Cri Lauren.

I guess it’s never more timely than to resolve to do things than the present, regardless of the actual date. January’s almost over and I’m deciding to be better. There are a lot of things this task requires but mainly the first order of business is falling back in love with writing. We’re like old lovers and now everything is awkward and fumbled. To many scribbles on paper and I backspace long rambles about the things that really matter because I’m too worried about being judged on my words and how infantile they seem to me in comparison of what I was once capable of. I’m putting my nose to the grindstone. I’m tired of making promises to other people that only mean something to myself. I’m tired of indulging the selfish whims of strangers. This is my selfishness. I want to move mountains with my words and realistically speaking the odds are never in my favor. I’d like to be truly good at this before I keel over and die. It’s all I ever really wanted in my entire life. More than anything else, more than love (which, really, is an overrated comoddity that is closely linked to your willingness to learn to be happy), and more than anything. Really. I’m reading more and writing more and I’m filtering out the things and people that don’t matter in my life. This is my new rule: if you want to be important to me, then we’d better be important to each other because these hands are small and tired and I cannot keep trying to scoop bucketfuls of seawater out of a sinking boat.

I can’t write from the gut unless it’s spontaneously. Never let myself think too much about the phrasing and just charge in unprepared like a child with a gun thrust into his hands and told to shoot if he wants to survive. This is warfare, the kind birthed from new thoughts and no direction and I’m just the instrument to get the job done. I can’t imagine what it’s like any other way. Too much thought muddles every little thing. If I think too much, I can think my way out of anything. I can think my way out of opportunity, longing, lust, love, and you. It’s devastatingly easy, and I’m better at it than anyone you know or haven’t met yet. I’ve never wanted something I couldn’t live without or let go. This is what we call survival. I can untie the strings that bind us and while the marks might remain against pale flesh, they won’t be there forever, and that is a comfort to me.

What am I waiting for? I can’t tell yet. I used to think I was waiting for someone or something to tame me, to break me, to make it so I needed someone but that’s not it. Someone to keep up with me? That’s more likely. Someone to make me feel something real, something deep. Everyone says love is like something gentle and beautiful, but I see love as a fire. It burns and will consumes entirely. It will eat you alive, and leave raised scars of knotted flesh that will never heal long after it’s gone. I haven’t been burned yet. Some people translate that into being lucky. I always assume it’s more tragic than anything else. I’m the girl who doesn’t feel. I wouldn’t know a scar against my skin even if I saw it in the mirror. I’d just think it was part of my face.

If you ask her what her earliest memory is, she’ll tell you it was white. Cold white blinding snow in an abandoned parking lot near the old church in the middle of the city. Spinning around trying to catch some on her tongue, dizzy and laughing until she fell down and stood there very still. She never tells anyone she thinks it might not be real. The memory, that is. The church and the parking lot are still there but sometimes she thinks she imagined it, her mind playing tricks on her. If that’s not her first memory then what is? What happens to people who just don’t have one? They’re a little less real than the rest of the herd. A little less genuine and a little more dead than the rest of them.

So she keeps her fingers around makeshift memories that make her childhood appear happier than it was. That’s what’s beautiful about the mind. If you tell it enough lies, they become truths. They become the same in the darkness of your mind. So she remembers being loved and being told she was pretty. She imagines her father is a handsome man who has aged gracefully as opposed to the faceless monster in her dreams. The man who takes pieces of her until she’s left with nothing but an echo of his face. Eyes that belong to her and a nose she just can’t place. Demons so familiar she takes these things out on herself. Cold white blinding truth. This is the way she kisses ghosts when she thinks no one is paying attention to the ways that she haunts herself with things that will never change. Tortured ideas of how permanent this is.

You can’t change this, girl.
You’re unwanted.
He never wanted you.

You don’t exist.

The make-believe girl has three half-sisters and they all have names prettier than hers, even though she came first. Exotic names. Madison is the spoiled rude one. The one that knows she’s beautiful, the one that scoffs at compliments and doesn’t know the invisible one exists. She wouldn’t care, anyway but the girl without real memories sometimes wonders what it would be like to have a sister, like on those sitcoms where the daughters share rooms and talk about boys and do each others makeup. Those fantasies are as real as the man who left without her name. He’s turned into folklore. Someone made up, a monster to scare her away.

Away from what, she isn’t sure. Away from this. A way to get raw edges mended. Some wounds need to be cauterized in order to heal. Seared flesh feels like lies against her lips. Like the unspoken truth that everyone knows but no one says.

What else is there to do, then, but wish for snow?