And where in the world was me?

Been a bit.

I'm in college. I'm four hours away from the last place I called home. I currently know three people by name. I've eaten gobs of spinach at every meal and today I worked ahead of my math class.

I think I'm happy. So far, sure.

I don't really know what else to say for now. Except, maybe, bye. For a bit. Bit longer. Maybe.

I'm a Big Fat Hypocrite but Hang On a Sec

I never ever thought I'd be that kind of desperate.

I've had this...thing, I guess. Long story, short novel. I spent two years bleeding over it until I was completely dried out and loved every second. I recently read it over and-

Well, I'm still in love with it, but I know it's gonna stay hidden in my computer until the end of time. It's not something that would ever get published. Maybe looked at a bit (it already has), and maybe even some good feedback (which, again, I've already got), but nothing further. My poor pages would stay locked up within myself unless I made some serious compromise.

And you know damn well I'm not rational enough to do that.

I've read about other edgy-type girls striking out. Getting famous by going out on their own way with Tumblr poetry and pretty-faced words. I hope I'm not Tumblr poetry. I hope I'm not the "crazy bitch", as I've been called by actual Tumblr poetry (Hi E! you cunt). I hope I'm something better, something that could one day make enough money off of my typing that I would never bother with public opinion ever again.

But that's not today.

So, I thought I might as well at least let that story be out there. Amazon, hand drawn cover, cryptic-like nom de plume (still wanna keep an air of mystery, I guess. Only thing worth interest outta me anymore.).

I don't know who likes reading all this, and I don't really even know if anybody is reading this, but here it goes anyway: I have a pinch of my self-published heart out for sale, both digital and in print.

Here are the links. Make something of me, please.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D5K8F98

And in paperback.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1982935456

From a humble, semi-psychotic high school graduate, thank you.

"Anyways, how's your week going?" (Prose)

I am now just shamelessly promoting my YouTube channel.

https://youtu.be/lNxeZlvIbPE

Anyways, how's your week going?

Like I’ve said, I’m really not that interesting.

Days are the same. Days blend. I can measure the mundanity out by what Big Trouble I had or what book I was reading. But here, for posterity, I’ll try listing it through:

School. Dark-sky drives to the institution and back. There’s not much to say about that.

Work. I can do a lot of that, most weeks. Feet like rocks for the build-up, tumble-down savings I’ve managed to muster. Work after school and on the weekends. I don’t work every day.

Books. My great sustenance. This whole existence is so easily pacified by Vonnegut and an iced coffee. I have a paperback in my backpack, purse, and car. It’s my stubborn will to create something material that I keep and display every book I’ve ever consumed. Of course I point out my titles.

I guess, if you’re wondering, I write things, too.

But I get my breakouts, sometimes. I’ll be walking to my car after an aching shift or eating outside when I catch a breeze under a pink air and simply be in love. God, that is what I love-atmosphere. No Romeo could ever sweep me up from it. 

To some greater extent, that is why I live. I smile at the drivel and continue on because I know, know well, the great common pleasures of the Earth. Of her fragile blossoms, of her cool tears. These fragments of truth have lived a thousand times over, and will just as starkly be reborn again.

And, I think, so will we.

"'Member Me, Sweetie?" (Poem)

I think they time out breakups-

Call it the night before, the morning after.

We were always flipped, ended so-

We had our morning before, our night after.

Because I hit him in the afternoon,

Bit the muscles in my cheeks and whispered into the phone.

The old boy hung up so quick.

I went home and scrubbed my mouth, my skin, my eyes.

I was only fourteen but did an excellent job of washing myself free of him.

Spent the weekend playing music and I was over it by Monday.

And he was the adult (20)

And he should’ve dropped the whole damn thing.

So why is he texting four years later?

All Right v. Alright

Let's go with this- I'm alright (all right?). Google says alright is not really a word, but acceptable. All right means the same thing. I guess alright invokes a touch of casualness in the written form that you wouldn't hear. I can just see this James Dean boy holding a match against the wind, brushing off concerns for his mind like that: "Yeah, I'm alright." Whichever, yeah. I'm alright/all right.

I've got plans, baby. More plans than I'll confess to the Internet. Maybe a priest, but not to you. And I want more coffee than I've already had.

Does any of this make sense? No? Good. Like I've said, that's not what I wanted outta this. It feels nice to have a little corner tucked away to bitch and spew whatever I so desire. And oh, my, my, do I have things to say.

I'm available wherever I am sold. Work, school, family events where I have to smile wide and try to remember who this person is that thinks my hair is permed.  But here, here I am not. Here is the public diary of a secret bitch. Open my heart and behold its black ooze. Sometimes I can even exhale evil spirits.

But really, I'm alright.

Envy is Truly a Horrid Bitch

Hi.

I've had a bit of a block. I think. I don't know. I watch that fucking vertical line blink in and out on the screen. Seriously, fuck that thing. I always feel like it's waiting for something that I can't do.

High school is almost over. I'm never going to see just about anybody from there ever again. It's this frantic, last-chance phase. People are hooking up, getting in fights, finally going to see that one movie or talk to that one kid. I'm not a part of any of it.

I feel like the ghost of someone who died a year or two ago, in that social sense. Maybe in that full sense, I don't know. I see people I used to drink with and giggle about the weekends and they won't even give me a glance to show that I'm still a person to them. What is it about me that has turned everyone away?

I must sound like I need some help. Well let me tell you- I'm fine. I'm just sick of seeing all these people beaming in FaceBook posts to a hundred heart-studded comments wishing them luck at their universities, fully funded a la pocket de Daddy.

