11-7

You do not deserve peace
   When you took mine
to obtain it.

11-2

One two three.

Times are changing. Seasons turn turn turn.

The wheel came up. The hanged man. I look down at the cards and they're telling me if I slow down, wait, things could be different, but I don't want to give my past a chance to catch me. I don't want to get sucked back into that vortex, and I know I would. I would get crushed on that wheel over and over, and I'm tired of being the butterfly.

I'm the bee. I'm the bat. I'm the hawk. I'm the sky and the ground and the atmosphere and the water and the fucking trees.

I am not a delicate dainty thing to be found crushed with shimmering scale-dust around me.

I am not a doe-eyed unguided pretty thing to kick.

I am not a red-lipped distant thing to pour lies onto.

I am autonomous.

I am tired of telling you what I am not. 

If you reached out a hand, I might hesitate, but I'm strong again. My molten walls are in place and hardening around me.

It's a hard lesson to learn who doesn't deserve them. He knocks quietly, chips gently, fingernails. I don't know how to drop them for such a quiet and reasonable request, not yet.

How unfair.

I wonder if he'll keep trying. It's an accidental test. I move away, I gather myself, and I try to reach out. I let my mind settle. I find myself in silence and re-evaluate. I reach back out. I pull back.

What a trial, to find me, to those who want to find me and are worthwhile. But if they're worthwhile, they'll make that effort. Isn't that how it works?

The ones who will stay are worth it. They'll see enough to stay. I'll try hard enough.

What will change when I'm gone? My life is swirling in upheaval, excitement, new opportunities, new spaces. Will he reach through the distance? Distance is my killer. I can't love someone distantly. Not anymore. I need warm arms and warm eyes to curl into.

Will it matter when my life is lain out before me, the way I want it? I have wanted this for so long, everything else pales in comparison. Warm arms seem tepid. Constraining.

I'm bursting forward to my future, the one I've wanted, the one I've dreamed of and fought for tooth and nail.

Arms may hold me back.

The Angry Queen

Snow is falling but it melts on my skin. I sizzle. I steam.

I am hot, I am boiling, I am volcanic.

I can feel myself glowing within - not that earthchild warm moon glow; violent sun surface glow, angry vengeful goddess glow, cracking beneath my skin, magma roiling and twisting in thick clumps of liquid stone and heat.

How do I sit here in my pale-wall cubicle with my feet on the chair and coffee in my mug and hide this explosive woman under my surface. How do they not see me burning and flowing?

Phones ring. Keyboards are attacked, the tic-tacking flicking and clicking nails running up my spine.

I want to flee, I want to be a creature. I am not fully human right now. I am churning with memories and sensation and feelings and so, so much heat. Broken hearts and anger and longing and bitterness melting through my veins and I absorb it all and it builds my walls up higher and thicker.

Once I cool there will be nothing but hard hard black stone around me.

I am a goddess of heat and then coldness. I flare and I burn and then I am hard, hard, and dark again. I still myself and try to control the turmoil within. I want to cool and solidify. I want to be cold. I want to be Diana in the woods. The wolf in the forest. Slashing and snapping with my nails and my teeth and my bow, hot and cold, ivory.

I am not comfortable in this real world. I am not made for things like heartache and 401(k)s and old women named Elaine.

I am unspoken words and fast actions. I am predator smelling, hunting, killing, seeking, being, moving, moving, moving against hard dry cold earth and surrounded by hard dry cold walls of black stone.

I'm burning with heat and kinetic frenzy but I sit shivering, fevered.

Are there others like me, moon people, earth people, who feel this? Who shake and vibrate in a world they don't belong to?

I miss my moon person. I was hot sun to his coldness. I fucking hate him. He burned that bridge and I would have let him chill me until I froze and died and disappeared in an igneous sarcophagus. I hate that I know that. Knowing how weak I am sets me on fire and I want to burn into him, reignite the bridge that's nothing but ash. I miss being miserable with him, that undeserving beast. What kind of disaster is that? The queen wolf and the cunning fox, we are not a match, but I sit here with coils of flame and ice within me missing him and his empty words and empty lies and empty face and I want to reach out and be burned just to feel it again.

Snow is falling outside and as I calm, it will fall within, and I will be impenetrable again.

I welcome the coldness.

10-31 Self-fulfilling prophesy

Is it
a self-fulfilling prophesy
that I knew
or thought I knew
or just told myself
or believed, at least
that I am a one-love girl
and I went into the world
looking for that one love
and when my body sang
and my soul connected
and my heart jumped
I knew I was right
in my heart
in my believing
in this one love.

And now
I go back into the world
looking again for one love
when I know
when i believe
in my heart
I found it
but it
did not one-love me.

so how do I go on
looking for this love
that I've been promised
by the movies and the books
and the aunts at holiday dinner
and the friends
who say, you deserve this
(and don't I deserve it?)
(don't I work hard?)
(don't I try to be kind?)
(at least try)?

when I already know
or at least think I know
it's an empty search.
and my tables and chairs
will be cold wood
and I will sit on the porch
with a cat on my lap
and a mug of tea
and sweaters that are gradually eaten by moths
and I will be content.

and i think?
that is okay to me now.

10-30 Dream State

I dreamed about you last night, Dorian.

I dreamed you did all the things you said you would. You traveled the world. You had a strong group of friends. You wrote and explored and bettered yourself as a person.

And I was proud of you.

I watched you grow from a distance, and I was proud that you had finally found your way. I wanted to be a part of it, but I wasn't, and that was okay.

When I woke, I missed you, briefly. I missed that dream person. The one you pretended to be, and had finally become.

I lay in the haze and fuzz of early morning and the memory of the dream faded away to reality.

I remembered how you spoke sharply to me. How no matter what I did, you seemed on-edge. How I became afraid to say anything, or to not say anything, because no matter what I did, to you it was wrong that I was speaking or not speaking, telling or not telling. I couldn't even touch you without some complaint on your part. I touched your face wrong, I stroked your back incorrectly.

How you carried this anger and jealousy inside you and I felt it vibrating like the tines of tuning fork, and how it made my body vibrate and my blood shake and my nerves a tightly wound ball of energy worry and fear.

How you told her how angry and cruel and mad I was, and then came home and crawled into my arms and told me it was the only place you belonged.

What do I miss? There's so little left for me. I was reluctant to give it up for so long, but now I shut my brain down when it starts to chew on your memories. The good ones are gone. The ones in the very beginning, when you were chasing me, when it was fun for you. That was long ago, and they're fading. They've been replaced.

I like that I can say the words on my mind. I like this breathing kind of love. Not love yet, no, far too soon, but the hint of it is there. A suggestion of possibility.

I want a love where I can relax. Where words can flow freely and my blood can move comfortably. I like this level of space. I can orbit, touch base, return to my own movement, and he seems to do the same. I like two lives and two people interacting gently.

I like that he apologizes when he's upset me.

I like that he cares when he's upset me.

10-26

There's a swaying inside me, beneath my flesh and under the ribs where the blood flows hottest. An internal compass tugs me in different directions; I sense my needle spinning and my head waves a bit with vertigo.

To admit I was wrong has been an endeavor. I can admit I am wrong, sometimes. I am wrong about a lot of things. I am wrong about people on occasion. It happens. I want to look beneath and see the goodness, and I let myself be blinded to the rest.

I was wrong about Dorian. That's the truth. It's still so confusing. His face pops up now and again - in my phone, secret photos I saved so I could look at him I now scroll back and delete as the pit of my stomach turns. That smiling face hid so much. It seems so earnest and true, but, as I erase it forever, I must admit that I was misled. A flush of memory and he's next to me, and I'm happy and in love and anxious and foolish and angry, that vortex of emotions he always evoked.

I read texts I saved and everything goes cold again. He was cold to me. He was cruel and selfish. It's so frustrating to think of the potential. I want to shake him and remind him how it was, when he was good to me and I was happy. How could he not see that could have been our Always?

But it's past that. I've said my angry words, I've reacted to his coldness, I've been dealing with his betrayal and coming to terms with how much of what I thought I loved was falseness. He has carried those lies to another; it's no longer my concern that he lies, that he's fickle and faithless and constantly wandering in his fear and self-hatred. He made his choices and I choose not to be discarded and picked back up by someone who would toss me aside.

The new one, that blooming potential love, frightens me. I have to make myself stop, feel the compass spin, and admit it. I'm frightened to be betrayed again. I'm scared to love. I found my One Love, my Big Love, but I was wrong, somehow. My body and my heart betrayed me too, thinking to give themselves to Dorian. My entire existence is at war with what I thought I knew and what I felt and what could be.

Don't they say the best love of your life comes after the biggest mistake?

I stop and I'm scared I'm just being optimistic. Will I let myself be blinded again? He speaks in the slightest way defensively and my guard goes up, recognizing Dorian. What is he hiding, what lies, what manipulations?

He explains, he apologizes. He comforts and compliments. I want to warm to the words but I pull the Tower for him when I ask the world, and I'm frightened to let my walls crumble. What will be the end result? Will my cracked and broken foundations provide the bricks and mortar to rebuild strong, or will I be left devastated once more?

I tell him take it slow, and he does. I have to trust myself and let myself trust another.

