i don't want to ruin anything at all, but i can't help thinking how nice it is to finish a project, or clean the bathroom and write a paper and listen to kids scream outside about how this is the most action your street has had all year, and to not be angry at them because i'm trying to go to sleep and they are interrupting me.


i'm also able to listen to so much music i haven't thought about in a while because i have this need to remember it within context. i'm listening to a song that i listened to for several days when i was with ryan, and it goes like this:

our lips were matched with cracked white blisters so badly rumpled that we went through three tubes of chapstick in a week between the two of us.


i don't want that, that which curtailed into a convenient relationship of quiet, easy friendship with edgy comments about fucking other people during grope-sessions [the heart slowing to a comfortable thud-thud-thud] to be the last thing i remember about youth and groping in the dark. i want there to be another jen in the other room, another jen to keep the mattress from squeaking for, and another family to hide from. i don't want to tell all my friends, invite you to barbecues and hold your hand in broad daylight.

perhaps all those people who have kept me such a secret have instilled within me this little gem. davy covertly slipping notes about the smell of my hair on his pillow into my apron pocket and ryan keeping all doors open by telling his friends the wrong things about me. i've had a dream about you specifically where i climbed into your treehouse loft and we stayed completely silent because fingers on our skin don't make noise because our skin is as soft as flat blue feathers waving like water and wind. not being able to make more high school descriptions of you is killing me, not because i've said it before but because i want to say it again and you are such a secret and it could only happen if you were drunk: because then you would think i was worth the easy fuck and it would be like a handshake to me because, as i told shannon before my computer screen and windowframe and street went black and the neighbors screamed happily, i would like to fuck all my friends.

have you seen the way people act around those they've had casual sex with? there is no animosity, there isn't even closeness, just sort of a crinkly-eyed smile and comfort because you've slid into what they now cover up with at least two layers of fabric because you don't fuck girls who go commando. it's good because no one worries about calling anyone back because it's friendship or close and you'll see them again, really. they'll show up with a girlfriend and you'll shake her hand and compliment her ring or her rack or her dali-inspired installment at the second saturday art walk and you will go home with someone else and drink the wine that's pink with pink cancer ribbon and your throat will be raw from laughing so fucking hard.

devo said: it's a beautiful world we live in.