if i was brave.

When I was small, I’d lay with my hands tucked contentedly behind my head; fingers curled in my mane of tangled hair, listening without effort to the whispers in the grass, and filling my lungs with the breeze that cradled the stories of faraway places that I yearned to see. The branches of the trees stretched in a chest rumbling yawn, leaves curling towards the warmth of light, trembling delightedly in the afternoon air. The canopy of growth hid my little body from the endless ocean of sky, which brimmed my eyes with a sense of adventure.

I knew then – as a child with cheeks round like peaches, and legs not yet long enough to peer over the bathroom sink – what I ache to know with equal surety now.  

I had not yet come to know of the darkness entombed – hidden inside the pulsing heart of the earth – a poison. I’d not yet seen into the bottomless mouths of men whose greed, wanting hands grab hungrily to take that which isn’t theirs. Men who selfishly tear away pieces of me – scattering them carelessly – hoping to hollow me out to make me like them. Beasts of consumption, not creation. A black hole that is never satiated. I had yet to recognize race, or corruption, heard no false witness, felt no distrust, seen no suffering, and knew no bitterness.

I lay here now, the same place I used to imagine I could make out comprehensible words in the whispers in the wind. I look taller than I did since last was here, but feel smaller and less significant than ever I have. I look up to the same drooping boughs of the same trees, only a tired huddling rather than the dense forest I remember it to be. It is the same cemetery – a mere stone throw away from my childhood home – no longer surrounded by a sea of meadows and marshes, but instead cookie-cutter houses and sharp edged streets.

I had an itch that needed scratching. A need buried within me, with roots deeply burrowed; nourished by a truth, and watered with the blood that coursed through the veins of my being. A need that could not be weeded out – as the maze of its vines were entwined tightly around and through my organs, tissue, and bones. A need that threatened to eat me alive if I continued to deny it.

The need was a promise – the purest truth – that I could be anything, could do anything. The longing that was so consuming – a curse to wake and bed with – a daily reminder that this me was only a shadow of who I am. That I could become a wild tearing tidal wave, beautifully devastating and impactful; not a controlled, unvarying trickle. And I know that all I simply needed to do, is to let go of all that this cruel world has taught me, and simply allow myself to be.

But my strength has been sapped, a maple tree bled dry. I feel so wholly exhausted. My soul is old and heavy; tired of slipping in and out of bodies like changes of clothes. I feel as if I’ve lived a thousand grey-tinted repetitive lives since last here. The world feels like a room that is crowded, hostile, and too dense to breathe; with not enough capacity for me. I’ve had to wedge myself into the cracks and slivers of the leftover space, having to grow, or shrink, or warp my body to fit in where I am expected.

I am told daily that I am too this, or not enough that; the demands are contradicting, and I am left unable to satisfy anyone, especially me. I am left to choke on my words, my opinions. They make me who I am – but who I am is uncommon, unwanted, untamed – and I swallow them like boulders. They’ve piled up one by one – steadily filling my lungs – weighing me down till I can barely lift my feet. If I ever found the courage to make the effort to speak, I fear there is no longer room enough for the air it takes to sigh.

I want to vomit out everything that I have ever wanted to say, so that the boulders can crash to the floor, and my once-heavy feet can lift off the ground and carry me wherever I please.

If I was brave:

I would tell the men who walk too close behind me, who tell me I am beautiful while licking their lips, who stare unabashed and sweat for no seen reason: that I see them as they are, not how they make themselves out to be. Septic, grotesque, and infected by the festering disease of lust that has long since eaten their humanity.  

I would tell society to stop dictating to me what a “real woman” is – and to stop allowing their guidelines to make me feel abashed for being wild or childish. That I am not ugly because of my imperfect skin, or the scars that rake my thighs, or my body that doesn’t fit into their pre-made boxes.

 

I would tell the world that social media and social graces have made us into fakes, showmen, deceivers, and predictable ants content to live lives of mediocrity. That we have forgotten how to live, and feel, and connect. That the only time we should ever look into the bowls of our neighbors is to make sure that they have enough to eat, not to compare the portion sizes.