Time

They say Time Heals All Wounds but I don't feel the wounds inside me healing. I don't feel new skin growing over the gaps you left, flesh knitting together, tendon rebuilding with thin elastic, bone hardening over with rocky uneven marks to indicate where I once was destroyed. 

Time Fades All Wounds, I think. If you live with a pain long enough, you grow accustomed to it. Your pain threshold changes. Your normal adjusts. 

I'm adjusting. I'm moving around the hole inside me full of distrust and betrayal as if it's not there. 

But I can feel it, grasping, wanting to swallow me. I am shoveling care and gentleness into a never-ending pit, frantic to fill it. I kick dirt over a cavern hoping no one will notice it's there. 

How do I let someone else fill it when you left it so empty?

I'm scared he'll see this emptiness. Not because it will frighten him, but because he could use it against me. I'm on the defensive. I'm angry you did that to me. 

He reacts in the slightest way defensively and my radar screams, run. 

You did that to me. 

I do not want to stand here and try to shield this wound. I want to show him and I want him to tell me it's okay, that he'll stand beside me while I fill it. He'll scoop with the shovel, he'll patch with gauze and ointments. He'll make it go away however it takes. 

But I'm scared, and you did that to me. 

10-24

Moving into the next stage with leaps and bounds.

I have faith in myself. My wings will carry me.

New life. New chances. Leaving the past behind me.

It feels great.

These Men Say

These men they say

    Just trust me

They touch their ears
   Their chins
   Frantic tics
Fingers that fly up
   Denying the words
Or lending them strength?

     Stroking coarse hair on their jaw
Or grooming their eyebrows with the pad of a thumb

   Legs kick
           Involuntarily
    Toes bounce
Within brown loafers with leather tassels
     I think are ugly

That flutter
That telltale rhythm

    I'm not like the others

These men say.
   As their brown eyes melt
   Into a hundred pairs
   A thousand
Blue and green and silver and earnest
    As they preach this gospel

This anthem.

    And we sit.
   Unbelievers.

But we sit in silence.

We are hoping to be proved
   That there is truth
That they are different
    That they are not like the others
       That we can give in

To these wild bright fantasies
    Car rides in the summer
And lasagna dinners on wooden tables
  Warm hands at night
This fantasy where words are what they mean
 
   Where truth is truth.
   And we gain wisdom from each broken love affair
Not bitterness.
   Not coldness or hardness.
      Not that edge to our eyes
         Not that subtle clenching of the jaw
We disguise with a smile
We're prettier when we smile
    So we smile tightly and we pluck
At split ends, at sweater fibers, at the napkin on the restaurant table.
   While his fingers are floating to his face
A face we want to love
   To trust
       To believe
To be different
    From every other face
That sat across from us and spilled lies
              Or truth?

But it is our odyssey to
    decipher
It is our journey
     to learn.

And we sit
    With fake smiles and tight stomachs

   While they are outraged
Or hurt
    Or sad
Or wounded or gentle or disgusted

That we don't drink these words we have heard a hundred, a thousand times,
 
      without worry that we are being slowly poisoned.

10-19 Freedom

I'm finding the freedom in my life. I'm making choices and standing by myself.

I'm playing the romantic, the optimist. I'm letting his words be truth. I'm shutting down the quiet voice in my head that wonders when, and how, he will betray me.

The words don't send quivers in my gut. His truths feel true. My internal compass doesn't twang and spin out of junction with what he says.

Time will tell.

I am ready to move to the next phase.

I am ready to wake up happy and excited. To go back to taking joy in everything. Little things that fill me with bubbles of happiness, like making coffee in the morning, putting gas in the car. A comfortable bed, animals on me. Books on the table. A small plant in the window. I never thought I would have these things and I will never not enjoy how much I have now.

It's time for the next step.

It's time to be strong and brave. To choose a life I want. To make my decisions with a voice that doesn't quake.

I'm ready to stretch forward. To take on more, to trust myself. To trust another. I play out fantasies in my head, in my new space, with a new man, with a new job, and they vibrate between beauty and terror until I halt myself and shake the shadows out.

I will try, and trying is good enough. I will grow, and growing slowly is good enough. I am scared, I am excited, I am elated.

I am ready.

10-17

The door is closed, capturing body heat and the pervasive odor of weed which strikes me as we step back inside and discretely - as discrete as we can be, walking through the center of a small room - make our way back to the table.

There's a strange tenseness in the room, a tight sense of connectivity that I rarely find. It's an interwoven intensity, people knitted together, healing like shattered tendons and bone, sending out hard calcified spurs to draw their pieces together.

I cannot see the speakers well from my angle, but I can see the room, and I am always more interested in watching the room anyway. Tables are full, the bar is full and everyone along the rail sits in the same half-turned position, elbows akimbo awkwardly behind them. From my location they appear almost interlocked. Vertebrae in a spine colored with plaid flannel, bowties, and flesh.

Some of them nod when the speaker unleashes their strongest words, some clap, some snap, and I feel a little silly, like I am sitting in on a scene that is not for me. I've stumbled into the 1960's and I am not socially responsible enough to join, not passionate enough, not loud enough, not creative enough, not unsure enough, or too sure, maybe.

But these strangers who sit at the same angle, their very bodies speak of connection, and I know I am not unwelcome with my cotton candy hair and quiet observations, because these are people who, in every piece of themselves from their skeleton to their tongue, want to connect to others. It's a vibrant room of grasping connection.

They give and take with words, with snaps and head nods, and their bodies encourage and support, fall quiet when words are strong, fall quiet when words are weak, and I feel their silent respect for the weak words because there's something to appreciate in anyone who stands before a room and drops words from their mouth that pull you into their mind. Neurons are flaring all around me, flashes of information transfer. He is sad. She is sad. She is angry. He is angry.

We sit and absorb the chemicals around us, taking in these strangers and becoming them. I become them and, strangely, I feel an urge to give them some of myself in return. I wonder if that's selfish, to hear their words and to want to return with my own. It's interruption, it's my overexcitement, it's a lesson I'm still learning - when to not speak.

But we are oozing into one another, and I feel that my voice might be welcomed. Appreciated for its own quiet strength. Me too, we say. We are all hurt, we have all been touched or hit or leered at or broken with words and now we take our own words and we rebuild ourselves. We are cells in a body that smells like marijuana and onion rings and unwashed hair. We are a teeming hive of organisms, a biome of sadness and suffering and rage that charges the air around us as our silent electric signals chase from one to another and we forget whose suffering is whose and whose anger is whose because we are all sad, we are all angry, we are all fighting the same fight.

The woman behind the bar has a beautiful face, thick thighs and dreadlocks, unassuming blondes with curled hair, there are men wandering who look homeless with their long beards but stand behind the microphone and capture the crowd, there are thin girls in lace dresses and dark-skinned men with newsboy caps and glasses, then there is me with my cotton-candy unicorn hair. We are all the same person. We are pulsing and surging as one and I forget to feel autonomous as I get swept up in the flow.

10-16

I woke up fresh and dehydrated from alcohol and chicken wings that burned my lips, already chapped from stress and chewing on them nervously, they're red and tender.

It's like a fever broke. I'm tired, my head hurts, but god, I feel good. I am almost Me again.

I cried again last night but it wasn't because I missed Dorian. It feels so good not to miss him. It's a feeling I thought I'd never reach, but here I am, and all I feel is a vague disgust and contempt. I'm still angry, I still lash, but it's not because I want to hear him come back. I no longer want to settle for hard words because they're words. I am not scrambling for his worthless meaningless scraps.

How does that feel, Dorian? Knowing I don't want you. You invite me over, you fickle faithless lover, and I have no compulsion to go to you. No hesitation, no memories of your hands on my body temping me. Only disgust.

But you're her problem now. She'll learn, as we all did. I wonder how she'll feel toward me, when she realizes I bled for her and wanted to warn her. She ignored it, you ignore her, and frankly, I could not care less anymore if you two spiral down and break. I hope you do.

I cried because listening to my friend speak my truth back to me both hurt and healed. It's strange to hear yourself from another perspective. To have someone you trust tell another, she has been wounded, she has been struggling, but it is good to see her growing strong again.

It's strange sometimes to know people See me and Know me and Understand me. I am so, so lucky that I have people around me who care to Understand me. That stood by me while I dragged myself and struggled for months, and who rejoice to see me standing again.

Their pride and their patience seeps into me and makes me warm and unworthy. I want to hurry forward and be myself again, so I can be strong and helpful and not have to lean, lean, on everyone. To regain control of my mouth so I do not push and snap at people who do not deserve it. I was patient and warm once too, I was calm and sensitive.

I've been broken since I met you but you took no pieces with you, and I am rebuilding. I will be more vibrant, stronger, and less inclined to fall for a fool child's bullshit.

I'm not there yet, but I'm close, and I'm so, so ready to be done with you and your mind games and the childish contempt and attitude you always seem to draw me into.

You made choices. You'll go on in life to blame others always, to excuse yourself, but you're rotten at the core, you're spoiled meat and a portrait in the attic and the Devil with a kind face.

You love, or loved me. That's the truth you'll have to accept one day. Go seek me in others, go break their shells open and sort through their yolk and leave them sticky and broken on the ground. You'll never find me and you'll never have me again. You chose that. You're the worst of all fools, trying to escape loving me. I have others who know that I am someone to love with pride and care, not fear, not distrust. You shut the door on us and I think one day you'll be hammering to come back in.

