dove's diary

miscellaneous thoughts, snippets, diary entries, etc. messages in a bottle.

June 1, 2026

All of it has always been so intense--until it's not, I guess.

I decided to keep a little secret and it turned gnarled and ugly, grew teeth and hair, embedded itself next to my heart. My creation. I can't let it out right now, so it's going to have to stay stuck in me. It presses sharp into my rib every time I move, but I don't mind much. I'm good at ignoring pain like that.

God. This is the kind of reckless I get about a boy. I hate that part of myself like nothing else.It's not even like that,I tell myself, except maybe it is. Except maybe it doesn't have to be, as long as I get what I want out of it. It doesn't matter. I'd like you as a brother, but if that doesn't work, we can try something else.

What do I want? You. You, you, you, your raw-boned face and creek-water eyes. There's so much inside you it makes me jealous. How come you get all of it? You don't even know what to do with it. Neither would I though, I think. We're alike in that way. Good at having potential.

What even is my end game? I have to ask myself this, and I have to acknowledge there is no answer. I can drag it out all I like, but if this goes anything like how I want it to, I'm going to have to eventually get this thing out of me. I'll have to show it to everyone I wanted to hide it from. All nasty mottled flesh and teeth and hair. They're called teratomas, I looked it up.

May 27, 2026

You wordlessly send me a video--you've never done this before. It's of these beautiful ceramic wall sconces with archaic dragons painted on them, coiling up the sides. It's terrible because you don't even know me like that, never thought you knew me like that, but these are something you figured I'd like. It's terrible because I like them a lot. Those are something I would save and revisit, dream of owning. How dare you get it right.

May 24, 2026

My Nainie traveled the world and told old Welsh folk tales to kids in classrooms with AC units in the window. My Nainie was beautiful, according to what people have told me, according to faded pictures I scavenged from distant family's facebook accounts. My Nainie had a revolving door of men that loved her, some of them cruel or kind or poor or rich. My Nainie never had much time for my mom, and when she did it was all venom-tipped tongues and sharp nails pinching cheeks, stinging across them. That's where my mom gets it from.

My Nainie tied different colored scarves around her head when her hair started falling out. The acid slowly slipped off her tongue, turning it basic, docile. She kept telling stories. They wrote articles about her: the beautiful storyteller turned tragic cancer patient. There's one of those articles taped up to the wall of my uncle's garage, right below a Buffalo Bills poster and one of those fake mounted fish that sing songs. The batteries in it ran out a long time ago. Sometimes my mom stares at me a beat too long and when I ask "what?" she says, quiet, "you look so much like her". She doesn't have to elaborate, I know who she's talking about.

My Nainie died in a horrible building with fluorescent lights and the acrid smell of piss and lemon disinfectant. She had this baby doll she loved, so before she died my sister and I sewed a quilt for it. My hands trembled as I gave it to her, my eyes trying not to catch on her snaggle-tooth or yellowed scleras. I'd try to ignore how she seemed nothing like the person my mom described, who I could only recall in fuzzy, warped-film memories. She patted my cheek with her gnarled hand and I wanted to cry, but I don't think it was because I was sad. I hated that place, and I hated the look my mom would get on her face there. She looked scared and too-young, shrunken.

I'd slip away from the room where my family gathered to walk to the other end of the building, where there was an old out-of-tune piano. I'd plink at the keys for while, and then play the same melody, the only one I knew, over and over. I'd try to ignore how my whole body trembled like a leaf. I wondered if my Nainie was still in there somewhere, trapped in that distorted body, if she hated the stink of this place, how we talked to her like she was four, if she noticed how I shook when she touched me.

Sometimes I feel guilty for looking anything like the ghost of a person who was full of so much. I wonder if one day I'll get cut down like that too, reduced to wheelchairs and baby dolls, diapers and lemon disinfectant.