I would tell all women that equality and superiority are two different things, and that somewhere along the way we misplaced their meanings. That we must stop considering each other as the competition or the enemy, as we are all fighting the same battle. That I have grown to be ashamed of my sex for perpetuating our own objectification, for damning ourselves to be seen as creatures of flesh in our fight for equivalence; discrediting all the strong women of our history by participating in our own exploitation.

I would have the courage to tell myself truths:

That I am not lonely because I have been forgotten or abandoned, but because I have made myself a victim in my mind, and stopped trying to make real connections a long time ago. That I need to stop pointing angry fingers away from my broken heart – blaming others in my past for the mistakes I make in the future – and turn them towards my own rib-cage because I am stronger than that; I know better. That I am accountable for my happiness. That I don’t have to let the way other women look affect the way I see myself. That I have in me the ability to confidently say the word “no” without fear of being hurt, or feeling guilty. That I don’t have to let men touch me if I don’t want them to.

If I was brave.

But I’m not; so I am haunted by the promise, tormented to suffer in silence till I can find the strength somewhere in me to spit up these rocks I suffocate on one-by-one, which I fear may take a very long time.

This is the first.

~Cate

wake the trees.

I am wearing a dress that is too short. All of my dresses seem to be too short, and I can never figure out if I simply purchase them this way – judgment blurred by a dark dressing room and the allure of something new – or if they are shrinking in the wash. Each time I climb out of my car, I tug at the hem self-consciously, feeling my tights slide down my thighs – where I unceremoniously hike them back up.

On my drive to the library each day – where I do the majority of my work – I always stop at the gas-station and buy the same things for breakfast: A 32oz cup of ice – because the drive is long, and hot, and I haven’t had a working air conditioning for over a year – a container of grapes, and a sugar-free redbull. I should probably cut back on my caffeine intake. Red Bull makes my mouth taste funny. 

I always park myself on the second floor, in the applied science and technology section, near a window. I move the chair closer to it – although the window is always closed, it gives it less of a stuffy feeling. I search for my laptop in my backpack – yes, backpack. I prefer it over bulky ‘designer bags’; they seem to fit me better, and are good for spur of the moment adventures. I pulled out my computer, pushing aside the book I had ‘borrowed’ from this library a few days prior. I hadn’t stolen it, I had the intention of returning it since I was here every day anyways, but I wanted to read it late at night in bed, and I didn’t have a library card here – I couldn't even get one if I wanted to, as I was living in another city entirely.

I sat down in the squashy brown armchair that sagged slightly with age. I liked it here. It was quiet, with an almost abandoned feeling to it; I felt as if I’d adopted it – the books, the musty smell, and the peeling wallpaper – and it had openly adopted me. It was easy to get work done here – sometimes.

Sometimes my mind would wander, and I would find myself setting my still open laptop on the floor to wander the hallways of dusty books. I would run a single finger along their spines, my eyes skimming eye-level over the titles, and stopping to pull one off the shelf if I felt so inclined. I would flip through where I would read the first paragraph of each. I love first paragraphs, and first sentences especially. I like to think of the author sitting down to a blank screen and typing out that first sentence, like pulling apart a pair of curtains over a window that looks out over the story. I can’t imagine how other people decide to begin a novel. Perhaps it is born with the writer, secreted like tears, falling out of them with its own unstoppable catharsis.

Though normally I may take several breaks throughout the morning to do just that, today – today it rains. And I cannot bear to pull myself away from the window for even a second.