While I used wish I could watch you break down, I don't think I care anymore. You've captured yourself in your own web, and I won't be looking behind to watch you slowly desiccate.

And god, that feels so good.

10-15 Early Hot Mornings

I'm rolling in heat

Hot blankets and warm skin

Humid air through the crack

Between the window and the sill

Leaving beads of atmosphere

Over my naked skin

Mingling with salted wet pores

Saliva from your tongue

Melts into the moisture

In the curve of my neck

In the skin on my thighs

There are pools in the deep curve

Of my spine and hips

Sticky warmth under my breasts

Catches your moving fingers

Arresting them

A blessing/ a mercy/ a curse

To my burning liquid form.

To The Men Who Love Me

To The Men Who Love Me

Do not come to me
With half-formed ideas
Of love and romance
And trust and honesty.

Do not lay your hopes before me
Misshaped balls of clay
Pressed into what you assume
Is some semblance of what love is
Or could be
Or looks like.
Maybe.

Do not ride my wake
While crying out
That I move too fast
I am too hard to follow
My waters are too rough
As you dip under.

Do not come to me
Thinking I will calm my nature
To meet your needs
To help you grow
To show you things
To take your hand and walk you
Through this lovely world
And stop to point out
The names and leaves
And stars
And colors
And tell you
How to trust and love
How to take me honestly
How to follow me
Or lead
Or be peaceful where you stand.

I am not here to teach
I am not the one
Who holds your shaking hand
And makes it still
Who takes your childish
Uncertain thoughts
And gives them substance.

I am the fast waters
I am the bright sun
I am sharp grass
I am lessons learned
I am not your soft tutor
I am not here to give
My time
To you
To help you grow.

Men who would love me:
Love me strong
And fearlessly
And take some care
Because being strong
Does not mean being hard
Walk beside me
Walk behind
Walk afore
You are a man
And I do not care where you walk
I care where I stand
In relation.

Men who love me:
Challenge me
Give me words that are
Fierce
And kind
And full of depth
And meaning
And honesty
I will glow bright
With my own light
And that light
Will shine on you
I will grow and bloom
Beside you
And you will grow and bloom
Beside me
And neither one of us
Need feed
Off the other.

10-13

My limbs are limp. There's a loosening between my shoulders.

I'm not sure how to take it. It's a nice feeling. It's an awareness of my body I'm unused to sensing. Something has been unwound. Pieces within me, tight and sharp, that barbed wire in my spine, are relaxing.

I think it might be nice to be touched.

I don't recoil at the idea. I think maybe I would not shy away from hands right now.

Maybe this is me moving on.

I ask my cards if I'll ever recover and they say no. In no uncertain terms.

It's disappointing but not surprising. I loved once. I always knew I would be a woman who only loves once.

I would have preferred to be a woman who never loved.

I ask if I'll love again and it's not optimistic.

But there will be others. I'll let him touch me. There will be more. I'll let them put their hands between my scapula bones and stroke and release the tension there, let them touch my jaw and my hair but not my neck because the memory of hard hands on my neck will always linger.

It may not be the wild, strange, angry overwhelming love I felt before, but I think that will be better. I would like a love that does not burn me out, lighter fluid on coals, a flash, a flare, a violence that leaves me cold and empty.

I remember how loving him made my lungs tight and my body tense with panic and anxiety and so much angry love I didn't know what to do with it so it solidified within me, and I do not miss that. I am loose now. I can bend and adjust and move, and I can form my body around another. I was ice, I was bronze, I was cement, and now I am fluid like a slow-moving river, muddied but determined.

Time heals wounds but so does willingness, and I want to heal. I want to flow on and drown that poison love in my current.

10-12

I can't sleep again. I'm becoming that inhuman person who is always tired but can never rest, the ones people worry about. People are worrying about me lately. I don't know how to say I'm just soul-sick and a few good nights asleep would help, a few days of nothingness would cure me.

I take four pills and hope for the best, quietly wondering, in that distant it-won't-really-but-what-if that constantly lives in my brain, if they'll kill me. I wonder what they'd say on finding my body.

A youngish insomniac with a foul mouth was found dead this morning, lying in a pool of her own dark roots and multi-colored hair. A preliminary search of her computer found an excessive amount of half-finished novels, photos of her pets, and an uncompleted brewery tour itinerary. Her employer called her "quiet," in fact too quiet, perhaps even anti-social, as he stressed the importance of networking. Her close friends and acquaintances say she was frequently in an exhaustion haze and canceled plans often. One lone sex toy and an unused condom were found close to the scene. No foul play is suspected.

The pills do the trick and I sleep (I do not die - or perhaps this is my purgatory, continuing on to go into work in the mornings, continuing to write with uninspired determination, continuing to find a mixture of neutrality and annoyance and contentment with my existence). I can't wake myself up however, and I find Dorian in my mind.

I think he's been lurking again because it's her turn to hurt. You left your mess for us to clean up, Dorian. She has picked me up and sorted through my trash, and though I still cringe and my stomach clenches because she makes it real, it's her chance to come to me. I have to fight my instinct to plug my ears and wish it all away, because I am a creature of fairness. It's her turn to heal and I have to try harder to help even if it makes me feel sick and dizzy. How selfish you are, walking away from the melted fractured messes you make of good women. How lucky that good women want to reach out and help others. You choose only the highest quality of hearts to break.

You're there in my dream and your friends are speaking for you. Forgive him. He's sorry.

They don't know what all you've done, and I scream it at them, in high notes, but it's a dream so my voice is strong and does not break and I do not cry, but I tell them what you did, and they're horrified (they deserved to know the truth). But they say, look at him, look how sorry he is.

I know it's a dream because you are sorry. I've never seen you sorry before. It's always been my fault to you. My madness, my anger, my unjustified discontentment, you've pushed them away from you and handed the burden back to me. But in my dream your face is red and anguished and there are tears on your cheeks. I thought I was forgetting your face, but my memory has the details down, and I'm disgusted that I've missed that face.

You're sorry and so I let you follow me, I let you kiss me like you mean it, and because it's a dream, I forgive you and we can start over.

But because it's my mind, and the truth is buried in there, it becomes real again. You hide things from me, you pull away. You kiss me to make me forget that something is wrong. You blame me. I dream of cutting hot peppers that burn my hands while you sit at my grandmother's kitchen table, twitchy and angry, and tell me I just need to trust you, while your lies are strewn all over my grandmother's linoleum floor and spill out of your phone and your mouth and your eyes and my fingers are on fire.

In my dream I leave and come back again, leave and come back again, and I'm reliving the living nightmare of how you broke me slowly but surely.

I wake lonely and cold and drugged.

There are white teeth and warm smiles waiting for me. There are patient hands and gentle words. Arms that want to wrap around me, but give me my space, because you destroyed me, and I need to be fair. To myself, to love.

I swim in and out of the medicated state, desperate to wake up, determined to leave your face behind me in the unconscious where it will lie forgotten until the next night I'm unlucky enough to be haunted and wounded all over again.

10-11

It's strange to feel myself coming back and realize how far gone I've been.

A veil has lifted. The fog is clearing. I look around and realize the damage I've done to my life while I was walking through the haze, and it's time to set about cleaning the mess.

I am sharp and smart again. I am present. I am passionate. I feel guilt for the relationships I've let falter, for the chaos I've let build up, but I will take care of it.

I do the things that make me happy. That make me feel present. I mix scented oils in a cup until they make me close my eyes and smile. I walk the night with my little shadow girl, who has noticed my return, I think, and can't get enough of me, can't let me out of her sight, can't sleep close enough at night. It's nice to know I've been missed.

I do yoga because I'm tired of drinking away my stress, and my body is lax as I lay on clean sheets, and I make myself present and notice I am relaxed. I am not sad, I just am. It's a brick in the wall, a step forward. Growth.

Around me I have relationships to repair, but I've built them strong, and they'll survive this. I have new ones to build, ones that frighten me, but I am a wild creature and I trust myself to stand and fight for them. Are they worth fighting for?

The doubt is what angers me. The doubt he put in me I now use to punish others.

I won't live a life where I can't grow and trust because of one heart error. I won't punish others for his sins, where is the fairness in that? I am a creature of fairness. I am a strong ever-moving creature. I will tidy this, I will rebuild, I will regain.

I sleep and dream of sharks in the water, but I will not let them take me under.

10-3 Soothing Rituals

I can settle my mind by thinking of all the things I have learned.

I calm my breathing. I relax the muscles in my chest and abdomen, clenched tight and smothering me.

I think back to who I was when I was a skinny, nervous child. My grandmother showing me how to press dough into the flour on the table while I pretended, half-heartedly, to watch.

I was not a girl who would Do Things. I scoffed at doing things.

When my grandmother died, I lost those things. So much fell away with her. Things she had tried to pass onto me, and I had scoffed. I lost that connection to her. I had lost my chance.

They made fun of me for the way I cut apples, but I persisted. I made crumble and crisps. I leaned painstakingly over the counters and I sliced through the resistant skins. The finished products looked ridiculous, but people ate them. In the back of my throat and nose I could sense her there with me when I did these things. When I tried to cross the bridge I had neglected. When I cook now, aptly and always swallowed with happiness, I still feel her.

