latches on to. He blushes at the laughter. He leaves his backpack on the ground so he doesn’t disturb the class with zippers and papers. He carefully takes his red jacket off. For the first time I know he doesn’t know how handsome he is. He’s the eye of the snow storm, the man in the center of chaos. He’s so precious I can hardly breathe. I don’t know his name.

I get disgusted, sometimes, by the way people try to crush beauty until it’s small enough for them to own. When people see beautiful land, they want to buy it. When they see a beautiful person, they want to conquer them. Whether it’s with sex, or dating, or marriage, they want to be the thing to tame them, own them, enslave them. They want to win them. I understand it, of course. It’s somewhat admirable that we’re always trying to fly towards the light, to get what we want, to suck up all the good things in the universe and live with our bellies full. But why can’t we ever just watch the lights glow on their own? It’s better to save our fingertips from being singed, to reject corruption, to accept space, to leave a butterfly’s wings untouched.

This is why I don’t care who he is or who he sleeps with or what he thinks of me, because I don’t want to own him. I’m just thankful for him, for his stony, unassuming silence. He doesn’t know his own grace, which is the very thing to make him extraordinary. He has never raised his hand in class to answer a question. Once, when the professor forgot an obscure date, he said simply, quietly, quickly: “1846”. He takes pages and pages of notes in sloppy letters. He writes slowly. He has strong, block fingers and hands red from the cold. He wears a digital watch on his left wrist, jeans that cling to muscular thighs, hiking sneakers and simple, clean long-sleeve cotton shirts. His face is angular, smooth. The Russian Tsars are broadcasted on the pull down screen in front of us, but what did they know of majesty?

There have been so many poems written about the power of beautiful women. I’m no poet but I am a woman and I’ll tell you this: there’s something deeply tragic about us. We’re painted with make up and tweaked and waxed and broken into Barbie pieces and I don’t know who to blame at the moment without ripping apart the world. Men sink my heart with their natural, effortless radiance. They’re so untainted, so clean. This man (can I call him a man? Can I call him a boy?) is tempered with humility. And today he has to give a presentation.

His speaks quietly and trips over words. He stutters a bit, and starts every sentence with, “You know…” He’s dizzy like snowflakes. He’s nervous, shaking, cold, but he’s making perfect sense. He makes so much sense. I can’t bring myself to smile at him because I’m too hypnotized, too obvious. I’m embarrassed, suddenly, by my make up and my big boobs and all the times I’ve spoken so loudly. I’m humbled. I sip my coffee. I don’t need to fight so hard. I’m pretending to write notes on what he’s saying about racism in the rural provinces but all I’m jotting down are the things about him that rattle my lungs, that shake the snow globe, that bring me into the moment. I answer a question with a confident, measured voice.

Outside, it’s so white and still stirring. There are twenty of us in this classroom in Maine, at this small school, on this warm island in a bleak world. I have no one to talk to, that’s true, but I don’t feel at all alone. We’re silent. I’m choked with beauty. I’m perfect. I can love anyone in such a gentle world, even me. How strange, to be in a tiresome classroom and never want to leave. How lovely to be so frozen and to find a simple way to melt. I hold my hands out just far enough to feel the glow.

How foolish I was to think that the snow would never fall.

Anonymous asked: "You're good enough" was so weirdly like someone I know named Gabe that I forgot this was your Tumblr and thought he made one. He's depressed about the world and a girl. CRAZYYYYYYY

I could say something douchey like “writers are many people in one,” or “I am the every-man,” but I’m going to stick with thank you. Thanks for reading and tell this Gabe in real life to call me so we can chat. 

My name is Gabe. I’m a 22-year-old guy who’s depressed in every cell of my body. I can almost feel the heavy part of my brain, the dark gray part that makes me tired all the time and pulses loudly with loneliness no matter how many people are in the room. There’s something cripplingly isolating about being desperate about time, and I am. Depression is endless but it’s also an hourglass, every miserable grain of sand scratches its way down my throat. Depression is a silver coin spinning in the center of my brain. Heads tells you you’re alive. Tails, you’re dead. 

