03/24/22 my ruined heart. my crumbling, collapsing lungs.
05/25/20 Pain is intimate. People are terrible at intimacy. That is why they can not look closely at your pain.
04/02/20 I stand in front of the syrup in the grocery store, deciding what kind of life I want to live. It feels like a reckoning with myself, and I’m not sure I am up to the task.
03/13/20 I’m losing my memories. They sift out of me. They float, dust specks caught in shallow light.
02/25/20 I keep saying, “I should be able to do this, other people do this. I should be able to do this too.” Maybe I am asking myself the wrong questions, and I have been all along. Maybe I need to be asking, “Do I want to do this?”
02/18/20 In a rush, it comes to me – a recalling, the sound of my mother’s voice. It is impatient and angry. I have done something wrong, or not soon enough – I am winded. Not by the words themselves, but by the realization of it – the idea that the most familiar memory of my dead mother’s voice is of it seething.
~~~
My need for validation tonight crawls under my skin, like I’m shaking for a hit. The inky night sky has nothing to offer me. I’m on my own.
02/16/20 The earth, a bright blue eye – wide open. You could take a needle. You could pop it.
02/03/20 The theme of this year so far seems to be fastballs. It’s fine though, they’re teaching me to dodge, teaching me to dance.
01/31/20 Sometimes, when I am lost and need guidance, I think, what would Buffy do?
01/27/20 The wide black sky matches my loneliness. When did stars stop coming out at night? How long has the sky been empty without my noticing?
01/24/20 The ache of this – just wanting to write, to have some flow. There is no stream, only squirts. I don’t know if I should leave the words or continue to coax them.
01/04/20 What is this sudden hunger to be seen by those I had dismissed for dismissing me? I gave up on being worthy. Yet now that you are paying attention, the validation is intoxicating – I want more.
12/31/19 I dream that my lips are two uncracked book spines – one holding the story I have to tell, one holding the story I have yet to live.
12/26/19 I wonder if I talk about my dead friends too much.
12/06/19 What does the worst chapter of your life taste like?
11/21/19 You must change your life.
11/19/19 I don’t understand how I feel too open & not open at the same time.
11/14/19 Trauma is not a moral failing. As soon as I realize this, I can stop digging at the wound.
11/12/19 There are no mile markers on this road, but I keep walking.
11/11/19 It is time to stop holding my body prisoner of war.
11/10/19 Margaret Atwood never lets me down. I call on her poetry like a spirit guide.
~~~
I understand now.
Darkest before dawn.
How silly, to think there is only one dawn.
10/26/19 Tight as a clamshell, I let no one in – not even myself.
10/15/19 If I close my eyes and think of home. The air muted with humidity.
~~~
This is who I am.
And you don’t know me.
09/30/19 What do you remember? I remember loneliness under the yellow neon lights, such a contrast to the night outside.
09/27/19 I practice being in the moment. The smell of the air, the taste of tomatoes on my tongue. I sit facing others, but my chair is still at a distance. I can’t bring myself to go closer just yet.
09/26/19 11:11 three times in a row. Are you screaming at me? Or do I just wish that you were.
9/25/19 Where is God on Mars?
09/12/19 The air sounds different in fall. Emptier. More space for the echoes to linger in.
09/09/19 Memories are biting at me today. I remember the same ones over and over – more myth now than fact. I suppose these are the scenes I will be playing for myself when I’m old.
08/24/19 Another day another waste of my words. When will I learn I won’t do it later – it must be now otherwise it will be never.
08/22/19 I dream of drugs and makeup.
~~~
I walk outside and the scent of burning is in the air. Something is on fire.
~~~
My belief makes it my reality, whether or not it is based in truth. I have started playing around with the idea that I can use this power for good.
08/09/19 Night is different in Illinois. Darker, more enchanting.
08/01/19 It turns out, living is easy. It’s so easy after all.
07/30/19 How does one explain the subtle journey of dawn after the endless night? So gradual that often it feels like no movement at all. A stationary dancer, posed for – for what?
07/23/19 I don’t want to stay here. I am done waiting in the wings.
07/16/19 I have never been one to visit graveyards. I don’t feel a draw. After all, that is just where your bones lay, not your soul.
~~~
Wherever you go, there you are. I had to find myself here, before I could go anywhere else.
07/12/19 This is not yours to hold. Set it down, set it down.
07/04/19 Grey sky casting shadows in my room while I listen to the song of my creaking bones.
07/02/19 Those memories – a sharp pain of childhood hurts, the ones that scabbed so long ago we forgot they existed at all. Splinters making it’s way to the surface. I’m still here, they say.
06/20/19 I spent years asking myself what did I need to do to be enough for other people. I had no idea that I was asking the wrong question – what I needed to ask is what do I need to do to be enough for myself.
~~
Your past is prologue.
I will not live my mother’s life.
~~~
My ghosts are everywhere.
But I am not haunted – I am guarded.
~~
The terrifying brilliant light of hope.
Activated stardust in my soul.
06/18/19 I’ve never had so much faith in what the universe has in store for me. I’ve never had so much love for my life.
06/15/19 I’m on a plane and I’m on my way home and
06/12/19 The journey of saying goodbye to who I was and embracing who I am meant to be.
05/26/19 Yoga in the mornings and the slightly sour smell of grass. When my head is close to the ground, the wind sounds like the ocean’s echo caught in a seashell.
04/18/19 Change is on my doorstep and when I lick my lips, I taste fear.
Swallow that mouthful of fear, child.
04/17/19 I stopped looking for others to carry my pain and revealed in the knowledge that I could carry it all on my own. If pain was a gift, I was looking to return it, carefully categorizing receipts. Now I have found a place for it in the shelves of my heart and it doesn’t take up that much room after all.
03/16/19 I am sitting in the comfy chair, and I think about showering. But that would mean committing to The Day and I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet. I might just sit here and let time slide through my fingers, each grain a minute falling away with nothing to show from it. Most of my life I’ve just existed.
I leave the world on Read. Not ready to exit the chat, but not having anything to add to it either.
03/06/19 We don’t talk about the days where I hang on by the skin of my teeth, hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles turn white, silence blasting in my ears. The days when the air pulses with unspoken paragraphs that I compose so eloquently in my mind and stumble over so badly when I attempt to speak them.
Perhaps this is why we don’t talk about them.
~~~
The piercing loneliness of a Tuesday night. Do you see me? Who am I asking this? No one. Everyone.
03/03/19 I write poetry in my dreams.
02/24/19 There are times when I can feel myself leveling up – becoming the bigger Mario in a Nintendo game.
02/08/19 When it comes to books, my appetite exceeds my ability to consume…
02/01/19 I summon Amos Lee, want to shout it to all I know, crowing my discovery that I am not a failed human being
01/18/19 Do I have a story to tell?
05/30/18 I like the night too much. Day’s just something to sleep through.
05/06/18 I find beauty in simplicity
Now We Are Beginning 