May 21, 2026

That part isn't all that important. I just like to pass my time like this--a study in masochism. Keeps me alert, awake, pretty. Really, you could swap him out with anyone else and the effect would be essentially the same. Something to keep me brushing my hair. Something to keep me on schedule.

Like I said, though, that part isn't that important. I think, really, it's always been about you. I only picked him out of a lineup because I saw him and enough neurons in my brain fired to connect him to you, and then it wasyou, you, you,your name on repeat in my head. Him being there seemed like proof that I wasn't escaping you just yet, and that was maybe more thrilling than it should have been.

You're still tugging on that string between us, and I still haven't the faintest clue what it means. I lied before, you know. You don't have to pretend to care about Mesopotamian poetry to see me, you don't need an excuse. This is terrible--but you could ask me to come find you any time, any place, you could ask me right now and I would. I would, I would, I would.

May 19, 2026

It doesn't matter anyhow, because I can dance to your favorite song. I can loudly sing the words in the passenger seat of your car, wind tangling my hair, the sun granting a favor it owes me. I'm good at not caring like that. I was never going to win anything by playing it cool.

That's the thing though. You've never let yourselfnotplay it cool. Does it bother you, then--the way that I am? I've never been sure. You called me your soulmate once, a long time ago. I don't know if you remember. We hardly knew each other, back then. Maybe that was the whole point.

May 17, 2026

Pause. I take this moment, memory, reframe it in my head to soothe my fraying nerves, my wounded ego.

I will make you and I beautiful in this recreation. Make us both kind, well-intentioned. Your furrowed brow is nothing severe, nothing displeased, it is instead you seeking to understand me.

Do you get it now? It's like that optical illusion: rabbit or duck?

Remember that? I would always think it looked like a rabbit until someone suggested a duck, and then I'd tilt my head and sayhuh, yeah,maybe it was a duck all along. I am very susceptible to suggestion.

Other people's perceptions of me are largely the same. Maybe it's my own suggestion, maybe it's a game of telephone--everyone around me whispering my name to the next person until I come out the other end as someone entirely different.

I am pretty if you let yourself believe I'm pretty, I am kind if you decide it. I can be smart or charming or funny if just one person in the room declares it so--and then suddenly everyone tilts their heads and sayshuh, yeah,she must have been smart and charming and funny all along. Their memories of me rewrite themselves, and then it becomes collectively and historically true. At least until someone suggests otherwise.

I hope I'm not sounding bitter. It is sometimes nice, I think, to be something so malleable. Other times I feel wispy and intangible to myself, like a ghost, untethered.

Or worse: my entire life becomes something unsure. Do I only remember it that way because I decided that's how it happened? Have I turned you over and over in my head, like a worry stone, until all your jagged edges have worn away? Have I selfishly made you into something smooth and swallowable?

I worry that I'll look at something and deem it a rabbit--and everyone else thinks it's a duck. No one will tell me so because this should be common sense. I'll wander through life like I'm colorblind, thinking the world is all shades of blue and green and never know there was anything else.

I'm sorry if I got it all wrong with you, really. It would help if you explained yourself to me. I want to get it right. I'm scared I never will.

May 5, 2026

Fuzzy headed in bed, off a barely-there bottle of soju discarded from last night--I had this strange sort of vision. It came like a recollection, a memory. Me, drunk, another place, another time, you, watching me. Careful, like always. Calculating, marveling a little. Weird. Like you were trying to memorize something about me in that moment. So real it puts me off a little. How terrible of me. Of you, maybe, but that's not fair. Can't blame you for something that never happened.

Move me through it. I am a river, I am the leaf--something like that. Flowing.

Raw and kinetic and stupid. Angry and stupid. Jittering cells trying to escape the form they're stuck in, something uglier than perpetual motion--rejection, maybe. Disputed by what I'm made up of, this isn't star stuff, no, just viscera. Dirt. My eyes look black in the low light so it doesn't really matter what color they are. The wordgutis a verb and a noun--I read that in a book once.