I think of when I was smaller and the basement smelled like wood and laundry, and my father would work with tools I didn't know the names of, but, as an adult, I still recognized. He would let me hammer scrap wood together with nails sometimes.

When the wood burns or the dust floats in the air, I remember the few times my father was patient with me, and when he gave me freedom to experiment. The haphazard items I would make with splintered pieces of wood, mere hints of tables and sorry mimics of shelves. The duck decoys in the basement that scared and fascinated me. The forbidden enjoyment of being allowed in his shop (accompanied). The delicious way the wood smells.

When my fingers move over the fabric, I think of how my mother used to make things, and the whirring of her machine.

I took pride in being the girl who Does Not Do Stuff for so long, but it bubbled up in me. I make things now and I connect to my past. I am capable. I am brave. I feel them behind me, ghosts and memories, and I feel supported.

When I am scared, I close my eyes and think of all the things I have learned this year - things I taught myself. If I have done so much so quickly, what can't I do?

10-2

Sometimes I feel I am playing a game with myself.

Children look at flash cards. Children watch television and recite words and lean too close over their mothers to stare at pages and follow her slim finger on the lines.

I am playing a game, too, to learn. To learn who I am.

I knew once, but he made me forget. I have been fuzzy and hazy in my mind. I am coming back into focus, but I am not the same, I don't think. Similar, but changed. I have not yet discovered if I have been made softer or harsher by this experience. I do not know what is different, only that something is new.

She builds walls, my friend is explaining to another. I like the way she talks back and forth of personal things between us. She is explaining us to one another, building a connection so we don't have to, and it's strange and exciting to hear about myself (though I am not so certain I want to be known as the woman who builds walls). She's explaining my struggles. She's telling her friend how I let my walls fall for him, and got swept away in the flood. I feel bad for myself, hearing that. I feel sad for the guarded girl who let her walls drop and got burned.

But she is not me anymore.

I paddle through the water, going farther than I have before. Why not? Who is waiting for me? Who can stop me? My shoulder blades shake with the effort, but I want to be strong again. There are birds everywhere - gulls and ducks of a variety of colors, passing through as they move to warmer climes. An eerie heron and swans I avoid warily (but they avoid me too), and even a eagle that makes multiple failed attempts to snatch fish from the water and retreats to sulk in the branches of a pine.

I am a girl who wants to know the names of the ducks.

I make a note in my mind. This is who I am. I cross-check, reference. Not new. That is who I was.

I pull up the kayak in the still areas where weeds have retarded the flow of water and grown into their own swamp. Duckweed layered on top hosts fast-moving bugs, and feathers in a multitude of colors and sizes and shapes from the migrating birds have caught up in between the delicate round pieces. I pull them from the water and save them. I will use them for something, or they will dry up and float away. I scan through my head. Not new.

A part of me feels strangely observed in this ritual. Somewhere along the lines I started to weigh my actions against what he would think. I pull the feathers from the water because I want to, but I wonder what he would think of it. I can't keep track of what is mine, anymore. I have to rediscover.

There's no one here, there's no one watching me watch the reeling birds and stir the stagnant ecosystem with the edge of my nails, so I assume that must be who I am. I feel a little contrived. Am I trying too hard to be this girl?

I remember it does not matter. I examine my motives, and they're for me alone. I do not care if someone sees me, I do not care what he would think, or another. No one is here; I am doing this for me. I can be a stereotype so long as that's who I truly am.

Squinting at words on the page, learning them. I have to become reacquainted with myself, and apparently that means I must question everything.

I make choices and I feel brave, even when they are small, because they're mine again.

9-29

It must be raining. There's a gentle noise coming in through the window, like lightly crumpling paper. The cat is pressing his paws into me, one by one, just slowly enough that it toes the line between comforting and irritating. I'm not overly responsive to his requests for attention at two a.m. and sleepily demand he stop, but he purrs and presses, and I'm just on that line where I decide I don't really care after all so he carries on.

There's a comfortable aura in the room and I don't mind being awake even though it is two a.m., because my body feels lax and warm and I like being up to listen to the rain. It will be gone by morning, the pavement will be dry, but I will know that I communed with nature at two a.m. and things were different for her then.  She was open and vulnerable, cleansing herself to make way for the sun, and she let me hear.

I have made way for the sun in me too. It took too long. I've leaned hard on others and become a burden, but I am ready to stand now. I feel guilt for making them care for me, and I feel love and renewed strength and I am ready to be myself again and care for them. That is who I am, not the leaner. I want to open my wings and protect but I suppress my urges to meddle, to mother, to push push push (unless I think they need to be pushed) and try to stand calm and supportive and learn what is needed from me. That is how I grow. That is how they grow.

That panicked urgency he unleashed in me is fading and I am myself again and I do not need to fight, only protect. I must let them have their battles, but I will stand guard as needed. That is how I grow. That is how they grow.

I am letting go of it. I am letting go of him; no more grasping, no more fear as this fades. No more clinging to memories. What's left? Why do I clutch at it?

He leaves my body and my blood and it makes way for new things and old things. Old strength, new comfort and faith, old freedom and desire to love and trust. I am not a girl who reaches, but when someone reaches for me I am there, I want to always be there. That is who I am. I want to be better every day. I want to be someone who is reached for.

My body feels so calm and I hope it lasts. Fleeting concerns swell into me from time to time. My mood flips and I am That Person again, frantic and selfish and grasping at things that do not serve me, but for now I push my mind inside and appreciate my stillness, my slow heart, my loose muscles. I must be kind to myself, I must be gentle when I err, but it is time to be strong again. I must open my wings to myself as well and protect that fragile woman, because she has been through enough, and I am tired of seeing her hurting.

9-28 Writing Prompt

I have nothing to apologize for.

You blamed me for shutting the door

Because I knew in my core

You weren't worth me.


I have nothing to apologize for.

Except coming back for more

Letting you continue to bore

Was beneath me.


I have nothing to apologize for.

My heart's coated in gore.

My dreams you ripped apart and tore

And you want an apology?

9-28

Taking the plunge.

That's what all this hard work has been for after all, right? To get where I wanted.

I've been scratching my way up for a long time, and now I'm at the top. I'm scared to fall backwards, but now's the time to take the chance.

I'm choosing good. I'm choosing small and simple, art, making the world a better place, crying and worrying because not enough people do. I choose to make a small and simple life. I'm happy with that. I'm happy with my choices and I'm only a little frightened to fall.

My body was warm and textured and soft like the tines of a feather as I lay in bed, and I realized it was because my heart was beating slowly. My muscles were relaxed. I did not lie there in a panic. I did not tense and worry. Is this how other people feel? Like the back of their neck blends into their spine and is not wires wrapped around glass? Like their organs are in harmony, not struggling to be autonomous?

What a strange small pleasure most people hardly notice.

I am choosing good, and I have faith I can make it work. I can adapt and adjust and I know now I have the determination to survive no matter what happens.

My heart beats slowly and I know I'm making the right choice. I do not chew the inside of my lips and cheeks until they bleed. I do not sit rigid. I roll over in the bed, delighting at how limber and limp my limbs feel, and I smile and choose good because at my core I am good, and I am happy with small and simple.

9-26

I wrote you a story on the way but I outwalked it. I left it behind me with my shoes in the sand. 

I sit at the end of the pier and remember how you kissed me like you had to kiss me. That was a part of the story. How you kissed me like you'd die if you didn't. And I am a girl who does not like to be kissed or touched without expectation and I was so glad when you kissed me because I thought I would die if you didn't.

Then I wonder who else you have kissed like you couldn't stop yourself, and the brilliant memory fades. I don't have many left, these days. 

I took your hand that first night, do you remember? I lay my head on your shoulder in the rain. I am not a girl who touches. Did you know that when I reached for you? I wonder if you knew that I had never reached for someone's hand before, if that would have meant more to you.

I was writing you a story, a beautiful tragedy, my story, but I walked very far and the cool lake air is blowing it from my mind and leaving only traces. 

I want to look at the timeline and see the mark in black ink where you decided you didn't love me. Somewhere between that time I reached for your hand, and that day I told you I missed you more than anything, you marked the page.

You decided you would go on to love others. Slim girls who love poems and girls with bright whore lips who love music and more - who will they be? What image will they fit for you? What image did I fit - who were you for me, who was I to you?

Somewhere in that timeline you decided my story didn't matter. Where did that happen? Because I never stopped being the girl who reached for you. The girl who fled love wanted to go to war for you. I want to ask you why. It's in my mind from waking to sleeping. Why? Why did I cease to matter?

Would you have been callus if you could have been in my mind? If you felt my insides too when you marked the page with black ink and reached inside and twisted and turned and plucked and pulled because you were bored (I guess?) and it became a game to you. If you could have felt the way everything in me swelled when you sometimes reached for me too, or when you turned to see where I was when I was behind you, or when I kissed the moles on your neck, could you have done that?

You decided I was not your story and so I did not matter, but this story was a girl who does not love but she reached for you that night. It was a beautiful story- a hard one maybe - but my mind reels that you did not see its beauty and importance. That you did not nurture it so it could bloom in a thousand colors. What a gift I tried to give you, Dorian, how could you never see what I was offering?