When someone else dies, no matter how it happens, there’s an emotional aftermath that wakes up everyone completely and electrocutes people into a state of elation, but they only feel that way next to a corpse. After the nauseating grief and the hopeless, unbearable crisis of realizing we’re mortal and are going to die very, very soon in the course of history…there’s a wild peace. There’s a renewed sense of urgency to live like we’re dying, to prioritize, to seize the day, to spout cliches that really just mean to feel the vitality in our skin and peel away all the bullshit. 

All this important breathing lasts for about a week, then most go back to their routines in the doldrums. They stop carefully choosing the last words they say to someone, carefully treasuring the way someone sleeps, carefully tasting the way soda explodes on the tongue. They forget how they felt in those crucial, primal moments and they work just as hard, turn off that animal in their brain and wake up, work, go to sleep. Wake up, work, go to sleep. Wake up. Work. Go to sleep. I can’t go to sleep. 

People think depression is the absence of living. It can feel like that, like you can hardly breathe or sleep or shower or eat (though I’ve never had a problem eating) or do any of the things that make a normal human function. It feels like you never want to get out of bed and you only want to be awake when no one else is, in the waning hours of the night so you’re not forced to interact with people of the happier race. But my depression, at its core, is a type of grief, of mourning. It devastates me that our entire lives aren’t like that week after a death. It paralyzes me that people spend so much time and energy on yelling, hurting and judging. 

I had a friend who got bit by a dog when she was little and she’s petrified now. She makes everyone lock their pets in a basement if she’s at their house and she won’t run outside just in case an electric fence falters. I wish I could make people lock themselves in the basement now and then while I breathe upstairs because we bite each other every day. 

It’s no secret that people are jealous, shallow, self-centered and two-faced. Anyone who’s been off their front step knows that any place you walk to there will be eyes that want to hurt you and hands that want to help you. It’s a Russian roulette gun we have to point at our temples and a concussion we just have to weather. But it the nausea gets to me.

I don’t see how any amount of medicine, booze or money could make me a happy, carefree person. There will still be rape and murder and genocide. There will still be broken hearts and tired dreams and kids who don’t live past 10 and the the simple cruelty of one person telling another they’re just not good enough. I can’t focus on things that don’t matter, and as far as I’m concerned almost nothing matters if it’s only being used to rank someone, make someone superior, push someone down, make lots of money. 

There was a period of time when I was younger and wore baseball hats and I thought that being in love wouldn’t be a bunch of bullshit, when I thought it was possible to build a universe with someone and fall asleep on rooftops with everyone locked down in the basement. I thought I had that, but she pushed me off the ledge and maybe I’ll walk up those stairs again but right now my legs have compound fractures and I ripped open our universe on the way down. 

I’m just alone and sick about the way people treat each other all the time. I’m tired. Angry. Insecure. How can you not be when you’re supposed to be in a world that tells you, whenever it can, how wrong and insufficient you are? 

I’ve been great at things. I’m good looking. I work hard and I’m kind and I’m smart and I’m interesting. No one cares, really. But I can’t stop caring. 

Everyone thinks this world is a big joke and I’m definitely not in on it. Anyone who’s full of joy and rapture sees what potential I see in the world but they’re too stupid to see all the pain all around them. Beautiful fools are running everywhere and I can’t stand the sight of them. You’d do anything, wouldn’t you, to say one last precious thing to that person you’ve lost? Or even to that little kid you saw on the news? But you won’t do anything to help that stranger smile for a change. Beautiful, stupid fools. 

I don’t know where to go. 

Until I was 6 I was loud and my eyes lit up and family was everyone everywhere. 

Then my cousin died, and it took a year for the brain tumor to kill him. It took a year for him to lose his hair, his sight, his hearing, his face, his hand/eye coordination. He taught me to tie my shoes and then he suddenly couldn’t put his on. We grew up together. He was bright and loved and athletic. We were the same age, he was me, and I watched him die.