What I'm trying to say is I am more of a suggestion of a girl than a solid one. A presence on schedule. Try to catch me in a Monday class, skip calculus, I dare you. We both want to be caught, maybe not by each other, but here we are. Neither of us brave enough to reach out andtake.

May 2, 2026

Something very sacred about this scene: every door in our little shoebox is open, a window cracked, sun trying to hurl itself against the shut blinds. A fan is running, the sound of it a meditation, and girls are strewn lazily in bed, reality TV a low hum from tiny phone screens. No one really paying attention.

I am lethargic, docile in the other room, but really I am thinking: I can read a book for the dozenth time and for a while my life is steeped in romance so vivid I can't bear to look it in the face. It is an untamable ache, ferocious in the hollow of my chest. Devouring the world, insatiable. The light on the bricks, my passing reflection in the mirror, melting ice turning the green pale and muddy. It is all a fairytale. The air is sweet and so easy to swallow.

May 1, 2026

I am not grateful enough for the people who want to believe me, and I spend far too much time dwelling on those who don't. I said I'd die a unicorn, but maybe I forgot for a while. And it can still be true, of course it can. But it is One Of Those Things where you resign yourself to a fate (however beautiful) to prove you never wanted something else. To make it less shameful, perhaps, when your own prophecy is fulfilled.

Shame, now that's a funny thing. I am full to the brim with it, it tips out of me whenever I move. I don't know when it became that way. I wrote, a long time ago, that I left my shame on the side of the road somewhere for someone else to find. I suppose that someone is me, always eating myself.

I have a shoebox under my bed full of letters from people I know and have known, proof of concept--this novel notion of a lovable me. I can't let these things go, you see. If someone loved me once, I will spend the rest of my life telling that story over and over. To myself and to anyone who will listen. The ache of that is forever, it doesn't fade. I don't even know if I wish it would.

April 27, 2026

It's almost formal, despite the practiced casualness in both of our voices--somber. Like we're two people who experienced a Very Bad Thing and we're reuniting purely to acknowledge that the Very Bad Thing happened. I once watched this documentary, about a mother who met the heart transplant patient her dead daughter's donated heart went to--it feels a little like that. Bittersweet and disorienting, like maybe I should be able to find something familiar, identifiable in you. I'm not sure if I do.

We walk for a while in the sunbeams between trees, cautious conversation filling the space between us. I do not quite know if I'm allowed to look at you. When I do steal glances, it's those eyes, muddy gold and too-precise. There's something so unattainable about you, I had almost forgotten.

Maybe that's not quite right--because I can almost sense that you'dliketo be attained, to be kept, held in someone's hand even as you try to slip between their fingers, quicksilver, saltwater.

Unknowable--that's more true. I can look at your sun-face and not be able to understand a thing behind it, that's what has always upset me about you. I'm usually so good at that. All I can feel is your energy, slow and careful, so careful. Your spirit is a wanting thing, covetous, I feel that, but I cannot tell what it is you want. I am not sure if I am even a footnote in your wanting.

You knock me askew a little, I never know how to approach you. I cannot tell if you hate me, I cannot tell if you miss me, I cannot tell if you are merely tolerating me. It's been this way as long as I've known you.

You speak softly, in polite, measured tones, and it makes me ache a little because it's not quite right, it never has been, you are withholding parts of yourself from me and I am helpless to coax them out of you. I have a bitter notion, then, that maybe the truth of it is this: I am simply not the right person for the job. This, this is an idea I revolt against. I want to be children in the schoolyard, I want it to be easy.

Part of me wants to wail and cry like I'm small again.Why? Why are you making this hard on me? Hard on yourself?It could be simple, I can see it. Grass and daisy chains, doodles on the corners of crumpled notebook paper. Woodsmoke, freckles again. Like before, only different this time. I know better now. I wonder if you do, too.