I have so many memories in the rain where I have felt love, ecstasy, hatred, anger, or sorrow with such a fervent passion as to split my physical world down the center. When it rains, I remember those memories, and saturate my soul in them:

i. We had only just met – he was a senior and I was a nameless sophomore – I still retained a youthful innocence that settled delicately on the corner of my mouth. He’d asked me quietly while we watched the ending of a generic love story with a team of his friends if I’d ever been kissed in the rain. I shyly smiled and said honestly that I hadn't, but confided in him that the romantic in me yearned try. A few days later the clouds – pregnant with precipitation, had broken – and as he drove me home in his mammoth of a van, he stepped out with me into the pouring rain and kissed me hard on the mouth. The downpour was so thick, so constant and unending, that it got into my eyes, and my mouth, and my nose, and I remember wondering if this was really all it ever was. When he climbed back into his bus – and after several coughing and wheezing attempts, brought it back to life – he leaned over the passenger seat to roll down his window to say that I had the softest lips in the world. He then drove away, leaving me standing on the sidewalk, soaking wet and disappointed.

ii. Together we stood in the downpour of ice outside his house in the middle of the night, shivering under the orange glow of the streetlight. I hugged my thin arms close to my body for warmth, bouncing on the balls of my feet as I always did when I was agitated. He was colder than the rain, and far more devastating and unpredictable than the lightning that cracked indignantly through the sky. I could yell at him, imploring him to see and to understand my depth; and he wouldn’t ever hear a word. He would just watch my lips move, clumsily fumbling through soundless pain. And my blind agony would spill like raindrops on tin, until the fertile downpour would end with a flood of anger and guilt, leaving behind long stretches of empty silence. Words washed away into another night.

iii. We were going on an adventure. We seemed to whip past every other driver – the image of us reflected back in the wet asphalt – rain pelting the car as we entered warp speed. His music was mixed harmoniously with the drumming rain and the enthusiastic whir of the windshield wipers. The sun-roof was open just enough to allow my hand to slip through; the rain was like pinpricks on my fingertips, and frigid water streamed down my arm. When I pulled it in, my hand was clammy, cold, and wet, but he grabbed it from my lap nonetheless and clutched it tightly, interlacing his fingers with mine. He sang so loudly – glancing over at me again and again, sitting dumbstruck by the complexity of his melted-chocolate eyes, and laughed – the laugh that won me over; that threw me into a place with no doubt, no uncertainty, no logic, no reason. I knew I loved him; and my heart burst.

vi. I was too young, not yet touched by fear, or doubt, or dangerous hands. It had rained and rained for days without stopping. My neighborhood had flooded, and the grown-ups were outside helping each other place sandbags around their homes. All the kids from the neighborhood gathered in the upper floor of my little house to drink warm apple cider – made by my Father earlier that morning – that was simmering quietly in an oversized stock-pot on the stove; the smell of cinnamon and cloves permeating every room. We all watched from the window, crowding our bare toes around the heater vent on the floor, as our parents went frantically from one house to the next. The road – heavy with water – was overflowing onto the sidewalk and into the yards. Being struck with an ingenious idea, I ran wordlessly into the storm, and dived into the road; I watched happily as the kids in the window laughed and laughed as I swam around, showing off the backstroke I had learned earlier that year. My angry Father quickly arrived, to tell me that the water was filthy, stripping me completely naked on the doorstep, in front of the still-laughing neighborhood kids. Even though I got sick later that week, I remember my only regret that day was the choice of underwear I had worn.

v. Our clothes were soaked long before we had darted from the parking lot and into to the street. We laughed loudly and without care for the passersby that watched us openly; he dragged me behind him by the hand as we ran a block to the CVS on the corner to buy an umbrella. We wandered – huddled together – around the strange city, leaving puddles behind in all the places we found interesting enough to stop in: toy stores, art galleries, candy shops. We were both broke, but he understood me, and recognized that I didn't need things, that I needed only new experiences to stimulate me, and someone loving enough to give me their time. We sat in a tea shop playing board games and drinking lightly flavored hot water until the rain stopped. When he opened the door for me, and we stepped out into the sunlit air, I remember thinking that it was far better to be loved in the rain, than kissed in it. 

~C

if a writer falls in love with you, you are immortal.

I’m still wondering what it is I’m trying to say here – as if I am expecting the day to come when I receive the revelation of a prodigious epiphany that will shake the entirety of the earth – and I will be lifted into the air and I will spill the seeds of my words in the hearts of men and then fall. With my purpose having been finalized, and all the words in me having been spent. The gnawing compulsion I have and the itching of my fingertips to simply write something – anything – will be gone; and all will go back to the way it was when I was silent and mostly dead.