I remember standing in the window waiting for my neighbors to pick me up to see a production of Annie in Derry. I remember my mom telling me that Jeffrey was dead and I didn’t cry and I was thinking, “He’s been dead a long time.” I was 7 and I had already learned people can pass away while their bodies are still breathing. I was 7 and I knew death was more than being a cold, empty body. We knew it was coming. It played out in front of us like a horror movie. We knew what the ending would be: dark rooms, chemo pain, the funeral of a child. 

They played the Circle of Life at his funeral. They wouldn’t let me watch when they put him in the ground so they had me plant a tree for him instead.

But still, I stopped talking. I got quiet. I always stood at the end of the line at recess and found things to obsess over. Best friends started being mean, forgetting about me. I learned to sob at silly things like not getting a vanilla cupcake, losing my What! Ever? wallet on my birthday, falling off my bike in the sand. 

I used to pray to him until I stopped believing in that sort of thing. Senior year of high school I was soccer captain and for the state championships I made every girl put a little paper heart in their socks and write on it one reason why they played. I wrote Jeffrey’s name. We won. I scored the game winner in overtime. 

It was a coincidence but cathartic. I felt like maybe he owed me, for leaving so early. Maybe I owe him every single day because I get to live and he didn’t. 

But I watched him die, you know. I learned how to die and I’m not sure I ever learned how to live again. I never felt the same, so whether it was growing up or going to first grade or losing him, I’ll never know. What I do know is after that I never felt like I fit in anywhere. After that I tried to find people and things to put my passion in, to live through, and nothing’s worked. After that I felt like a ghost. 

This is such a strange, sad, lonely life to float around in. I don’t cry in the window when the worst has happened, but in odd, spattered moments where I’m reminded not only that we can’t get what we desperately, desperately want, but there are cancers that eat at us for absolutely no reason. 

It’s been 16 years, so I should be over it, right? I should have moved on, tucked it away in scars. But when I visited his grave last year for the first time since I was little, I knew exactly where it was. I didn’t look at a single wrong tombstone, and it was pitch black out, and the only light I had was my friend’s headlights. Consciously or not, losing Jeffrey is in the map of my bones. 

I walked by his bedroom today, the one on the first floor he moved into when he got so sick he couldn’t walk up the stairs anymore. The tender nostalgia, the stutter heartbeat, the sorrow. Those are the things that live there now. 

Scene:

Gabe is laughing, his lungs heaving and hawing uncontrollably. He’s running down the basketball court with his arms locked in the air. He is tanned. Toned. Sweating. His hair is curling and matted with water. People aren’t touching him but are near him with their fists held high, cheering, waving, whooping. His muscles are acidic.
 
Quiet. A dimly lit room. Gabe is slumped down on a ratty, ripped couch with a beer can in his hand. He hasn’t tasted it. His hair is unwashed, his clothes are stained and covered in cracker crumbs. His bare feet are cold. The TV is on but he’s closed his eyes. There are people in the kitchen eating pasta from the pan without butter, without sauce. He tunes them out.
 
He is in a bright classroom with his head resting on a fist, his feet propped against the back of the chair in front of him. Taylor is next to him and keeps typing BOOBS on his TI-83. They’re grinning painfully. Doc Marshall is drawing bell curves on the board. They look like boobs.
 
Gabe is in the train station counting nickels to put on his t pass and his hands are shaking. The dirty slush from people’s boots has soaked the bottom of his jeans. The machine keeps spitting out his ripped dollar bills. The man behind him coughs, “Come on.”

He’s in the air, the tarp of trampoline a body below him. His limbs are unconnected, his coordination is pudding. His socks are wet with dew. The sun is orange in the corner of the sky. In his house, the lights are still off. Everyone is still asleep but he’s breathing heavy, awake, flying.

Gabe is a freshman with new jeans that he bought with his own money and the orange and black JanSport backpack he wore all through high school. He’s standing outside his classroom, he’s on time for class, he’s watching people file in, but he’s not going. He can’t bring himself to cross the open door and walk down the rows of student eyes. He feels sick and watched and dry. He sits on the leather couch just outside. He waits for the door to close, the hallway to silence. He hear’s his professor—a tall, skinny man with suspenders and a sense of humor but not one of compassion— taking role call.