April 25, 2026

Watching gaggles of boys my age, laughing and loud, punching and shoving at each other, taking up more space then they actually are. Pang in my chest, because I won't ever get that, that easiness, the slouch of their shoulders, the camaraderie that's almost a little ridiculous, boyish and put-on, like they're soldiers, like they're brothers in arms.

My friendships with girls are usually quieter things, honest and raw. Vulnerable, a little romantic. Maybe there's something in those that is more truthful than whatever transpires between men, but it lacks the easiness. It hurts a little. I look at these boys, grinning like sharks, swearing at each other, and it all looks so painless. It's something I can't touch, though, something not made for me.

My most shameful truth is that sometimes I dream of being let in on it. Being accepted into a world like that, but distinctly as myself. Nothing put-on about me, and they take me anyways, maybe they're charmed by the otherness of me. And more shameful still, I dream that it does not come with the typical conditions of girls becoming close with boys. I dream they take me in like brothers, and they love me like a sister. As proof that it can happen, as proof that I am worth more than whatever is said that men desire from women. I want to be loved by a boy like we're children in a schoolyard.

That's my secret, though. Don't tell anyone I said so.

April 25, 2026

It's about intention, or so I've been told. I press my mouth to the back of my right hand three times. There are no words for this, just feeling--flickering colors through my mind like a film reel. Just that timeworn green smell. Cloying and tricky. The back of a stranger's herb cabinet, a different world, a different time, but it's closer to me than it should be. Existing in parallax. I'm good for this, I swear it.

April 24, 2026

Sick with wanting, worse because there's nowhere to put it, because it's not for anything tangible. A feeling, maybe. Romance, but not really the kind like being in love. More like the beautiful, impractical. But love wouldn't hurt, too. Restless in my room, my heart trying to crash out of my chest, fists clenching around nothing because there's nothing for me to hold. Pacing between the mirror and my bed. In the lowlight my face looks like a creature, otherworldly, rendered in yellowed scrolls and myths and I wish that someone would try to capture it, keep it, hold it. I wish that my life suited that face, the strangeness of me.

I wish I felt that magic in people, that I didn't have to invent it, I wish for instant connections. Prophecies unfolding, maybe. A memory, replaying even as it happens in front of me. Inevitable, kismet.

April 24, 2026

I'm not so hard to fall in love with, not really. Silence and sunlight do most of the work, it's hard not to fill in the blanks. I can listen and I can know you, really know you. It's what I'm good at--I've been here before. I'm not so hard to fall in love with, because I can fall in love with almost anyone. And I know you, like I know everyone. You like being looked at like something worth knowing.

The rest of it is me, I suppose. Used to think that wasn't worth much, but then a pack of wolves proved me otherwise. I can gather myself and then it's my voice, my skin, my eyes that blink too much, look too intently. Then it's my vampire teeth, then it's my cold hands. I won't make you tell me any of it if you don't want to. I don't need it. I can be alone with you just once and learn you. And oh, you. You want to be learned.

April 23, 2026

All these boys used to be sweet. You especially, you most of all. Leaning against the couch with this girl who's a friend of mine. This girl who I'm a little in love with. That's always how it goes with me, I never know how to untangle the two.

Anyways, she's a good listener. Eyes smiling and receptive, leaning in, listening, wanting to know more. I tell her about you, more honest than I've ever been before. I pull up the messages in bottles we've sent each other, stagnant on both our shores. I realize something myself as I read through them all, realize that maybe you stopped being sweet because I stopped expecting you to be. She tells me I should toss just one more bottle into the sea, just to see. Just to be sure.

I do, a little nauseous. You reply instantly--in this way that's so eager, so earnest, just like I remember, and it cracks my heart open like a robin's egg. Your name in my phone is just a bird's nest, you know. You've always been something incubating, as long as I've known you. I realize then that with the way things are right now, even if you hatched, I wouldn't be around to see it.

You tell me you want to see me, and I recognize now that you must have been telling the truth, whenever you've said that. I feel cruel, I feel buoyed. My happiness twists in my chest, something soft and selfish.

