I spilled tea this morning accidentally, burned my finger, but the shape it made on the kitchen counter was a “m”. 

My hair is curling right at the nape of my neck. The daffodils are in bloom, this morning, someone told me he loves me. I thought it would storm, but the rain never came. I can still taste fizzing strawberries on my tongue from last night. The sun changes my hair into a prism, throwing a million colors out into the world. All the colors come back to me. 

Call me Alice, because I’m stuck in wonderland. Call me Alice, because I never left. Call me Alice because I never will. 

I never said I was right or wrong. I was both, you were both. We were everything. We were too loud music, my cigarette smoke leeching into the upholstery of my car, the wind in your hair, the way we finished each other’s sentences and laughed at the same time. I was a mean person wearing the mask of niceness, you were a nice person wearing a mask of meanness. We were scared that everyone could hurt us, so we swore nobody ever would that night we sat in my car till four in the morning with the rain pounding on the metal above our head. 

You knew all my secrets back then, though I’ve picked up a few more since that last time we spoke without yelling at each other. When the screaming started, I wouldn’t give you anything else to throw back at me. You did the same thing. Maybe if I would have just told you my last, biggest secret, it would have been okay. But I didn’t want you to know it. 

I was scared of how I’d deal with the cold, cruel world without you. I was scared I’d need you. I was scared of letting you know how much I cared. 

You weren’t my best friend, not my lover (we had enough of those in our lives). We weren’t frenemies, even regular enemies. Not rivals or siblings, but we were something. The only word I have for you in my head now is secret keeper. You were my secret keeper. And when you left, I gave your secrets back and you gave back mine. Now they’re all bunched up around my throat again, but I don’t have anyone to tell except the rain on the car roof and the smokey smell that will never come out of my car seats. 

Write something and post it, every day, for the entire year. It doesn’t have to be much, just a glimpse into my world, my life. Something. It won’t be posted here, but it will be posted on another tumblr: 

http://bloodonmykeyboard.tumblr.com

She couldn’t be put into a category of “good” or “evil”. Thinking back about her, what sticks in my head is what someone once said, that she was a force of nature. Is a hurricane or a forest fire good or evil? No, it just is. She was not a woman who sat back and waited for the world to unfold, she was a woman that made things happen.

She was venomous in her anger, cruelly spitting out words like a snake, like the pendant she wore around her neck. But she was always the same person to heal those wounds. She laughed at her own tears in bewilderment. I had never met another person like her. 

And sometimes, at night, I think I can smell her cigarette smoke drifting in through the windows like a memory, reminding me that she lived. She was a force of nature, hardly human sometimes. And yet, sometimes, I think she was the most human creature I’d ever met. 

She told me once that she would rather burn the brightest for her life and burn out early than to never burn bright at all.