“Gabriel DiSantis?” Silence.

“Not here,” he says, stands up, walks away, deflates.  

Taylor tackles Gabe into the ground and the grass rips up their knees.

“That was not a tag!” Mr. Howard yells but Taylor dives on the football, which has bounced free.

“That didn’t count,” Matt Fowler says, and he points at Taylor.

“Of course it counts,” he says, “you guys are a bunch of pansies.”

“Yeah, just count it.” Gabe says, standing up. “He’ll get what’s coming to him.” He brushes the dirt off his mesh shorts and inhales the ecstasy of freshly cut grass. Taylor slaps him on the back. 

He showers to cry so no one will see his eyes get red, swollen. In the hot fall of water, his fevered blood feels natural, his face is wet because it has to be. He crosses his arms, buckles over, can’t think. He repeats words in his head, “Why, why, why, why, why, why…” “No, no, no, no, no…” “I don’t have anything, I don’t have anything, I am not anything…”

Lark spent $80 to get her hair twisted into an updo and her eyes are sparkling. Gabe is using his left hand to hold hers, his right hand to eat the chicken wings he picked up at the prom buffet. Her dress is short, red and satin. Their hands rest on her bare knee.

“Prom is a wasteland,” she’s saying, “but I still kind of like it. We’re being socially conditioned to be perfect little married people.”

“But you still kind of like it.” Gabe says with a smirk.

“Well,” she shrugs, “I kind of love us.”  

He is sitting on a bar stool. Lark’s number isn’t in his phone anymore so he won’t drunk text her, because he did once but it didn’t make anything better. It was a cry for help but she wasn’t helping anyone anymore but herself. In any case, Gabe isn’t texting but he’s drunk and alone. Taylor is talking to three girls at the other end of the bar and all Gabe can see is the thong sticking out of the blond girl’s pants. The bar tender, Michelle, who told him she goes to Berklee and is a piano player and yada yada, asks if he wants another drink.

“What’s the cheapest thing you’ve got?” he asks.

“It doesn’t matter, it’s on me.”

“No, you really don’t have to do that.”

“Well, you don’t have to look so sad.” But he does. He really does.

“Corona.”

When I opened the door to my room, I saw Camilla sitting on my bed with her knitting needles and ipod balanced on her knees. I felt my skin shrink with frustration the way it did when I needed to be alone, but there was always someone everywhere in the city and I couldn’t do it. I didn’t understand these people who could be with other people all the time, looking and laughing and being seen. Maybe their souls were attached to their skins like normal animals, but I had to slither out now and then in order to breathe or grow or survive. I am a hermit crab with a carefully painted shell. Or, maybe I’m just a hermit.
 
I could have laid on Taylor’s bed but I sat on the end of my own with my arms crossed and stared forward. Camilla took her headphones off and crawled over to me, rubbed my shoulder. Then she sat back and rearranged her black yarn, made it twirl around her fingers..
 
“You’re a good guy, Gabe,” she said. “Jomo’s banging a girl upstairs and I can’t bear to listen anymore.”
“It’s 3 a.m.”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t you working brunch tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re sober and knitting and listening to…”
“Nickel Creek. Where’s Taylor?”
“He’s sleeping at Christina’s.”
“Oh, the stupid webs he weaves.” Christina was loud and impulsive and had awesome tits. He was stupid, all right.
“Who does Jomo have upstairs?” I asked.
“I don’t know but she’s faking all sorts of orgasms.” She shivered and I shook my head. I made a mental note not to leave my room.
“What do you think he used, ‘I played DI lacrosse?’ or ‘One day I’ll be a lawyer?’”
“I can’t believe girls fall for anything but the present.”
“I mean, he’s a good guy and he’s decent looking. And they’re not falling for him, they’re fucking him. Most of the time people only fuck the idea of another person anyway.”
“Right. He gives them plenty of labels to play with. And then there’s you and me and others, who can’t do that.”
“How do you know I can’t?”
“Because, sweetheart. It’s Saturday night at 3 am and you’re here with me and your soft penis and this isn’t the first time.”
“Well maybe if I had some game that wouldn’t be the case.”
“You have game. You don’t want it.” I closed my eyes. She was right. Girls smiled at me and touched the small of my back and called me tall. I just wanted to sleep all the time and I didn’t want someone breathing into my mouth, touching my stomach, being in the same room as my secrets. The only person who I wanted there was me, or a girl who would become one of my secrets, a living journal who no one could open up and read or lose or throw away.
“I’m so tired,” I said and pushed my shoes off with my feet.
“Well, I’m sleeping in this room,” Camilla answered and started towards Taylor’s bed.