I put my phone away. My friend laughs and says she told me so.

Precious, fragile right now. A flower unfolding.

April 19, 2026

No one from my old life knows about the temporal me. Angel in November, new and pretty. They don't know about the looking and the touching, they don't know about the skittering rabbit's heart in my chest, fed to the wolves, always hungry. Ripping at my clothes, my hair, my skin. They don't know about the blown pupils, the ragged breaths. Too-close, too-much, faint and faraway as they pawed at me. They don't know about car rides late at night, how everyone begged me for more scraps of myself. That was adrenaline I won't get back.

They don't know about a watercolor bruise on my cheek, purple smudge into green, yellow. Self-inflicted and so proud. Dizzy with it. Running away, buses to far-off towns. Bluegrass in my ears as I passed by rotting barns. Gas stations, two dollars in my pocket and I spend it on a bottle of milk. Strangers wanting more of me, just like before, but this time I won't give it. Tickled, smiling, sharp at the corners. I know I'm interesting. An old bedroom, still smells the same, but everything's different. Little brother, sleepovers like we're small again. He missed me, he tells me, and oh, I've been selfish, only this time it doesn't feel good. Wish I could go back.

I crack a window, and the cold air feels exactly like I remember.

April 4, 2026

In love with you, sure, but that's the way I come. Sweetness comes real natural, my cheek against your cool shoulder. My eyes too soft at the edges, too many pictures of you, captured memories, stuffed in my pocket, greedy for 'em. Too blurry, too sunsoaked. In love with you, okay, yeah. It's built into me. Don't take it so personal.

April 2, 2026

I have my idols, they're taped to the wall over my head where I sleep, Angels up on high, watching over me.

The other day I stood waiting for the bus, rain beginning to cling strands of my hair together, beading down the bridge of my nose. There was a boy beside me with an umbrella, a big one, it could fit three people easily. I started to think about how funny that was, how there's all these respites technically available to us, only if we forego politeness. There was no tangible reason not to stand under his huge umbrella, at least not one I could think of.

So I nudged a bit closer, caught his eye, and just mumbled "Could I?" and his eyes crinkled a bit, wordlessly he adjusted his grip so the umbrella was covering the both of us. How easy that was. He smiled at me as I got off the bus and I started to think about that, about all the kindnesses we deny ourselves by not asking.

Old man like a tortoise, pleasant and stooped, rambling delightfully, no one else seems to find it as amusing as I do, but then I catch the eye of a girl across the room, all sharp angles, contrapposto in her desk chair, and she's grinning at me, eyes crinkled knowingly. It feels as if I've earned something.

Complimenting strangers at the same time as they compliment me, the words tangling, confused, but sweet. We laugh at it together, I'm a girl, just a girl.

Anyways. Eye contact is always meaningful with me, but lately I've been dreamy, far-away. Late at night, shoulder blades, freckles down a spine. Ache in my chest, oh please,please.I've waited long enough now. Let me have this.

March 28, 2026

I knew we were sipping at dregs, where the honey is all pooled at the bottom of a mug. Too-sweet and ending soon.

March 18, 2026

I dreamt of you.
Hair tickling my soft palms, my cheeks.
A whisper, a ray of light, it's twin freckles on your neck,
one above your jaw, or right between your eyes.
It's wind in our faces, light behind the thin skin of my eyelids.
It's a bird in my hands, heartbeat fluttering against my index finger.
So fragile it's frightening, so quiet it aches, so soft it bruises.
I miss you isn't so much a lie as it is a half-truth.
I miss the heaviness of your jacket on my shoulders,
the way your hair curls against your nape, cow lashes fanning on your cheek.
Sweet eyed. So scary.
We are both the bird I'm holding in my hands, trying not to crush.
Trying so hard to keep it from leaving.

