“A Girl From Nashville “by Aiden Drake

Clockwise from top left:

Distress Tolerance Handout 10 (Harbinger);

Mindfulness Handout 3 (and what a tangled web we weave / when we invent false binaries);

Interpersonal Effectiveness Handout 15 (Is this what Georg envisioned?)

You had short brown hair cut like a boy’s and big brown eyes that filled wide like cups of milky tea If you were excited, or if you lost track of the world around you. Short but slender fingers, good for grasping sleeves and tugging hands In the pictures you sent me you tried to make your hands look small

I wanted to fill up your eyes You asked if you could be my girlfriend And I said no the first time you asked, we lived in different states But then, after a lonely weekend in the woods how could I stand against someone

Who loved me? Or at the very least was willing to bathe in my affection Or at the very least wanted my flesh and my words to pour into the mould you built

I felt like I had known you my whole life Maybe what I had known my whole life was needing to be fixed I remember texting you and resigning myself to binding to you At the time it felt like I would never touch another person

In the way I wanted so badly to touch someone In the way I wanted someone to want me so badly to touch them

And you were, then as now, too far away to touch But it cheered me up so much just to see someone in a picture

who would possibly want to be touched by me You were wearing a gray hoodie, and smiling sweet And I remember when you unzipped it down the middle

And there was nothing underneath