“I won’t think about what’s gone down in here since these sheets were changed,” she said as she peeled the sheets back and shook off her slippers.

“Don’t worry,” I breathed. “The whole world is dirty.”

I climbed under my covers and my head stung, my mouth clenched. 

Jesus Christ, it was cold in there and Camilla was trying with me, then. She said I’m a good guy. For wanting that, for wanting nothing.
That wasn’t good that was empty.
I wanted nothing and my head hurt and everyone had someone else’s body warmth except for me and Cami and she was smiling with her headphones on.
I let my mind sing fuck words. I let the nightmares come. I froze. 

It’s like, you’re standing in the window of a New York City hotel and you’re up. You’re up 40 stories and you’re watching the ants run between buildings and you’re twisted. You can’t stop looking down and you don’t even care to look up because what you’re really staring at is the glass and the gravity and what you’re really listening to is your heart pounding. 

It’s like, you’re standing in the window and you can’t jump through it but you ache to. It’s like, you joke with your friends: Dare me to jump? And you even swing your arms and mock dive towards the see-through prevention plane of your mortality. 

It’s like that, you know. Your fake jump and your suicide that doesn’t end in death but just you spiraling through the city landscape and learning to fly right before you hit the ground.

That’s my life. I’m always standing in the window. I’m always fighting the urge to jump, the shadow of who I really am free falling into the bloody pavement. 

Or, we’re all standing in the window and society or morality or humanity or something is the glass. You know you want to slap that bitch at work who talks to you like a child but you don’t. You know you want to press your fingers onto the chest of the guy in front of you in the Barnes and Nobles line, but you don’t. You know you want to kill that unsorry demon that stabbed you in the ventricles but you don’t. 

So we’re all like that. And the glass is there for you, right? Or at least for most of your friends. I swear to God mine isn’t there anymore, though. I swear I walk all day and the sky diving sky scraping fantasies aren’t just little games I play but vomit I have to swallow.

You’re thinking that’s disgusting. You’re also thinking that no, I shouldn’t grant myself the liberty of no-glass because self-control is a choice and I can’t pass the blame off to my brain or my psyche because I know what’s wrong therefore I should fix it. I should back away from the glass. 

I try to do that, really, but I’m not with you in the fancy hotel. I’m ten feet away on a telephone pole just as high. 

I’m trying to keep my balance and find the wind and lean the right ways. 

I’m trying not to slam doors and scream things that hurt people or run into a car in my bathing suit and drive down the street for no reason with no money or shoes or hope for a future past the speed limit. I’m trying and I’m succeeding here and there but it’s torture. My whole body itches and I spend my time dreaming up people who would look and me and just know, raise a pole up next to mine and instead of daring me, say, 

“This is how you balance,” or, “You do realize you’ve already jumped?” 

At least I’d have someone to wave to as I spread my limbs out and float. 

And they’d hate me on my way down.

Do little suicides ever end?

but I’ve been tired and busy and confused and stressed and working on my ridiculous Bruins story when I have a few spare minutes.

Thank you for not abandoning this tumblr. 

I’ll think up some words for you all real soon.

And in the meantime, 

Forget one ugly thing you don’t want to forget.

Tell one person they have a nice smile, even if it hasn’t crossed your mind.

Do something in real life that you do in a night dream.

In other words: breathe, give, live. 

In other words: lose, lie, fake.