March 4, 2026

cold and kind / nestled like a dove in my chest / so soft it bruises

February 19, 2026

Believe in it, sweetness given back to you. Latent and forgiving, tender fingers braiding a crown upon your head. The truth of it was something small in my hand--round blue robin's egg, yet it knots itself upon my tongue, thick down my throat, a cyst in my stomach now. You have to understand, I haven't loved someone in so long, it's been leached from my blood, left me a wobbling husk. I thought I'd do anything to get my fix, not so long ago. But now maybe I would like to rest, now maybe I'd rather sleep alone as an ugly, rough-skinned creature rather than something pretty and flushed.

December 2, 2025

Smiling, sad. Everything you think is God, anything else is blasphemy. Wanting to kiss your neck, up your crown, into soft dark curls. Frustrated because no picture I can keep looks how I remember you. Now anytime I feel that bitter, early-morning cold I get the itch to fall in love again. All your fault, angry, sweet-eyed boy. Haven't seen a real ladybug in so long.

I'll die a unicorn and be content. My cross to bear, pale as milk, naked in the lowlight, hair like a cloak, soft across my chest, my shoulders. Hem fluttering like a moth as I spin, slow and dreamy.

Tucked into my locket. Used to be so good at this. Used to pad barefoot between bodies, molars crushing red jewels, syrup down my throat. It felt like everybody wanted to touch me.

Used to understand it so much easier, how that could be. Could feel their hearts, quick and swollen. Could see it in their eyes, blown pupils, shaky breaths.

Used to scare me, like I'd been caught somehow. Pinned, trapped. Now there's nothing I wouldn't give to be looked at like that again. Maybe that's my problem, then.

Everything that's hurt me seems more beautiful in hindsight.

November 12, 2025

same dark curls, sad moon eyes. freckles i can map out with my fingertips.

i wake up and my whole body is a bruise. i don't think love was ever the right word for it.

October 17, 2025

Yes, I have known you once. Or rather, you knew me.

You knew me when my face was red and glowing and you were so thin and spread out--one particle scattered eons and eons from the next. You knew me then. I was the undulating creature scooping you up, scraping you together, the light of my red face kissing yours until--oh, there, a flame began to flicker in the hollow of you.

October 14, 2025

For the first time in two years, I'm dreaming about you. It doesn't help to see your face in passing, watercolor smudge in my periphery. Haunted. Always have been. I dream that you want me, I dream that you hurt me. I thought I was done being scared of you. You must hate me. Dreams are powerful things, and I figure these ones must be sent by a hate so fierce it's ripping you up. But maybe I'm giving myself too much credit.

Feeling raw in the morning as I blink my eyes open. Kinder in hindsight, don't I know it. Used to hate it when you cried. Made me feel guilty, helpless. It made me shrink. Now for some reason, in quiet moments, I replay the way your mouth would twist, eyebrows scrunching together. Salt tracks down your cheeks. People at home in the wind, that's what I used to call us. Sepia-tinged. Rock in my pocket, weighing me down. Cold when I wake up. Wish I could say I don't miss it.

July 18, 2025

One day you will be an old thing growing dust in a drawer and the weight of you will be foreign in my hand. Sleeping lion, hallway induced. Still-warm ghosts. Benevolent, encased in marble so soft and white it feels like skin. It's an ache. It's a knowing. It's tepid water up to my ankles. Everything I've ever wanted has never been real enough to last.

April 28, 2025

I placed my hand on my stomach as I sat there vacantly. I felt it rise and fall steadily with my breaths, and at once I was met with a very strange and faraway sensation--as if I was placing my hand instead upon the flank of some guileless animal. The image was warm and comforting as it settled in my belly, and I let my eyes flutter shut, let it swallow me. I have been a fearsome buck and I have been wide-eyed doe, but always,always,I have been a creature to tame.

July 19, 2024

At some point my shame fell off from where it was slung over my shoulder, I left it unaware, lovely and pristine on the side of a road for someone else to pick up and find.