It is dark and the corn-silk colored moon is slim as your other girls in the sky, and there is a cloud of silence around me. I am a ghost, I can move unseen and quiet and barefoot. I have words in my mind but the wind is blowing them away. Masts are creaking in the water and they are me, they are a part of this, they disguise my silent passing. In the safety of being unseen I am myself again. I sit and stare into the endless water, splashed with moon, and think of all the things beneath and I feel strong, not frightened. 

I am a night creature and this is mine. I am the water, I am the dark and the moon, I am the creaking masts and a million hot particles in the air; how stupid you were to think so little of me when I am the whole night. 

I felt bad for the girl in my story as I walked here, but I walked farther than my sadness, and I am too much wild to be sad when I am free and the breeze is blowing you away. For a moment I wish you were here, being quiet and steady and strong with me, but you wrote yourself a new story to get away, and I like my calm soft night's tale too much to leave it. 

9-26

Just like that, it's gone.

A huge burden that I have carried with me, and pushing always up the hill like Sisyphus. In thirty seconds, eliminated.

Who can I be, now?

This is the year I invested in myself. This has been a year of risks. I tried love and being stupid and being honest and being open and being vulnerable (it was terrible); I started a new career where I feel in way over my head day in and day out and I struggle consistently but I take home thick checks and I have insurance that pays for pills that keep the weight in my chest and my shaking feet and hands under control; I took money and I moved it around and I put it into myself, because it's time to start believing I am worth it, and, lo, some of that money is starting to come back to me because maybe I really am worth it.

This has been a year of growth. I am not who I was when it started. I am excited to see who I am when it ends.

The steps are lain out for me now, and I can see for once they're attainable. Independence. A home. Stability. Friendship. Love. Rest?

It's there, and I edge over them carefully, trying to be patient, trying to keep my footing. I've rushed in the past and I've tumbled over, but I am learning to be cautious- lightly, my darling, lightly- and I move forward.

My excuses have been stripped away and there's some level of anxiety there. Will I fail again? Will I fall back on bad habits?

I pause and look into my options, I weigh them, I step carefully and slowly. Who will I be when the bad habits are gone, when the burdens I've carried with me are no longer weighing me down? I already feel so light and strong. I may be unstoppable.

9-25

My fingers are fast and twitchy with potential.

I hate waiting. Things are falling into place but I hate waiting for them. My future is there and I itch to reach out and grab it, to skip forward.

Waiting builds character. I don't know. I think I probably have enough character. Too much, even. I'm rich in characters.

I want Instant Pleasure. I want to see my life lain out before me. I want to leap ahead to my autonomy and my own authority where I live how I want to and I am at no one's mercy and I make my own choices and I make my own things and in that I build my own life.

All the pieces are around me and they're beautiful and promising. Sun hits them and they dazzle and I am nervous to reach out and take them; they seem too good to be true. I've been in the cave so long the brightness blinds me, but I edge toward the warmth.

Is this what I've been fighting for, all these years of struggling and discovering and experimenting? Have I reached the end?

Then what?

Can I please rest?

I want to sit in the autumn sun on the drying grass and appreciate what's around me. I want to close my eyes and breathe and feel secure. I haven't been still. I haven't felt calm. Briefly, I was able to rest, asleep on his chest, curled up next to him, but that became another war and I'm exhausted, my sanctuary crumbled.

I'm scared to stop. Things click and turn silver with promise and my determination only grows.

He says, sometimes I think you'd break through the wall instead of going around it.

He's right. Damn.

I pause, I collect myself, I close my eyes and picture that moment in the sun when I can sit and my head can be quiet and my body can be still, and I tell myself to be patient, because the wall will fall if I give it time.

9-24

She calls it compounded grief, but I call it exhausting.

I don't want to talk about it anymore. I change the subject. She lets me. I'm lucky to have her.

I am a new person, with bright hair and new roles and a new life and things are good for me. Things are so beautiful. I am tired of talking about my grief. Fuck grief.

I have pulled hands from my throat. I have slept in a tent made of blankets in a rain storm. I have wiped human shit from the floor. I have struck out to defend myself. I have curled leather and metal in my hands as a weapon. I have thought I would die, once, twice, too many times to count, and I did not die, because I fight.

I don't care how much of my life's grief is compounding - I am sick of it, because this is no longer my life. Grief is nothing compared to what I have survived. Fuck my grief. I fought with words and with nails and with fists and with education and by shutting myself off to the words that were killing me and here I stand, and fuck it entirely.

Who would look at me and know what I have come through? It's hidden under a crooked smile and new white hair and a career and motivation and ambition and cool smooth words and I will keep it there, quiet, suppressed, until one day I forget who I was and where I came from and how fucking hard it is to sleep some nights with all of the ghosts that chase me.

I walk in the dark and I hate my smile and I hate my crooked eyes and nose and I pull the new words around me that I have been given. Special. Memorizing. Fascinating. They're beautiful words. I picture myself and my nervous crooked smile and they don't fit. I wonder if they'd seen me crouched over a body I knew was dying, wide white eyes, tense fingers, if they would think the same of me. If they'd seen me rage, throw bottles of pills, beg for an ending, strike out, fight, shake with fright and rage, if they'd call me beautiful words or if they'd recoil in horror or maybe pity or maybe both depending on the day.

Compounded grief. The weight of all of my life, crushing down now upon me. She's right and I hate it.

How fucking terrible. Now, when things are so beautiful and bright and I sleep with the light off without fear, and someone touches me with patience and gentleness and lets me pull away when I need to, and when people open their arms and I know I can go into them and it will be okay, okay, now this is when the weight of my horrible fucking life hits me?

Fuck it.

No, I carry on. This one stupid ridiculous blip in my violent urgent timeline does not define me. I pause and let hands linger, adjusting. I fight my fear of being touched and held. I lean into warm bodies. I listen to their beautiful words because I fought for those words. I fought to be more than nothing. I fought to be more than what they raised me to be and I have come so much further than they, than I, ever imagined, and I will continue on and on and I will grow until they are nothing behind me. Their hard hands and their cruel words are nothing.

Who am I? Who was I?

It doesn't fucking matter. I am now. I am me. I fight and I fight and I fight for the day I can rest.

9-24

It's leaving my body. I no longer feel sick and weak. I no longer shake and sleep.

Some part of me clings to it. It has been who I am now, for the better part of a year and a half. The girl who is sad over you. The depressed waif who wails and walks the halls at night. The one who lacks all self control and self respect. The one who makes excuses for you. The one who lets herself act like a fool because, for a while, it feels amazing, before that inevitable drop.

I don't know why I would want to hold onto that. My body still glows and burns like embers and I miss your touch, but your poison has left my body and I think what I felt for you goes with it and my body will turn to ash soon, untended.

I'm acknowledging the greatest tragedy in my oft-tragic life. This was my happy ending, my silver lining, my proof that all of my struggles were not in vain.

And this is how it ended.

But it ended. It's done. You made sure I couldn't come back to you this time.

And I am moving on. I am moving on to laughter and acceptance, to affection and touch. I am opening myself up to being soft again. I have energy and hope. I trust myself, I'm beginning to trust others again. I see other endings, that I did not anticipate, and they are a rising sun of promise and warmth as I wake cold from the death I have been living.

9-22

I wonder if I'll ever stop missing you.

Missing what? I want to shake my shoulders.

Who are you? Who are you now, for her? I hear stories of who you were for the doe-eyed poet, and I don't recognize you in them. Are you someone else now, and do you like that person better? Are you a good man who prays at night and loves his mother and has asked forgiveness for all his sins?

For how long?

You run and run but you still find yourself looking in the mirror at the end of the day.

I miss who you were for me. I thought that was you, but maybe I was wrong? And I'm wrong. I miss who you were when you felt like it. When you kissed me honestly and I felt loved. When you wanted to hear me talk. When you drove out late and spent the night and drove out early just so you could see me for a little while and lay beside me.

Was that you, or did you simply know I was looking for a man who would drive out to lay beside me? Who walks barefoot and tries all the beer and makes silly songs and jokes and loves his cats and sitting outside in the grass. How could you lie to me about who you were and be everything I wanted, when I didn't know it all until I met you?

My brain spins. Who was I, and who were you, and what were we? Why do I feel empty now when all you did beside me was take from me? Who are you and who is she? Why was I not enough, when you sapped me of everything I had? What will she give you? Will she make you a good man?

I lie awake in the dark and my body burns hot with missing you and missing your touch and your smell, but I remember that those hands were touching others and I shudder to think that they meant something to me.

Time will cool my body. Time will heal my mind. It slows, from time to time, and I forget to mourn you, whoever you are. I remember that I was and am whole, and you never will be. I flood with rage and then sadness, and I hope she breaks your selfish heart into small jagged pieces and you understand what your thoughtless way of handling me did because you feel it just as deeply.

I lay my hand on my chest and I feel my warmth and the curve of my breast and the strong heart that beats underneath the skin and interlaced bones and I know I can only be patient and wait to forget the feeling of your hands and lips and the sound of your laugh and I pull the betrayal around me as protection. I will wait, and you will fade, and I will survive in this cocoon of reminders.

Will I stop missing you?

9-21

I walk in the dark and I cry, but it's no longer hopeless tears and tragedy; it's infection leaving the wound; it's poison bleeding out. I have so much to get rid of within me, I can't seem to move on until it's gone so I walk the familiar path and I let it ooze out. It poured out in words, it pours out in saline tears that wash my eyes clean.

