A.E. Janes

I will become an academia war machine, with books in my head and indifference seeping out of a full moon heart. I will destroy the English 10 STAAR and gain the courage to teach five preps while getting my masters in literature next year all so I can feel the pain of being fully alive, functioning at maximum capacity every minute I have the privilege of taking another breath. I will become a cog in a college machine again, a slightly bent and angry one at that because I hate being the student and must enrage every professor I have by questioning their worth to their face.

I will participate in bastardized relationships until they suffocate me, stripping me of not just dignity but all of my humanity. I will repeat this cycle of mocking HOLY things until one day in public I slap the living shit out of the six people who tricked me into loving them at one point or another. LEFT CHEEK = I still begrudgingly love you; RIGHT CHEEK = I stopped loving you after overstaying the feeling (typical).

This winter, once again characterized by burnt medium roast coffee that tastes like kidney beans and a severe lack of sleep, I will slowly, militantly, and on my own walk up the driveway to my parents' house all to sit in my old room for an unnecessary amount of time. I will breathe in so much cold air that my lungs feel brittle. I will sob on New Year's Eve when I wake up in the middle of the night to preserve tradition. I will systematically carve out my insides over the course of the next three years all to complete a comedic cycle, removing feelings of obsession from my bruised body. WONDERFULLY HOLLOW. Cracks I can fill with PASTE: Journal entries, seed beads, and buspirone. 

It is already happening. I am almost fucking complete. And when I am finally WONDERFULLY HOLLOW, ready to learn lessons in frontal lobe-ism, I will move across the ocean, my luggage smelling of petrichor because a boat ride is the romantic way to get to my destination, my warpath tracing the footsteps of friends who seem to know perpetually more than I ever will. Obedience to self-righteous justice is my final learned virtue, it was never patience.

Before I run all that way away so I can free myself of particularly stubborn messes, I will torch borrowed possessions, pushing myself further into crazed poetic verse alongside anyone who wants to burn.