Diary Excerpts
June 5
I put my cigarette out on an ant one time and cried. I can’t kill myself. If I do I’ll spend the rest of my life in some tax-funded pool of fire or a state-run snake pit. My darling, I hate how I love her. I hate that our angelic nirvana that normal people call love keeps me alive even when my .357 whispers in my ear. In this Godless world, I am not her God. I’m not good enough for her and I’m probably not good enough for hell either. It’s funny until you’re left to kill yourself. I can’t help of thinking about the kids I will never give Azalea. And Charlie, and Vanessa laughing; brimming with life and how nice it would be to never see that again. The rats of Seattle will gnaw and have soft chewy bites at my freshly moldering flesh and cockroaches will dance and play in my eye sockets. When I’m dead I’ll still be giving to the world because my eyes will roll out of my head so the sewer slicked infested mammals and insects will have some soccer balls.
Bullets injected into my forehead will feel like Azalea’s soft sweetly placed kisses. And the only divine intervention I’ll believe in is bullet holes in the shape of a cross. I make pink offerings of flesh as some dark thing inside me boils. I’ll cut my thighs with rusty razors and I’ll only stop until I get visions of a life worth living in the blood. And when she gives me a handjob and asks about the scars I’ll say the faded white skin is stretch marks. My final lullaby will be police sirens and I will be so happy. I will be so happy. Red blue blue blue red red blue. White red blue blue. White red and blue. Blue red and white. Red red. Blue.
August 24th
She is the center of the universe, she smells like raspberries and rum. She gives me the gift of some kind of sore and sticky heaven. And I’ll hurt her because the angels told me to. Lust makes everything feel so warm. I leak nothing but love for her. Universal law and quiet coexistence. Valentines for Adderall girl. Heavenly spheres and cashmere colored scars. She’s the one sole angry urban goddess against a sea of ugly animal longing. My one embodiment of all ecstasy. My wonderful favorite. Lovesome, dirty, and divine. I hold her in my arms. She smells good. I swear gold and silver liquid thoroughly coat the raw lining of her esophagus because she only speaks in magic and money.
I’ve always wanted to love a gentle thing like her. She’s exquisitely adjusted into individuality. Loving her is all warmed toned desire. The sky is star-speckled and she pours another glass of wine as her cells divide and the bouquet of flowers in the kitchen wane from lack of sunlight. Unfortunately, the world’s mechanics don’t wait for anyone and I’ll make sure to be her favorite world every day from the birth of our children until her first signs of Alzheimer's. White blood cells fight the cancer in her cigarettes and her liver fails at digesting the concoction of liquors she forces to meet her lipstick lips to sliver past her wine-stained tongue and down her greedy throat. I think she’s lovely.
I don’t care about anything and I just want the voices to stop. Nothing shuts them up. They tell me what I am and what I’m not. They tell me what I can’t do. They tell me what the world is. They ooze pessimism like a fleshy wound. Darling, I’m drunk. Do you remember the couch we shared on New Years? How the cold made our cheeks burn? How you clung onto me under a beer smelling quilt like I was a Hallelujah?
I cannot behave. I wanted to have a wasteland mind ever since I had a loose concept of dystopian reality. I have secrets and you have secrets and your tattoos are just for you and that kills me. I wish it’d shut up, the heaviness is really not leaving me alone tonight. Alcohol is fighting for more of my time and attention. It’s just another day that wants to be stolen. My darling, my god, I wish you had a hobby besides sitting in your underwear on the porch collecting weed crumbs. I wish you had a hobby besides people watching and being sad. Besides trying on different eye-shadow combinations at 4’oclock in the morning and obsessing over Elvis. I wish we had the money and you had the direction to smoke your way through school but the gods don’t always bless us with the qualities we need now, do they?
July 22nd
There was Emily. Who was this teeny tiny little blonde who was artsy with an edge. We met in our community college art history class and bonded over Impressionism and bondage. She had the personality of honey and hot sauce. Fierce and fiery one moment and dainty and overtly sugary the next. All the metal in her face and ears made me nauseous with affection. And she made me sad because there were parts of her that were lost and couldn’t be found and the parts that were there didn’t fit with me. Then there was Riley who was an illiterate vegan Buddhist punk and she loved heroin more than she loved me. And we never liked each other we just lived together because it was convenient to have sex accessible to both of us 24 hours a day. I finally broke up with her because she carved another dude’s name into her ankle. Then there is Azalea who is my elegant junkie dream girl. I’d marry her on a Tuesday.
I hear violins and sweet-tasting piano. Her carmine silk dresses and the indigo violet blush of burst blood vessels when I stain her neck with my love. Her mind reflects her constantly tangled gold and silver jewelry; valuable but twisted. I live in her world now; of crumpled up dollar bills and earring backings piercing me in bed. Vomit and hairspray and chocolate stained poetry books. She's an odd one, smelling like lavender, microwaved coffee, and sex. She tastes like clean colors and clenched fists. Beauty art and fire infection. I’m safe with her fast life and furious love.
She’s always looking out of place in a public space with her knobby knees and god-like glare in her eyes. I always make sure to watch her in my peripheral vision. At bars or house parties when she’s nursing a sweaty beer bottle into her system, bored, and rolling her eyes when a stranger steps in too close. She knows they’ll never love her like I do. I know about the gleaming silky stretchmarks gliding along her hips that are the color of unripe raspberries and have kissed each one. I don’t think there’s a single centimeter of her body I haven’t kissed. The backs of her calves, the insides of her elbows, her eye-shadow covered eyelids. She’s dangerous rushing through life, greedily searching existence for the next thrill to the extent of her falling asleep with shoes on. I know her. I know when she’s hopelessly tired she still pushes to feel the best, look the best, think the best, talk the best, be the best. Be this enlightened urban angel among a sea of slithering human desire. She doesn’t want anything. The girl never wants. I always want. I’m sloppy with longing. Azalea just wants a bed, coffee in the morning, wine at night, and occasionally for me to read Yeats to her. She has no God. She has no rotting passion. She doesn’t long for material things because of cosmic nihilism and because she saw what wanting did to her parents. Her dad wanted fame and instead, he got stale recognition and alcoholism. Her mom wanted her dad and a nice body but instead, she got anorexia and alcoholism. She doesn’t strive because her parents lost it to trying. Maybe I will buy her a cat?
I’m sickened by her sweetness. Did I mention that I love her hopelessly? Her cherry rose lipsticks and the faint baby blue sky-way of veins gracing her inner arms. She’ll stand, stare into the distance, and won’t say what’s on her mind. I watch and long for the day where that type of understanding sinks into her heart. The day where she won’t feel a sting of regret when she speaks because everyone is oblivious to the importance uttered from her lips.
And I don’t mind her waking me up early in the morning when the counter-tops are spread over in sugar and the windowpanes are split and shattered in sunlight. Eggs might be burning; depends on her mood. She’ll be wearing sleep clothes and her long hair would be tousled from a dreamless sleep and just as eagerly as she brings caffeine to her lips she’ll stand on her toes to pull me in for a kiss. Her eyes glow with longing and innocence. Caramel sauce and coffee cream flavored kisses. She gives me the gift of how life is supposed to be.
Juliet Lauren is a nineteen year old emerging writer. Her work can be found in Gold Wake Live, SkyIsland Journal, High Shelf Press, Anti Heroin Chic, and is forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite. You can follow her general antics on instagram at jadore.mon.amour and view her reading poems a bit too licentious for Youtube under her name Juliet Lauren. She dreams daily of being a full time novelist and thrives off of espresso and melodrama.