I like to look for the spaces in people as I silently comb my eyes through them to find the places that gape, and wedge myself in.

I’m sorry I’m so nosy.

Pain makes people human to me. Once I can feel for them – empathize with them and learn their secrets – I love them. And in each of us are these black places that start as tiny cracks that grow into echoing canyons. Canyons lined with words, guilt, fear, stories, nightmares, shame, memories, hope. My arms and thighs are raked with these canyons; and I've come to love myself despite them, because I feel that it makes me more real – even if it causes me to be more difficult to love.

The lonely hearts club.

“Tell me a secret.” I always say, leaning in close, my lips curling at the edges.

But what I mean to say is: I cannot reach you – you are untouchable – allow me to look inside of your most secret places and tell you that you are perfect to me. So that I may come to understand you in exactness, and accept you so that you may never be lonely.

We hide the spaces to keep ourselves feeling whole.  And maybe sometimes we cling to the spaces and make ourselves into addicts – to people, to alcohol, to our self-perception, to the verdict of others, to drugs, to unrealistic dreams, to love. Maybe we think that by throwing all those things down into the blackness, we will fill it back up, giving someone the footing they need to make it to the other side.

I like to look for the spaces in people. So that I may blow myself up four-thousand-times and lovingly pour every tender word and every hopeful feeling I’ve ever had into that darkness. I do it not for me, but because I have felt such a sorrow in my life that I have made the decision to never allow another to ever feel that same sorrow.

Recently however, I have been stretched taut – with streaks lining my flesh, and careless footprints down my back. But I feel that by constantly expanding, acting as a human Band-Aid, and caring far more than I should, will eventually lead to its own repercussions.

But I have decide to stop worrying about ‘eventually’, and continue to cram myself into spaces, and just deal with the trouble compassion will bring me if that time ever comes.

Isolation from those I love has been difficult – living so far from everything I have ever seen and known – after finding adoration for the land where I was raised: the tall mountains dominating the skyline with a silent power that demands reverence, the frost that blankets the morning and suspends the movement of life – if only for a moment, the secrets hidden away in tall branches and behind the climbing boulders, I miss my thinking spot and being touched by people who genuinely love me.  But over the past five months, I’ve learned how to combat the solitude. I’ve always done well on my own, been contented with just spending time alone and was able to easily find happiness within myself. But it isn’t until you no longer have the option available to be with another that you begin to miss it.

I’ve found that I tend to take up more space than ever I have – sprawling my body over the sofa where I read like a blanket, or filling the dining room table with heavy books and fresh-cut flowers to hide the empty seats, or how I sleep with one hundred pillows on my over-sized bed so that I always have to fight for a space for my body to mold itself into. 

I’ve come to learn that sometimes, you just won’t have enough. That you won’t have enough money, that you won’t have enough vacation days, that you won’t have enough hours in a day, that you won’t have enough sleep in a night, that you won’t have enough hello’s and too many goodbyes.

So although it has been difficult, I have been able to find a beauty here un-matched by any I have yet to see; setting my insides aflame with child-like awe.

I have a room in my home with windows of windows, lit only by the sun. Where I can write the sunshine into my pages, and spectate with open mouth at the thickness of the fog in the early morning, and how palpable it tastes on my tongue. I live near a botanical garden – that is spread abundantly over acres and acres – each plant tenderly labeled with care, gardens of roses and free-flowing water with long docks and hanging branches. In the evening, the un-hindered skyline leaves the moon satisfied, and together we stretch out on the rug and contemplate the turning of the stars.

It has been refreshing to have an unmarked foundation of which to build a new life upon. With the land and the people untainted by prejudice and corrupted memories. But even here, so far away from home, I find my past in the most unexpected places.

When I was in the eighth grade, a boy tried to teach me that even when someone doesn’t love you, you need to be beautiful to them. Or else people will write you down on a scrap of paper like a bad secret, and push you into the spine of a book – leaving you on the shelf for some unfortunate reader to find. He called me ugly, and stupid, and fat. I took all of his words and wrote them under the surface of my skin – as a reminder that sometimes the world is cruel, and that sometimes it hates you, even when you haven’t done anything but live in it.

