HopelessCase

It's like holding your breath for a minute. If you haven't experienced that sensation, go ahead and try it now since you've got nothing to lose and it'll help you better understand the story. That first twenty seconds is like a walk in the park. Like, gosh, I didn't know I was so gifted at holding my breath. I am the best. Then about halfway through it, you start feeling a pressure, right? Not exactly a panic, but you are just waiting for the moment when you can just start breathing again-- like normal. Just five seconds after that you start panicking a little. Oh, god it has only been five seconds… how am I going to handle twenty-fi

He hated himself for sitting so frozen. "It's really a simple operation, Jig," he said. "It's not really an operation at all." He was totally still except for his mouth it felt like. The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. She was blank and hidden. Her voice was surprisingly strong despite having been silent for what seemed to be hours and hours as she said and not asked, "And you think then we'll be all right and be happy." "I know we will. You don't have to be afraid. I've known lots of people that have done it." He didn't. He knew one person who had but he never met her. There was silence again. The warm wind blew the bea

I want him. This rapt and mulling want. That pine, that perish we all know. I want him to hum into my ear, hushed, beneath my ceiling of stucco. I want him to stop bustling, bustling me, with arms so his head can rest at the base of my neck on my back. I want him to reach for my hand his quiet movement from a calm I lack. I want him to map out trails on soft skin as we lay discussing the texture of linen. I want him to sing to himself as he walks calmly through the kitchen. I want him to smile against my chest because my hand in his hair lulls him to sleep. I want him to photograph an instant, a subtle

Chapter One George Percival Higgins Jr. was sixteen years old and awkward. Not to the extent of being wince-worthy, but enough for one to know the poor boy was awkward. He stood at six feet and a quarter inch, towering above most of the boys in his class who weren’t basketball players, with gangly limbs jutting out in random directions.  Oh, and he wasn’t actually sixteen; he was technically fifteen years old until tomorrow, but out of anxiety for the big one-six, he already rounded up. He did not know, however, how important this particular birthday would be in the grand scheme of his adolescence, and how important it was that h

 Darkness. Crickets. They chirp. Piercing the silence. We lay in bed together. We’re not really together though since you’re plagued. I know you are because somehow I can feel it coursing through you. The guilt doesn’t just stay in you, no, it flows around us and over me who can’t feel the awful sensation. I instead feel an acute pain from the barrier you suddenly dropped between us, reminding me that I should have left, and I would have given anything to disappear— vanish right then and there. And no matter the circumstance, I was rejected, and your rejection hurt me more than anything else did, and if I couldn

    You gotta sit there first. Yes, just sit there. Start to daydream—if you’ve never daydreamed, just space out. Now smile like you just ate a big hot fudge sundae with extra fudge. You just imagined a hug—it didn’t have to be you actually getting the hug, but still, you imagine a great big warm hug. This hug, that just the idea of it put that ridiculous smile on your face, was one of those hugs that people give each other after a long awaited reunion—prodigal son type of things. It’s also the type of hug that you imagine you’d give to someone you loved who died but came back to life for a moment only for