I feel like too much, my sadness is leaching out around me. It's getting boring. I'm boring them, I'm boring myself. I say the words over and over and I cry and I think, I must be done now, but the next morning there's more, and I try to pack it into my body and compartmentalize it but it's a heavy padded mess and it won't stay neat.

It's no longer something I want to deal with. I want to shove it aside and forget it. I want to stop forcing others to hold my hand and help me through. I am tired of this. I am tired. I am exhausting myself chasing my words in circles trying to make sense of it, and I cannot, so I spit the words onto others and let them pick over them, but I am dissatisfied still, and so I walk in the dark and cry and try to shut the words off because I am so so sick of them and they will never make sense to me.

9-20

I have always been afraid.

As a child I slept with a wide flat light plugged in beside the bed, to ward off the things I couldn't see. The things I couldn't see, I imagined, and my imagination has always been unguarded and wild.

I was frightened of things I did see, undisguised in the light. My father's angry fists striking through walls and doors, or falling on the ribs of my brothers as I sat in still shock and did not know what to do because I was a child and the parent must be obeyed so what he was doing had to be right even though it did not feel right.

I was frightened of my brother too, in different ways. I was frightened of his attention and his ridicule, wondering what mood he would be in, whether he would love me and perhaps even be kind and play a game with me, or if he would be jeering, feeding me candy coated with salt or encouraging me to jump off the treehouse, or pinching the sides of my body and telling me I was getting fat and no one loved me.

Once as a little child I was very sick, sick enough that I could not go to the Titanic exhibit which, even then, was strangely crushing. I read children's books by Robert Ballard and stared with wonder at a pair of boots buried in the sand, their inhabitant eaten away by time and sea water and fish. I wanted to see this marvel, this destruction, the pieces of memory that remained from a tragedy that took so many from their boots. I wanted to see what was left of them and try to learn who they were, so they were not forgotten. I have always been frightened of being forgotten.

But I was sick. My father and brothers went without me, and my mother sat with me over a hot bucket as I breathed in steam with a towel over my head and cried because my body hurt and my throat was on fire and I was so tired and I wanted to see the Titanic exhibit.

When I slept that night, the wide flat light cast the shadows of skeletons on the wall above my head. They danced and laughed, disregarding me, but still they frightened me. I tried to cover my eyes but the darkness was worse - large gaping mouths - I preferred the merry skeletons. It was a fever dream, perhaps, or a hallucination, but I cried and I was afraid, and I am sure I scared my mother with my talk of seeing dead things dancing above me.

I don't remember when I stopped being afraid of the things in the dark. Adulthood settled in on me. Reality settled in. I slept with the light on because I was more afraid of my real life. Something sharp under the pillow, a phone nearby. How could I be afraid of things that don't exist when a true monster lived rooms away?

I became frightened of other things. Of proving people wrong, of being disliked, of failing. Of people finding out that I slept with a knife under my pillow and I knew what red and blue lights in the dark look like. That I have struck out to defend myself ,and I have thrown bottles of pills at the monster that haunted me and taunted him to take them so I could finally be free of the fear and the humiliation and the constant constant wondering when the moon would rise full and he would turn.

Those memories are finally fading, though I will never be free of them. I can only build myself a new life, where these secrets are not my shame. Where I admit that I lived frightened like a small animal and yet I survived. I have a foundation around me and it is new but strong. I do not have to be the frightened girl anymore.

I drag them with me, now, fighting their pull. I make nine cakes in two days because I am scared to ruin a cake. I can't be the girl who can't bake a cake. I can't be the girl who fails at something so simple as a cake.

I shake my shackles and I pull harder. I pick up the paintbrush and the pen, I mix sticky resin in a cup and I spill it on myself and I smell like chemicals, but I brace myself and I push forward.

It is hard to be gentle to myself. I want to ignore the things I carry with me so badly. I want to sleep, comatose, until I wake and all my lessons have been learned, but that is not life. Life is messy and frightening and bloody and bright and brilliant and I will not move forward unless I let myself feel it.

So I cry into the pillow and the dog, I wipe resin off my pants. I tell myself it is okay to make just one cake even if it is not the best cake.

I blink fast to rid myself of the pressing urgency to be perfect, perfect and tell myself I have nothing to fear.

9-19

When I am sitting still my restless hands have little to do but hunt out ways to reach out to hurt you.

Things are boiling within. I want to unleash them, but then I'm proving you right. I lash out, I regret, I retreat, I fill up with steam once more.

The unfairness. The injustice. I roil with anger at it. That you think you can just leave this path behind you and choose another. That you can turn away from the consequences of your choices. That we won't haunt you.

My hands twitch and itch and I look for ways to strike at you.

But I am not a ghost.

I cannot be still with this pressure burning in me.

I am not a ghost. I remind myself, pinching the fat of my palm between my thumb and forefinger. I look at photos of myself to remember. I exist. I am real.

I am more than a haunting memory. I cannot enforce your guilt. You will never feel the shame that you should. You walk away from the damage you inflicted and you see only the beauty ahead for you, not the storm clouds and broken buildings you left behind.

They say life is unfair and this is life and I wonder if I want a life where things are this truly unfair.

But I am not a ghost, I must focus on living.

When I can move, I forget you. I sit cross-legged on the floor and my hot angry hands move fast and they fly over new things, touching and feeling and experimenting and learning, and I am alive again for a while.

You have no place in my living mind.

I twist wires with thin-faced tools and there is red paint under my nails and things spread around me waiting for me to come to them and make them alive, and I am focused, and you are gone from my mind then because you are nothing in comparison to living.

I am not bones and a corpse to bury in your muck. I am not the wraith you made me, crawling and clawing after you, gaping toothless mouth, wide unseeing eyes.

I am warm blood and fast pupils and a bright brain and eager fingers. I am happy when I move. I feel music bubbling under my ribcage, replacing the empty socket where you drained and drained and drained me because you did nothing, nothing but take, and then you demanded more, and better, and you left me an open wound.

Dorian Gray, you were exhausting. You did nothing but pull the good things out of me and scoff at what remained.

The unfairness of it.

When I sit still it overwhelms me. I must keep moving, I must stay alive, because you are dead for me.

9-18

I looked at your face last night, Dorian, and I did not feel anything.

No drop in the pit of my stomach. No swelling blackness behind my eyes. No frantic urgency. No desperation. No anger and loss.

I did not feel anything.

I remember seeing your face for the first time. I thought it was a nice face. Good hair, good smile. You were wearing bright colors and you hugged me, and I thought you were a little shorter than I expected, and your eyes were rather too close together, and your nostrils were strangely pinched, but overall, it was a good face. It was a face I didn't mind looking at.

And then I fell in love with you and that face became so beautiful to me. I stared at it in wonder. I traced the lines and imperfections and I thought myself so lucky to have them. You didn't like when I touched your face too much, but how could I help myself? Everything about it was so incredible because it was yours and you were mine and you let me touch your face even though you didn't like it.

Now I see your photo and it is the face of a stranger. It is a pleasant face. It's a concerning face. It worries me, how deceptive that white smile can be. Those close-set eyes and tight nostrils became a metaphor, a symbol. You keep everything close and tight. Your very body is built to hide things from others.

My throat is scratchy today from talking across the water. I am a quiet person but to speak of you made me loud. To let the words come out and have the wind whip them away, they are gone now. I've said the words over and over in my own head, but to speak them aloud, that has freed them. I will never be able to find the right words to fully express how deeply you betrayed me, but I no longer feel I must. I spent so much time picking and choosing what I will say to you when you come back, I lost sight of what matters. That you won't dare come back. That I couldn't have you if you did.

I understand now the concept of burning bridges. You tried to keep the fires low, keep yourself an exit back to us, but you're a selfish man and now they're just smoke and ash.

To speak of you aloud is to hear how cruel you were to me.

Yes, cruel. You are a cruel man. You are a selfish, grasping individual.

You hated how I made you feel because that is who you truly are. You were so angry that I made you feel mean, but you are a mean, small man. You were cruel to me. You played with my mind and you made me feel small and nervous and crazy.

I am an island, I am a volcano, I am a wild creature. I scared you. I overwhelmed you. You admired me and you wanted to own me and you, in your smallness, misunderstood what that means.

You cannot tame a wild creature by being cruel to it. You only make her more wild. The more tightly you wound me around your fist the more wild I became, and now I must pull apart my strings and undo the damage you inflicted.

I can no longer be the animal biting her own tail and tearing out her hair. I have been freed of my cage.

I will wander alone or in my pack, until someone reaches out to me. Until someone kneels and holds their hand still and speaks to me gently.

I am sad, that I let you make me into this, but I feel my strength coming in through my marrow, and I sense the needles of my compass swinging back into place. I move forward, forward. I am not afraid, like you. I am not unsure, like you. I am not weak, like you. I let you convince me I was, for a time, but that did not change me. Now I look down at you from the burning bridge in contempt, and I walk on through the flames.

What you will be no longer matters, because you chose to be cruel. Who you are no longer matters, because you hid behind lies. Who you love no longer matters, because you will only seek to crush them to your will until they snap and lash out and leave you and I feel sad for them, but they make their choices too. I made mine.

