Ceci and Hannah reflecting on 3 years

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Its august
I want to slow this down
I haven’t written a full song in ages, I keep the guitar in the same tuning for one year and I try to exhaust everything I have to say in that tuning and then when something changes I can change too
This month three years ago I was twenty six years old. We walked down Nostrand Avenue and there were explosions everywhere around us. It happened this year too. At some point I would like to tell you that
I sing something over and over the other night. I can't figure out what to come after
we were phantoms and then we were
phantoms
Then full of ghosts and courage I try to
make it a song. At Hannah’s concert I want you to look at my face. I want you to see the awe
when I listen to something beautiful
it doesn’t happen that often
When Holden watched my cat he told me that she acts like a butterfly. It has a few too many beats and if I say butterfly in a song its going somewhere visually  I’m not sure I want it to but
he said
she’s so gentle she’s
just like a butterfly
I choked up when I repeated it
She’s so gentle she’s just like a dove or just like a worm. Holden said that too as an option
In every song I’ve written I have tried to say
I have to do everything with my hands. anyways. I’m always trying to
tear apart something with my hands
your grey clay on your desk you say no, it shines so it’s silver.
I’m always trying to figure out what it is in my throat if it’s
not fire or a cold it’s
something harder to stomach
God it
takes a while to figure out where you’re going.
All I know is for a few months I slept on a twin bed and there she was with me
A memory surfaces for you that you want to tell me about, gently please
I opt to move for weeks, for years, for an hour in synchronization to think less about
missing you with my arms stretched out wide. Because then
we all have our arms out like that
Ceci Sturman

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The beginning is the last of moments
smell of cat hair mixed with burnt popcorn
How long it took to release my body 
The jar of salve next to the couch
Rubbing the knot each night from your back
No one makes me know pain 
Quite the way you do
hand me a glass jar 
You Tell me it is 
Immunity
The time inside of it stale and forever
How do you choose when you most need the fix
I lost many of the friends since that august
Not lost, you say
i push away the world again
Wanting it to continue 
just you and my world is an expanse!
It is more than i could ever ask for! 
I wear you
My immunity!
You remind me forever is more than a glass jar
That the point is what exists around it
Reminders of time
And The lack of it stretching on
To eternity
I keep on the table next to my bed
Ashes
A piece of volcanic glass 
And i wonder
Is it forever 
Or the lack thereof
That i see in a thing that has changed shape
Your grandmother took that straight from etna 
A woman who never left pennsylvania
In the year of my memories
She came back with her girlfriends and a bracelet of thick volcanic glass
And all the same she is twisted in memory
Future past make believe
paper is fact
The only distortion, intentional
Or the slow eroding of sun
Heat warped moth eaten
I cross the same word out each time i try to write it
Some old words i find from that time
The rest around it lost
The glass jar preserving the rest

I want future 

Was this what we imagined?
Hannah Pruzinsky

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