Cara Writes

When faced with the basic human ill of starvation clouds set in the ego and fog all sense of morality. It's impossible to fathom sending my kin into the woods, helpless and alone. But love -- love and hunger blind all ability for rational choice. Go ahead and judge me, trust there is no harsher critic than my own conscience. My conscience and God. I worry about my soul sometimes. It's hard to understand reasoning of the divine -- which relationship He values more.

She watches her students through the glass, daydreams of summer Her children peel at the pane, and there’s always a new crack a new scar to run her finger over But they never replace this window they just brush a new layer over the peeling, chipping wood hoping it will hold up another year

It was cavalier, almost, the way you threw money like you threw saddles, buying affection and favors. 18 years you were gone. You returned to the same horse, same saddle, same mountains that protected your secrets. Join me for a ride , you said. Her mother; everyone loved you. She couldn’t say no. She went for a ride and drank your wine and kissed you harder on the lips, just how you wanted. She did what you asked: smiled to your wife at your daughter’s birthday – a girl twice her age. She grinned, vomited in your bathroom, said the ride to your house was tough. She stayed because she couldn’t escape at 15 and you knew. 18 years you were gone… Us two, we held your wife as she cried Like locks on your secrets we intertwined our hands and walked past your memories. Felt like sinners when we thought, we were glad you died.

I rolled the bottle over with my toe, small chunks of sand tossed about inside It looked recent, maybe from the night before. I wondered if they were legal or just summer kids trying to find their own nook on this tiny island. There were rocks everywhere. Rocks and cliffs and dirty sand, not the postcard you find on main street. But he was fascinated by it all. He had seven hundred photos from the trip, obsessed with getting the perfect angle and light. I wonder if he took a picture of my mother, more beautiful than ever, sitting on the cliffs alone.

My weakness returns to this place that my head knows better not to where acting “orange” wasn’t a fantasy and I could skip class to get high and fuck our ideas into creativity. Where I sat on a kitchen counter and you gave me a margarita glass full of water and I wasn’t afraid when our skin touched. It wants to sit in the grass with those red hills that looked like mountains and pictures of our happiness, but I know better. I know those things don’t make up a life. They only make up a pleasure that longs to be refilled fuck after fuck and bowl after glass. I can’t return to that place of infatuation, grasping whatever makes me smile because now I know; it began to kill me slowly and it was this far from being pleasurable.

They took turns throwing flowers to the Earth and questioning their own mortality. They both threw yellow roses – hers made it on top, his fell below, it was the first to fall off the stack. Somehow it became that the equivalence of flowers was measurable to the amount of love; but no one stays long enough to watch them wilt and rot after they gush over them at the office Or wonder if they’re sympathy flowers Or I’m sorry I hit you flowers Or I’m sorry I slept with your sister flowers. No one wants to look down that far and see the end to their life and relationships. And so all these people dressed in black threw in red roses for love. But they two, with the yellow ones never noticed their difference. All he saw was a beautiful woman at her worst, and all she saw was flowers.

Crash into me not literally but the melody had taken him away and he was floating above the clouds not even the end-page could keep him down because he drew his finger in the air tracing the halves and wholes and didn't realize when this was all over she would be half and he would never be whole and the shatter of metal and hearts transcended the sound waves all was quiet for seconds, minutes, he wondered if he was deaf but they explained later how your heart can stop and he wondered if it would ever beat whole again.