Dear Kirsten,

This is Kirsten. 
Maybe I seem to you a dreamy figure, with briefcases and bookshelves and boobs, but I think at this point you have so much more that is foreign to me.

You think of me now as an icon, a milestone to reach, but someday you will find that I am amorphous. That the vision of your 20-something self will never be constant and can never be mapped out. I remember the way you sit and imagine your freckles spilling out across adult features and flirty smiles. And eventually the image shifts and you picture me as edgy, unpractical, spontaneous. You have named me many things, tried to form me in many ways. You put so much pressure on me to have it all figured out. But Kirsten it can't be done.

Pretty soon you will wake up on a family vacation, with Mom and Dad's spherical faces hovering over your morning vision and whispering. Behind them you will notice a blinding sunshine through the sliding glass doors. You will hear them ask why you are smiling, you just woke up why are you smiling, and the hotel sheets will smell of citrus, your tiny body exploring their shape. And then you will hear them say that this is what you always do, this is how you always wake up, and for the first time you will have a sense of the only thing impermeable, unwavering, that you want to keep.

Stop thinking about that mocking question you're always asked. Assholes who ask 8-year-olds for their future professions are still just assholes. Stop spewing out that you'll become a ballerina or a vet or a singer. We both know you don't mean any of it, you're just scared that you need to grasp something and call it yours. 

But stop worrying and pulling your own hair. Because one day you will have the citrus on the bedsheets. And the rest will follow.




<3 Kirsten

Castle Kirsten

Reverse the car and start again.
Run me over and start

again.

You and I, we're always going through the motions

of this doll parade.

Synthetic hair entangling neon lace.

These figures sprawl out on the floor

In their motionless attempts to fill us up.

To act out scenes.

I find myself positioning plastic limbs in ways

we may never move ours.

It's weird, isn't it?

The way I thought up a house and named it my own.

I thought up a family and named it not yours.

You can hardly annoy me if you don't even know me. 

Sloppily sewn flags atop a painted castle.

And gilded picture frames with Barbie portraits.

Your shoulders curl away from me and

the red car traces beneath your hand.

The zig zagging tracks on the tattered carpet look so much to me like passports 

and diaries and college degrees.

Sometimes I have this image of you, torn and ground into clumps of pixels on my screen,

trying to talk to me over miles and miles of white noise,

but the sound goes mute on my computer.

and all I want is to click you back into place.

You're married now.

How the hell are you married now.

Your limbs aren't plastic any longer.

And I'm happy but I can't shake the feeling that we did this all wrong.

Maybe we did this all wrong.

Maybe corvettes and castles are the same fucking thing when you break them into these pixels

and rearrange the colors.

Red over gold. Gold over red. A fusion of the two.

And maybe the elemental squares sprinkled across screens were always the only thing we really needed to fill us up.

Reverse the car and start again.

Pick me up and start 

again.