So one night, not many nights ago, I saw the familiar face of that boy – the face that had painted itself beneath my skin, still twisted in disgust as if it was yesterday. He saw me as I saw him, and with a tilt of his head he asked if I was the girl who used to love him.

I could say nothing, I just stared into his eyes and I saw the emptiness that lay there – the insecurities, the arrogance, the selfishness – and I could not believe that for so many years I had carried the words of someone who never knew me so close to my heart, and allowed those words to mold me. So I opened the cavity of my chest and pulled out everything he had written beneath my skin nine years ago and noiselessly dropped them in his lap – because I had no use for them anymore – and left him wearing all the words he had tried to drown me in.

When I was in eighth grade a boy taught me that you can’t keep the world out of you – that it is ugly, bent, with torn corners – but you can turn it into something new, like a pressed flower left tenderly in the heart of a forgotten book, nine seasons after someone else tore it from the ground.

~C 

regret is a revolving door.

When my youngest sister was six a boy in her class hit her in the face; leaving behind an ugly black stain like spilled ink on her tiny cheek. My questions of wonder and concern were answered only by giggles and silliness, leaving me only to reason it had happened by her own mischievous hand. 

Not an hour later, the boy’s mother called me to apologize on his behalf.

I crawled into her bed that night and held her close, to ask her why she hadn’t told me the truth. She said, in all seriousness, that they liked each other and so it was okay that he hit her.

I swallowed my fear – like acid that burned my throat – scorching my words; settling them curled in a smoking mess at the pit of my stomach.

As she nestled her head of soft tangled hair into my chest, I remembered the first time a boy hit me; and how the teachers – with lines of laughter crinkling their eyes, smiled – and said that it was because he liked me.

So when I was seventeen and my boyfriend gave me my first set of bruises, I thought it was because he liked me. When he threw his angry fists at my body, I’d been told they were hand-written love letters that he was sending me. Counting my breaths and tallying my sins and shattered bones. They had taught me that aggression translated into affection in the language of love; and all of those songs about love being a battlefield made sense to me for the first time.

Boys will be boys.

And all is fair in love and war.

I was taught to speak in apologies and broken teeth; to start every sentence with “I’m sorry” and to end every sentence with a mouthful of blood and shame.

I wish I had told her then, what I know now.

I wanted to tell her that she doesn’t have to be soft; that she doesn’t have to be the delicate flower with the ethereal smile, quiet and flowing on small feet from room to room with grace and poise.

 I wanted to look into her eyes and tell her that she can be an ocean rushing without means of stopping toward a cliff-side, that she can be a roaring wind barreling across the entirety – shaking everything in its wake, that she can be as wide and loud as a lightning storm. That there is a universe inside of herself, wanting to be explored – and that she can stand on her own.

I wanted to tell her that when she finds someone that is sufficient enough to deserve her; he should be in constant amazement that he is hers. He should think about how it is him alone who gets to kiss her each night, when the lights are off as the city sleeps. He should be one to stop, in the middle of the day, to imagine her laughter and allow his heart to skip a beat. He should find himself awed that out of all of the men wiping their feet at her door, she chose him to let inside.  

That this is the way everyone is meant to be loved – the way someone might stare slack jawed at the sun setting. Because you are a pink blue red and orange sky at 5:30 pm in January that makes you pull over the car and get out just so you can make sure what you are seeing is real. That love is not frantic or hard, but gentle and exciting; the kind of thing that you keep running your hands over because you can’t believe it is everything you dreamed of and never thought you’d get.

I wanted my little six year old sister to know that love shouldn’t exist hidden under make-up and excuses. That love should exist where the world can see it; in the smile so wide it hurts; in the strength
of her footsteps and the way her laugh becomes a song.

And I wanted my sister to know she deserves that;

And the person she should always love the fiercest
Is herself. 

~C

real truths and word vomit.