Maybe it's because I didn't go to prom. I didn't go because it was too expensive, mostly. The other part is that I thought prom would just make it worse- puffy-faced girl in an overly modest dress and not enough makeup, hoping someone will talk to her and make her night. Yeah, no fucking thanks.

Okay, maybe I do need help. Maybe I can't run on only food, water, words, the occasional good sleep. Maybe I need that human interaction after all.

It's not like I don't talk to anybody. I think I have friends. It's just the fucking teenage angst social anxiety insecure self loathing shit. I can't even really articulate what's going on with me. Funny, I'm supposed to be the writer and I don't have any words. Ha.

I'm sure I'm fine.

"I'd like to think so." (Short Story)

I got a really cool opportunity to write a story for Pretty Sick Bitch, a YouTube channel centered around horror stories. I haven't had a lot of experience in the practice of writing stories specifically intended to elicit fear, so I was excited to give it a go. Her accent and production gives a certain classiness to the narrative that I find quite thrilling, so be sure to check it out at the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqArVriwDzY&t=17s

I'd like to think so.

By Zoe Rose

At eighteen, I consider myself tentatively lucky to still have a great-grandparent. 91 and just only now starting to disappear behind the thicket of dementia, my mother’s mother’s mother is held in my family much like the beautiful antique platter we once had- treasured, requires the most careful of handling, only seen at Christmas.

Not that it was always like this. Maw, as we seven youngest group of descendants call her, she used to be so, well, here. Aged, yes, but she refused to let anybody be able to call her an old lady. I spent elementary summers in quiet awe of how much she was able to at her age, all on her own, while the four others I had known went so quietly into the ground that I can hardly even recall that they were once more than just a figure in the frames on the wall.

Too many errands ran and dinners cooked and nights spent to really pick apart the specific memories of Maw before now. And I was too young to be able to get anything but the essence of things from then. The accumulation of time stretches out like a landscape, blurred and somewhat consistent, peppered by the rare oddity or importance.

But there is one.

I can’t remember how specifically old I was, but it had to’ve been when I was still young and small enough to have been comfortably sleeping on Maw’s loveseat in her living room. An overstuffed structure held together by cool, plastic-y leather, I usually would find myself up with the sun almost directly following saying goodnight. For some reason, on some night, I had been pulled back to consciousness by a very loud, chug-a-lug type of noise.

I do remember keeping my eyes closed for a long time. I figured I’d fall back asleep if I mimed like I actually still was. Eventually the noise became piercing, all-around, too much to ignore. I sat up.

Pushed up against the wall on the other end of the couch was a large, matching chair. It usually sat vacant, but not then. I had opened my eyes to a man sitting there- pants and shoes and an old-man belly visible through a tan shirt- and he didn’t seem one bit out of place with the scene. The prickle of fear that I’d have had nowadays went unfelt then. I was not scared. In my child-mind, he looked even natural to be there.

Most of his face was covered by a great opaque mask that stretched from nearly over his eyes to past his chin. From it ran a long tube that snaked off his knees and onto the floor.

We stayed like that for a while. Even in the Ohio dark, I could see him well enough to make out a struggle in the rise and fall of his chest as he took in air. My mind was so unbothered by the presence of The Man with No Face that I could even conjure up sympathy for him. An asthmatic since kindergarten, I knew what it was like to not be able to take that simple function for granted. I can remember most sharply how bad I felt that this stranger had to live with that loud mask.

But I never said a word or made a motion, and neither did he. I blinked at him. I think he blinked at me. Then, after some time, I squirmed back down onto the couch and fell asleep.

In the daylight, eating pancakes with my brother and Maw and waiting for my mother to come take us all to the movies, the incident felt like nothing more than a really silly dream. I knew how my brother and cousins would laugh- Ha ha ha, a man in the chair. And ha ha ha, he had a mask. The adults would say I was making things up again. I’d get another lesson in truths versus not-truths, and I already knew well enough.

So I had a secret. I once saw a man in Maw’s chair and I was almost proud to have never even whispered it at sleepovers. And after so long of not calling that night back to tell to others, it became far and enough away that I very nearly forgot it happened.

It wasn’t until I was something like sixteen years old when I thought about it again. Maw had finally agreed to move into an assisted living and put her home of about sixty years on the market, and I had come up north to help my grandma and mom clean everything out while Maw settled into a place where (much to our relief) she would never be alone like she had since 1989.

Something about rummaging through an old basement- curling newspapers nestled into the corners of a ripped pool table- inspired such a nostalgia within my mother that she got talking of the times when she was “my age”.

And my age then happened to be the same approximate time within my mother’s life that she had seen her grandma go a widow and herself lose someone that, she admitted with this little pull in her voice, that she cared about very much.

He was a photographer for a local paper. Good one too- almost won the Pulitzer for capturing a “Terror on the Mad River!”. Mom likes photography. Mom is like her grandfather.

And he had a whole life before the bad time, something wholly different than what I had seen. I don’t know if I really believe in God, or monsters, or a world past this, but I’m sure, I’m sure, that we all leave an imprint- an electrical little pulse that grabs hold of what’s around and tells others that dammit, we were, once.

But it didn’t really matter how he lived. This man with the camera, searing the history of Dayton in a fearless bulb- Beatles Here Today!, Mayor Elected, Man Captured- marching only forward, always forward, to an early, choked death. The man who captured everything forever, his own true history lost.

“It went so quick,” She said to his box of negatives on the broken wicker chair in the corner, “At the point he was at, the doctor just sent him home. He had this big, loud breathing machine to keep him comfortable, but that was it. We were all there. Grandma had left the room for a few moments, and that was when he went.”

And you wanna know where? Do you really, really want to?

Because I think you already do.