I let myself be stupid because I had never been stupid before, and I fucking hated it. I made the wrong choice, loving you. Being stupid was not fun, it was destructive. You and your pinched face and your false words and false smile are a pleasant grinning force that swept through me and tore me into pieces, but I have been a million million pieces before, and I always rebuild.

You will keep sweeping through, seeking, never stopping your damage, but I stay still and I rebuild and I know now I am safe from you, I am free of the pain you inflicted and the ruin you left, and I am free of the anxious small angry person you made me.

It is my curse to carry these words within me, when I so wish I could express them to you, but I know it does not matter. You would not hear them anyway, and now the wind and the water have carried them away, and I cried but it felt good to cry, poison bleeding from me, and the words are gone and you are gone and thank fucking god my nightmare is over.

9-15 The Insomniac's Curse

i wrote you a poem last night
as i fell asleep
it was warm and soft in my head
like new bread
like fresh beginnings
like moving on
and it said all the things i was feeling
and thinking
it put words to
the damage
the love
the shame
the shock
the anger
it was words
even you, in your denial
would have understood
and you would have felt shame
and anger and love
and damage
even you, in your selfishness
would have been touched
i was touched
i was transformed
but i fell asleep
or maybe i was already dreaming
and the words are gone
they will never move you.

9-14 The Frustrated Empath

He's telling me a story. He's a good story teller. I admire people who can find words in their mouths. Mine stick in my hands and my head, beating like moths against my skull and fluttering in my fingers. I enjoy listening to him, even though it's a sad story. He tells it well.

Even without the words I would know it's a sad story. He wears it on him. His body changes, his eyes focus elsewhere, on remembering, on finding the words. He pulls them from his past and he gives them to me, forming images. I am there with him in this memory. His dejection creeps through the air and I feel it seeping into me. He has felt sadness and loss--he feels it now again, and as he feels it, I feel it too.

It's so clean and clear. So easy to understand and interpret. The air shimmers with particles of his emotions, and they touch my pores, becoming my own. There is a sense of comfort for me, even through this sad story, that I can connect to him on this level. Gratitude.

For so long Dorian altered my radar. His words did not match the feeling in the air. His face did not match his stories. I have loved who I am, this person who senses what others feel because it becomes me, too. To feel one thing to be told another, to see an expression that does not match the sharp edge on my skin that he is sending me, it confused me. Sonar blocked. My internal guide distressed and uncertain.

He is telling me a sad story; he is sad, I am sad. Simple. I can't get enough of it, this honesty. My analytical mind wants to poke and pry, to uncover more emotions so I can feel them with him, so I can understand him entirely, but it is late and I am tired and I am making him sad with my poking and he is making me sad with his sadness so I calm my roving questions and I just appreciate what I am being given. Truth.

My boss has wide wet eyes that are always looking into mine, and he asks me why I'm agitated, what's been going on. I cannot hide my truths. I alter the air around me with the darkness I've carried in recently and I cannot shroud it, so I take it with me. I try to keep it away from others. I do not want it to leak into them. But he has sensed it anyway, and now it leaks out my eyes, mortifying me. I cry without purpose, face still and I look away until the horrifying honesty of tears has slowed.

I glimpse honesty all around me and I marvel that Dorian was so false. How can a person look another in the eye and lie? I felt the lies all around me, I was covered in razor blades and suspicion, but I let his words overwhelm what I knew was true. It is incomprehensible. He looked me in my leaking eyes and he lied, he told me the sensations cutting my skin were my own, my own fault, my own imagining.

My skin feels soft and whole again without him destroying me, the scabs are healing over in smooth white scars.

I see the truth in people's faces, their bodies match their words. The air they carry around them moves in rhythm to what they say, and I want to weep with gratitude.

9-13

Something clicked within today.

I walk the night trails, the crushed gravel glowing and soft like I have forgotten my glasses. Only the water is sharp as I pause to look down into it. It reflect the world above, duplicates, confuses. Against the sky the mundane have their chance to be noticed--telephone wires no longer in competition with clouds and sun look poignantly black against their backdrop.

This morning I admired the sunrise, without him in my head. He stole too much of me. A feeble comparison. Why did I waste so much of myself admiring him and losing this beauty?

I have felt her, Myself, hovering, coming closer, and tonight she clicks back into place. Somehow my bones feel sweet and hard like brown sugar left too long in the air. My body is decadent and sticky in the night. I glance down with my night-cat sight and see my two legs, white, and note that I am not eating enough. I miss my thickness and my strength. It is like waking up from a long sleep. I look down and realize I have been hurting.

Against the sky, vivid leaves. I am a million layers. I am every other life I've lived, one cycle after another. I am my past and my future. I am my choices and my heart. My sugar bones move within me, crusted and sharp on the outside, and I feel myself building a new life, new layers.

Those who want to be whole, how small they think. He wanted to be whole. He seeks himself in others, in everything. He will always be unhappy, seeking himself, searching to patch holes, because we are everything. We are a hundred million pieces, we are a swarming biosphere of incalculable moments.

Why is that so frightening to some?

Why be a droplet when you can be a pond, a lake, an ever-moving river?

Why be a cell when you can be a hot vibrant living being?

9-12

The little body is already cold and stiff, formed into the shape of a tufted stuffed animal bed. She holds her position as I lift her, and though her face is stretched strangely in death, her pose, curled and languid, speaks of comfort. I hope she was peaceful as she died; not the gasping, fighting death from earlier. I resisted that death, and I wonder if it was cruel of me to struggle to keep her. In the end, she seemed more pained, her thin delicate chin elongated somehow in that face of inevitability, than perhaps she would have if I had simply let her go.

I wrap her in a towel, gently, carefully but she is no longer there. She does not care how I wrap her; she has left her small fragile body. I do not know when or how, and I feel excluded from something important. Slighted.

I am growing distant and cold as the dead kitten, I feel nothing either. Nothing but surprise, as if she had fled and left the back door open rather than died. She is gone, she left, and this artificial soft cold thing in my hands was discarded behind her.

I go through the catalog in my mind, paging through. Filing her under failure, glancing at successes as a reminder. A strange sense of disappointment in her and her sister, dead creatures. Why did they not tell me they were ailing? One lies gasping, more than gone, on the floor, and I fight for her. I have done all I can, I tell myself when she fades and her eyes go still.

This one, I resent her peaceful death. I cannot soothe myself. She did not give me the opportunity to find my own peace. I was abandoned. I was not consulted.

It is a cold week for me, and I have withdrawn. I shut myself down. Quarantine. My mind needs to rest. My body needs to rest or I will become cold, cold, again. Bar the doors and close the windows. I shutter my frantic thoughts in darkness and they settle slowly like sleepy birds, quieting and rustling but never still.

Around me, death in the night, and life, and things move forward, and I carry on with my sadness and my heartache and my joys and my anger and the world spins onward without any care toward the burdens I nurture, so I snap the cords and I let them fly into the ether.

9-10

My eyes have been dry for a while now.

Harsh and itchy, but dry. I feel him there in the pit of my stomach, but I push him aside. Walk it off. If it's not bleeding it's not broken. I smother him with Kobe beef and Pellegrino and vodka, the food of rich folks pretending to be good ol' boys. Typical Americans. It feels good to take joy in food again. I am a person who takes joy in the senses.

The sun is warm but not overwhelming, and people with more money than me swing clubs on manicured grass. She and I drive through trees and open fields where people have paid to lean on their knees and size up their surroundings, and I mourn land I would have wandered happily for free.

Wind whips my white and red hair into my face and I smile my true smile, teeth I am ashamed of, crooked and wide, because no one can see and no one will care that my smile is odd and it is nice to feel the breeze and the sun, and as we take corners I slide to the edge of the cart and almost lose my balance but I don't steady myself because a strange part of me wonders what will happen if I fall.

I am the girl with white and pink and red hair now and she is the kind of girl who would fall just to see what happens.

She tells me a dream and I remember that she was in mine, and I flush with vodka and clementine soda and I tell her how in my dream I lay on her lap and she stroked my hair. I expect her to laugh, to be uncomfortable, but she understands and she is flattered. A little glass shard of me warms within, to be understood and accepted for all my strangeness, without question. To understand that I am not a person who knows how to ask for love and affection. Who knows that she should, sometimes, but does not speak the words.

I think about the last time I was touched but the memories are all tainted now. We have lain him out, the timeline, the final excuses I made for him ruined. The touches I thought were meaningful. How can people do that to another? I am not a person who touches, who asks for love. It defies my comprehension that this selfish boy man could lay on my lap and feel so genuine, could run his hands through my hair and make goosebumps on my arms and I felt love in his touch but it was not love. What was it? I can't separate these things anymore. They've gone past explaining. I am accepting that I will never understand, that I will never know what was real, or why, or how he could fake love in his touch when he could fake so little else.

We swerve around a corner and I let his memories fall onto the cut grass. I have nothing to show for this but a wasted year, so many tears and anxiety and screaming and losing my mind, and I thought, I thought, it was in a fight for love, but now I know it was nothing. I let myself be ruined for nothing, and that is the hardest truth to accept.