I sit complacently – watching unabashed at the sticky-sweet pair across the park lawn – their too-loud, high-pitched laughter echoing shrilly through the trees; drawing attention.  

Typical.

She runs away from him, and he chases her. 

This is his opportunity to show off his “strength and masculinity”, and her chance to torment the poor besotted potential love interest with the opportunity to hold her close.

I snort loudly; having seen this scene a hundred times before: cheap, old, unoriginal. I pity their pathetic ambition to have a love like a love the movies. 

You know the film(s). Guy and girl washing car, guy sprays girl, girl sprays guy, laughter filled water fight that ends with the two lying on the ground, soaking wet, gazing passionately into each other’s eyes.  Or a flirtatious food fight where the heroine’s hair always looks flawless even with pink frosting in it, and the hero’s visage wouldn’t ever appear unsightly, even by the dab of whipped cream on the tip of his nose.

The truth is nobody likes to have bits of mashed up food on their clothes and in their hair. Nobody likes being sprayed in the face with a pressurized jet of ice cold water, or trying to take off wet jeans after getting soaked. It's all fake. It isn't real. So when I see lovers attempting to re-create a story emulative to the thoughtfully scripted and repetitiously filmed to perfection anecdote, I can’t possibly help but roll my eyes, and come to the immediate prejudice that what the cat-and-mouse lovers had, isn't real or lasting.

So, I close my eyes, allowing the corners of my mind to envelop me like a cocoon, and bring to recollection of a memory of something so real; so intense and vivid, natural and new.

True love; real truth.

My belief system was simple: true love – as I myself had come to discover over a great deal of time and obsession – is not a college experiment, or a midnight hypothesis, or mouth-to-mouth ways to make a past suitor jealous. It is not merely yearning for beauty, undressing. Or simply wanting to kiss your way across their milk-flesh, or wanting with a fervent passion to taste and feel it all. It is not a flick-worthy “how I met you” story, or dry moments like staying up late under the stars, sunny picnics in the park, or long walks on the beach.

Not a single one of those things matter.

Do you hear me? 

Not a single one.  

Because you cannot put all of the building blocks of what the media brainwashes you to believe is “true love” in their places, and then expect that from those blocks will magically create a love that is endless.

The blocks are cold, lifeless, and square. 

Love is so much more than that. It takes its own shape not otherwise specified, and takes you in different ways if you let it. It is the spaces between your fingers eternally filled – never to be empty again. It is a raw boldness, shamelessness, a feeling of power in togetherness; such a force as to block out the sun, and all rational thought, ripping through your bodies as one.

I am a hopeless romantic in the worst kind of way. Because I see truths, but despise reality.

I am blind.

~C

deep lakes and other eternal resting sites.

This place feels so forlorn;

like the small childhood house I used to live in but now revisit with a sad smile curling the corners of my lips, and a heavy lump in my throat. I drive by slowly, remembering it to be so much larger than it looked. With green shutters and a red picket fence – now painted black, with a yard cluttered with garbage and my climbing trees torn out – leaving only brown splotchy dirt behind. The lump grows as I remember the wonderful girl who lived with me there. Her name was Courage. She taught me to feel my soul exhale each time I laughed from the pit of my stomach, to dream as big as I can – and if I couldn’t quite touched what I dreamt, to imagine it and to be proud of that – and to lie with curiosity in my eyes to look up at the flowers instead of down at them, in order to see just how new the world could be with a different point of view.

I’ve moved, in a sense, to another place. But this will always be my home. A small forgotten dwelling, in an insignificant cluster of tired looking houses, on the outside of a town looking in. Courage is always with me, though others shake their heads disappointedly and whisper that I will never find a husband because my standards are unrealistic, my dreams are impractical, that I need to grow up, get a “real job” and a “real life”, that the world revolves around money and that if you don’t have enough of it then you are a nobody going nowhere.

But I don’t want to believe them because I have to embrace these dreams, imagination, curiosity and courage as a part of my humanness, of who I am, and how sincerely and fully I love.

I don’t care if those who have it all figured out tell me that the way I see things is abnormal, or unreasonable. Because I guess I feel that it’s the most beautiful part of who I am.

