I have all of these words written down on pages, in the back of notebooks, on bar napkins, receipts, the palms of my hands. I keep them, these words, they leak onto page from the blood in my veins, from my beating heart. Sometimes I can’t write them, they hurt too much, or I’m feeling too numb, but they are always there.

This morning, after my run, I was eating breakfast and writing, when I stumbled upon a few, and my heart flooded with memories.

These are random thoughts. Some are poetic, some are forgotten memories, all are from something inside of me.

I’ve had this idea for a while, to take all of these thoughts and turn them into a coffee table style book, there are so many taking me back over the years. I remember the places I wrote most of them.

Until that day comes, and I put them into a book, I’ll start sharing some as a new segment to my blog: thoughts from the back of a notebook.

vulnerable moments before a heart breaks

She burned it into my bones, words of drunken starlight slurred from lips that taste of gin and bitter regret. The only time she let the moon out in her voice was when her blood burned with liquor fumes in her veins. Against my flesh her skin shivered, but she was too far gone to feel the cold in the shadows of my chest. I drank in the night of her, the subtle twisting’s of a velvet sky, the dark silence of a love waiting to die. Holding her against me as words fell from sick dotted lips, I let her cry in the hollows of my heart.

In the end, when the tears had dried, but the liquor remained, I wiped the soft words from the pale of her arms, knowing she wouldn’t want to remember them in the morning.

strangers at a campfire

You dive into moments, until your chest is full, until your heart breaks, until no more breath escapes your tired lips. Each starry night is a symphony and you dance in the spotlight of cool white, pressed against the chest of some warm lover, pressed so close you can feel their heartbeat through bone and flesh and a flannel that smells of gin and wood smoke. I’m that flame in your arms before you realize campfires are only what you need for a day or two. I’m the moment between moments when the world around you turns dull and you need nothing more than a single spark to ignite it.

These moments don’t bother me, I cherish the soft touches in morning light, the brief warmth of a fire in my arms. When you leave, I have no home to return to, so I huddle around my campfire, waiting for another stranger to stumble by and warm their hands.

ex-lovers in morning light

Head swaying along to the soulful music dripping from phone speakers, she prances about in underwear, unaware of how beautiful and full of life she is. Between nervous giggles and hard beats, she throws clothes into a bag and pulls from a bottle of dark wine. In the empty softness of the house, goosebumps tickle up her thighs, crawling over pale hips and beneath snowboard socks. She purses her lips when she concentrates, and her eyes smolder in fiendish pleasure when she gets distracted. Watching the lovely movements of her slender limbs, warmth blossoms in my chest.

Her eyes light up at a new discovery, she sweeps it up and holds it to her chest, dancing around the room. She sneaks a sly glance at me, waiting on the bed, waiting to get going, to go adventure. She finds true joy in someone else’s excitement. You can tell in the way she moves, kindness runs deep beneath her fiery lips and wanderlust soul. She is thick with it, her eyes yearn for it, need it. In those moments, in making her own existence, she comes alive, blossoming into something far greater than I will ever be.

She is obsessed with the vast unimaginable expanse of the stars, burning with a need to feel the loneliness of the cold light. For her, fairy lights, gnomes, and elves lurk behind every tree in the forest. There’s just something in her bones, something I can’t put into words. It’s not a feeling you can describe, nor one you want to be heard. It’s merely one you want to pulse alongside the beat in your chest.

wyoming roads

Seats kicked back, white lights stream through the side window, slipping past a plaid flannel hanging in limbo. A hoody as my pillow, it’s really hard to sleep. The ache in my bones won’t let me catch a wink. Today I’ve traveled, miles farther than I can believe, wind whipping by me until the stars fade into the purpling sky. Now in the silence of this rest stop, on this forgotten Wyoming road, my mind begins to drift, lulling me to sleep.

I’m only car sleeping, just for the evening, but these four wheels begin to feel like home. It’s not about the troubled sleep, or the streetlights in my eyes, or the fact that I haven’t showered in more than a couple days. It’s about how I come alive every time the first hints of sunlight catch my face, or the miles that fly beneath my tires, the adventures that I take. All I do is drift between places, find forgotten spaces, car sleep in the long stretches of highway that settle between.

Alone in my car, on a forgotten Wyoming road, I take quiet moments, beneath pinpoint jewels, far away from a place I once called home.