She laughs and I touch her back briefly. It's a motion that feels strange to me, to reach out. I feel silly and awkward, but she only smiles. I know that the people in my life who accept me and know me and understand that I am not mad and angry and wild, I am a warm soft center and a sharp mouth and a quick mind and a loyal, loyal heart, those people will let me reach for them. They will reach for me. I am warm as the sun, I am flushed now with excitement and happiness not shame. I bubble with a laugh, and it expels him from my system.

9-8

I lie in bed and I think of what the doctor said.

Mindfulness.

I had shuddered at the word when she asked me if I knew its meaning.

I do. I thought I did. I knew the twisted convoluted connotation Dorian Gray gave it, with his condescending granola smile while he spoke pretty earth words and yet lived his life tense and judgmental and sharp with blood full of smoke.

The pretty earth words lost their flavor for me over time.

I lie in bed and I want to reclaim the earth he took from me, the freedom of thought he suppressed, my fearlessness, so I pull it through my brain like taffy.

Mindfulness.

I shut out thoughts of Dorian Gray, of Wickham, of the lovely villain in my life's novel, and I push my mind down into my limbs.

The fan beside me, humming gently, a murmuring sound I have become lightly addicted to, steeps into me. I feel the weight of the blankets, the warmth of the dog, my one ever-loyal, curled under my arm breathing moistly into my palm.

I rise out of my body like mist and droplets of dew, like the aurora of the bright moon that had guided me on my night path only moments ago. She reflects, thick and lopsided, in the water that runs through my territory. I release my mind from my body and listen to her.

There is food in my stomach for once, not harsh acidic liquor, and my fingers and knees are still. I push my mind into my body and my surroundings and he vanishes because he is inconsequential.

There is strength and determination in my body. There is love and caring and devotion in my life. I sense it around me; it washes over me and makes me glow.

There are lessons in everything. There are choices and chances. I want to trace the paths in my mind and remind myself of what good things have come, but I tell myself tomorrow, tomorrow, and feel instead.

I detach. I am free. Diana, moon, night creature, survivor, sister, mother.

I burn silver with opportunity and love.

Angry Letters to Dorian Gray

To my dear first love,

I have said these things to you, as much as I can in quick bursts and flares of temper, but now I put them on the page, for me and for others. I need to break myself open and let them free because I am done loving you.

I told you you were the love of my life, and I would always love you, didn't I? I suppose I can lie too, then. Though is it a lie when I once thought it was truth?

The truth is that love doesn't exist.

It carried on, somehow, stubborn, through everything you put me through. Through all the emotional and psychological damage you inflicted on me, somehow, this love lingered. I walked away over and over because I knew, in that drowned suppressed piece of my brain that remained sane, that I did not deserve your thoughtlessness. Your voice overwhelmed her. You convinced me I needed to be unhappy. You pulled me into your self-pitying whirlpool abyss and then you scolded me for not saving you.

I knew all this time who you were, and now I go through our moments in my head and I feel foolish and ashamed on such a level I didn't know existed. I have new pity for the heartbroken and stupid. The greying women on television who fell in love with an alias and had their bank accounts emptied and still, somehow, they stare into the camera with a bewilderment and hope that somehow, somehow, they were wrong and they were truly loved.

We all want to be loved. You prefer to fall in love, though, don't you? It's much more pleasant. It's easier to hide who you are, when they don't know you. You take our love and it makes you warm inside, where you are cold and dead.

    "All the pieces on the floor only wanted to be seen as their own fine work of art."

It's pretty to feel broken but it's not pretty to break others. You tried to patch yourself together with my pieces and left me clawed full of holes.
 
But I don't matter, do I? You're your own fine work of art. You're obsessed with your own loveliness. It's so pretty to be tragic. My story means nothing beside your own, I am only a device to propel you forward.

Dorian Gray, you smile and speak gently. Inside the dark canvas your soul prowls and rots.

I look back and I am mortified at myself. I knew you. I saw that blackness. A jangle of wrongness in the air, a confusing sensory blip. It did not make sense.

I lay on you and looked at your face in the dark and I thought, this is the face I will always want to look at. This is the one that will stay beside me, that I will keep.

It's fun to fall in love, isn't it? I didn't know. I was frightened. You took my hand and you gently lead me down a new road, and I closed my eyes and trusted you.

It was fun, catching me, wasn't it?

No one else ever had, not like that. A true prize. Hold me up and take a photo on the pier. Look what I have done. I must be beautiful and good after all, to win this.

A tension in the air that never felt right. The spider you killed, those small things that didn't suit who you pretended to be. Dropping my hand when another approached.

They grew larger and larger. You left me wandering in the dark searching for you in the orchard, abandoned and fearful, and you blamed me for my fear and anger.

That's where it began, the blaming. The avoiding. Hiding me. You caught me, the fun was done. How could I expect you to continue caring for me? It was a silly female notion I suppose, to think you would carry on with your affections.

The questions you avoided answering. The anger you directed at me that I could never anticipate. The accusations.

How did I become the woman who wanted to see your phone? I hated myself for that.

You just have to trust me, you said, and I was ashamed for my doubt. I was ashamed for being a woman who doesn't trust.

I must be cheating, since I was so suspicious of you. Tables turned, you smile victoriously. Am I projecting? I just have to trust you.

I rack my head trying to understand why you would think these things, why you saw me as you did, but now I know that it was nothing but pulling the strings of a puppet.

It confused me how you had no relationships. No friendships. A few scattered people who used you (you liked to be needed) and your drug dealer, keeping you sedated and tasting of smoke when you lied to me about being high.

Relationships are real, and you are not. Friends learn your insides, and yours are poison.

I mourned you for so long. But I'm mourning a ghost. That man who made me love him does not exist. The man who broke my mind and heart, he is the truth, he is the ugly looming face in the dark.

I can't decide if it helps, knowing there are others you've left in your wake. It's a cruelty I can't open my mind around. I think you must feel nothing. Crocodile tears. You preyed on us. I wonder how you can work with the broken and damaged and love them so, but behind you, you crush others and leave us bleeding and wounded, and do you feel nothing?

Still, somehow, at night I lie awake and I wish you would say you feel something, but I know that too would be a lie.

You're the hero in your story, but what a tale you must have to tell yourself.

We will lay you on the table and we will pick over your bones and tendons until there is nothing left, an unrecognizable carcass on the wood. Will it help us, to see your truth? Even now it's still hard to understand, and I reel at the extent you must have ruined me to continue to make excuses for you.

You are a simplicity, that is what we must come to accept. Your complicated brain, your poetry and your fast love and your fast anger strip away and you are nothing but a little violent animal, hungry. We fed you what you needed and you bit our fingers.

I wonder what she is like, this new love of yours, and I feel such overwhelming pity for her. I hope she is a pretty fool and is swallowed by your tide. I hope she is strong and sees you as you are and breaks you. I hope she is a lie, I hope one thing and another and I twist this around in my head. I overanalyze, didn't you say? I must not read into things. Because therein is the reality, and you tried to hide that from me.

I think about your past, your family, what things made you this way, but then I'm overanalyzing once more. My flame for the mind begins to burn and I want to understand why, why, why, but this is the lesson I am learning - the why is not an excuse. The why is not what made you. You built yourself, this smiling, lean, cold creation, and you and your broken pieces will wander haunting forever because that is who you choose to be.

I have no love for you left. I looked for you, my whole life. I wanted you. I thought at last my search was over, but what I know now is that that One Man for me doesn't exist. I am the cat who walks by himself again and all things are alike to me. I wanted to be in love once, and now I have been, and in all of my damaged life, it was the worst thing I've experienced.

You will always be the monster in my dreams, but that is where I will keep you.

I am happy having myself back. You took her away from me and you twisted her against me. I frightened you, didn't I? You didn't like when others listened to my voice and not yours. You hated  when I was smarter than you, or kinder, or calmer. You took the best parts of me, the parts a good man would admire and nurture, and you crushed them in your palm because they made you look more dull beside me. How dare you?

You'll always be moving, trying to shine, but your light is dim, my love. Your heart is weak and clumsy and fearful. You love to control and silence and confuse. How can you ever glow? You must keep moving, my love, before the veil drops. Always forward.

I cut you from my heart and I leave you behind with nothing but contempt and disgust. I must shake off the anger and rage. That's your influence, twisting me. Making me a mad woman. It's easier to leave a mad woman. It's easier to look bright beside me in your story, when I am wild and insane. So I let it go.

I release the ruin you have done.

I won't let you leave me with that final insult. I won't let a weak black creature take my strength.

My legs shake, I have no taste for food. I force myself to eat, to rise, to smile, because you do not own me anymore. You were fucking careless with me. I am taking myself back. I am tired of weak men using me like a ladder.

I wonder where your story will go, and then I shut my mind off. It does not matter. You are a waste of my consideration, my sympathy. I have seen who you are and it is disappointing. You are small. You were never worthy of me, so you tried to make me small too.

I rise, I eat, I work hard because I know inside my sharp mouth and odd tendencies I am good and I am worthy, and I strive to be better every day and I am building myself a life. To grieve over the broken pieces you left makes me no better than you, wrapped up in maintaining my pain.

I shrug you off, I move forward. You were faster than me always, but you lack direction, you lack impulse control and motivation and ambition and I move, slowly, surely, forward while your erratic path leads you nowhere.
 
Goodbye to my first love, perhaps my only love. I leave you in the dirt where you belong and I rise to a new day.