I wish I could speak words as elegant as the ones that bleed from my fingers into my pen and onto my paper.

I don’t want to go to a movie, or eat overpriced food.

Take me to your favorite place, and let me find the reason in your eyes. Take me home and show me where you sleep – and I’ll promise not to laugh at the mess. Show me the window you stare out of most, and show me what you see, so I can see it too. I don’t want you to impress me, or try to move me to amazement. I want you to love me, and to know you’ll stay when it’s hard. I want you to laugh at my bad jokes and understand that I am just as messed up as I promise I am and simply not care.

For I have known men who could hold my hand without touching me, and kiss me from the other room. I have known men who knew punk rock better than they knew the feel of my fingers. I’ve known men who didn’t hear my voice until I said goodnight at the door per the conclusion of a yawn swallowing evening. I have known men who grew up too soon, cared too little, and drank too much. I’ve known men who were artists, tech masterminds, and professional jerks wearing suits of insensitivity and brass buttons.

I don’t need love, but it’d be much appreciated. I can put layer after layer of blankets atop my bed, lay upon the mountain of insulation and keep myself warm, but I’d also love for you to gently fold back the covers and invite me in so that I can wrap my legs around yours to keep warm. I can watch Wuthering Heights alone and dry my own tears, but it’d also be nice to press my face against your chest and dry my tears with your soft cotton tee while you hold me close and stroke my hair. I don’t need love, but perhaps it’d be much appreciated.

~C

how easily time slips through our fingers.

i. An eco-friendly covered cup sits next to me. It’s been empty for a while now; I've waited all afternoon to say: “Oh this? Just a novel I’m working on.”

ii. I want to write as I wrote last year – of the goodness in the world, of infinite faith, and brief captured moments of beauty – rather than to write just to expunge the bitter tastes of life. I haven’t written in a while – yes I realize what a bad joke that statement is; seeing as I hardly ever put my pen to the paper anymore. A great many adventures have ensued recently, but every time I begin to write them down, I end up hating my words and scrapping it all frustratedly. 

Perhaps I don’t wish to print my happiness in permanent ink, if it is in fact merely impermanent. For I know that if it all vanishes back into long work days, and short cold nights, then I will re-read these words and be drowned by the tidy little paragraphs – caught up in a better time – and forget to open new windows and doors that happen to present themselves. 

iii. This year has been a year 

of faking it, wearing burgundy lipstick and dark winged eyes, making detailed lists, ensuring my voice-mail doesn't get too full, watching my weight and flipping off my scale each morning, learning to smile without permitting my lip to fold up, looking in the mirror and accepting that my forehead has frozen into my thinking face and left a permanent thoughtful crease between my brows.

a year full of nights. Of sleeping with windows and hearts dangerously open, letting the sometimes biting breeze makes its home beneath the cracks of my eyelids, recognizing that blankets are never enough to warm my cold cold bones, staring emptily at the pages of the journal I never really seem to fill, watching my pile of feathered pens dry up, wondering to myself if the life I live now is all it will ever be, and fearing the rapidly turning pages of the calendar as I watch fearfully with eyes wide open

a year of staying focused, trying to be the adult that I am expected to be, ignoring my internal monologue of endless questions asking me what I am doing, struggling to never let on that I am somewhat lost and sometimes lonely, and often so confused. Tasting the blood as I bite my tongue to keep from screaming, and struggling not to ask strangers to tell me what it is that I am supposed to do next, and where exactly I am supposed to go from here. 

vi. My writing had become a reflection of my blind ambling through an empty existence; the only light in the darkness were my dreams of another life that was not mine and wistful thinking for romance painted with a golden brush. 

I had forgotten that life is far larger than the drive to work with sleep filled eyes, or the rush to complete a task minutes before it is due. I had forgotten that keeping friends was more important than making money, that my soul was more important than my body, and that there is always love waiting to be found in the most unlikely of places if I only took the time to seek it out.

v. Forget about the things you had, And all the things you lost. 

Before you let your heat drunk breath, Grow cold and turn to frost. 

~C