figmentsfragments

[figmentsfragments]

This makes so much sense

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Just to be clear

I don’t want to get out

without a broken heart.

I intend to leave this life

so shattered

there’s gonna have to be

a thousand separate heavens

for all of my flying parts.

- Andrea Gibson

[figmentsfragments]

My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?” In my back pocket is a love note with every word you wish you’d said. At night I sit ecstatic at the loom weaving forgiveness into our worldly regrets. All day I listen to the radio of your memories. Yes, I know every secret you thought too dark to tell me, and love you more for everything you feared might make me love you less. When you cry I guide your tears toward the garden of kisses I once planted on your cheek, so you know they are all perennials. Forgive me, for not being able to weep with you. One day you will understand. One day you will know why I read the poetry of your grief to those waiting to be born, and they are all the more excited. There is nothing I want for now that we are so close I open the curtain of your eyelids with my own smile every morning. I wish you could see the beauty your spirit is right now making of your pain, your deep seated fears playing musical chairs, laughing about how real they are not. My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving. I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before.  Do you understand? It was me who beckoned the stranger who caught you in her arms when you forgot not to order for two at the coffee shop. It was me who was up all night gathering sunflowers into your chest the last day you feared you would never again wake up feeling lighthearted. I know it’s hard to believe, but I promise it’s the truth. I promise one day you will say it too– I can’t believe I ever thought I could lose you.

love letter from the afterlife, andrea gibson

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"Some people will drain you dry then resent you for being empty.."

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A Quiet Cup Beside the Guillotine

I sip my tea where shadows softly tread

Unbothered by the ticking of the end

Death hums a tune and nods his quiet head

The sky could crack; the stars could all burn red

Still, I’d not flinch, nor beg the night to bend

I sip my tea where shadows softly tread

No prayers are whispered, no pleas left unsaid

The hourglass spills, but I don’t seek to mend

Death hums a tune and nods his quiet head

Once fear would howl, now silence purrs instead

My pulse — unhurried — finds no need to pretend

I sip my tea where shadows softly tread

What peace to walk where even angels dread

To find in falling not foe, but a friend

Death hums a tune and nods his quiet head

So let the final breath come light as thread

Not tragedy, but just a well-timed end

I sip my tea where shadows softly tread

Death hums a tune and nods his quiet head

[e.carry]

[figmentsfragments]

i never asked

to be clung to

the salt comes anyway

wearing me down

with your shaking hands

you call me steady

as if i chose stillness

as if erosion is loyalty

each wave takes a little

you, too

with your need to survive

on something solid

i remember when i was mountain

before the pulling

before the prayers

now

i sit at the edge

let you lean

and crack

and weep into me

i do not speak

i do not move

but gods help me

i stay

[e.carry]

[figmentsfragments]

you used to run

lab rat in a maze

believing velocity

could outwit the downpour

believing escape

to be found in speed

not surrender

the rain, unimpressed

each drop

a blunt equation:

mass × gravity × time

struck harder

the faster you moved

ambushed in surface tension

and poor decisions

someone

maybe a voice on a train

a footnote in a book

you never finished

a dream

where the rain talked back

told you

you get wetter when you run

something about angles

and trajectory

extra drops

you collected

by moving too fast

through what would have

only kissed you

if you'd slowed down

so now

you walk

like a body

meant to be here

soaked in full surrender

to the sky’s math

there is no prize

for dodging water

no shelter

better your own skin

let the rain write

its calculus on your collarbones

drip logic

down your spine

arrive drenched

alive

a little unsure

whether you survived something

or remembered

how to be

[terminal velocity — e.carry]

[figmentsfragments]

oshibana

pressed like a dried petal

in the pages of a book i never lend

not for fear of loss

but because of what they might find

tucked quiet between chapter and sin

your secret slept there

flat and fragrant with rot

a bloom i didn't pick

but somehow still held

like a child grips a thorn to prove they’re brave

i have carried you

in dog-eared silences

in margins inked with almost-confessions

in the spine’s slow breaking

under the weight of things unsaid

you never asked

but you looked at me once

like a beggar at a locked gate

and i

fool that i am

swallowed the key like communion

now it’s mine

the echo you left in my throat

the bruise of your shadow on my better self

still i do not lend the book

still i dust it

still i guard that page

as if love were something

that can be earned

by hiding proof it never was

[e.carry]

[figmentsfragments]

i don’t burn anymore

the anger left

like smoke through cracks

slow

without ceremony

one day I just noticed

my jaw was clenched no more

the scars remain

of course

a few shaped like teeth

some like hands

most look like nothing

but reminders

that I was there

but I don’t carry the weight

of your name on my tongue

no longer do I rehearse soliloquies

I used to whisper to the mirror

pretending it was you

you don’t own the ruins anymore

I do

and it’s quieter now

not clean

not healed

but mine

[e.carry]

[figmentsfragments]

Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"

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babygirl

—e.carry

(TW: CSA implied)

knotted pine

pressed to painted wood

and cardboard walls

your breaths and mine

dangerously entwined.

a thief cloaked in darkness.

locked jaw. clenched fists.

eyes shut tight—

praying sleep

might mean surviving night.

scent of smoke,

musky, thick—

the scratch of stubbled

whiskey lips

on porcelain skin,

a hairline crack

from caving in.

thought I might matter.

flattered,

infantilized,

shattered.

god,

if that little

babygirl

could rise

from ashes of those nights,

she’d spit blood

on your grave

with the quiet grace

of a curse,

for every

goddamned

world

of hurt

you gave.

[figmentsfragments]

never meant to be the glass
showing cracks too sharp to pass
as marble veins and weathered grace
merely a fracture, out of place

spoken silence shaped like rain
echoes back the buried pain
and in the hush of every word
a restless, shifting truth stirred

never broke nor drew a line
just held the light where it shined
too cruel, too clear, too close to bone
when secrets begged only be unknown

offered warmth and gave a flame
too wild any heart to tame
watched it climb and watched it sear
until a soiled soul grew fear

not a villain, not a guide
a mirror turned too wide

let it serve as quiet thread
woven through words unsaid
not for pardon, not for peace
just a longing for release

[e.carry]

[figmentsfragments]

I promise I'm really smart it's just all my best thoughts get lost in The Fog

[figmentsfragments]

the tower

the stair returns me to the room i fled

whispers echo back words carved in drywall

clocks that breathe only when my back is turned

voices i can only hear when i call

a window choked with moss that drinks the light

it hums with heat, but nothing comes to sight

years pile up on shelves in fine dusted files

each labeled wrong, in someone else’s hand

the gravel gathers quietly in my throat

dragging down ev’ry breath until i choke

the air turns thick, like glass before it breaks

you lie there still in the shattered remains

a door stands warped, its lock long-turned to dust

i dare not knock — it opens all the same

a coat still hangs, untouched by time or rust

and in its pocket: something with my name

[e.carry]

[figmentsfragments]

a thought in passing

the sun withdraws its hand from pane and sill,

and dusk resumes its post with practiced grace.

the world grows soft, as if it waits until

a ghost of sound might pass through time and space.

the wind makes riddles of the garden air,

unfolding secrets no one claims to know.

the trees converse in tones too faint to share,

while shadows stretch as far as they may go.

there’s comfort in the hush between the hours—

silences shaped by all that went unsaid.

and, though i ask no questions of its powers,

it brings to mind the paths we did not tread.

and when the stillness gathers in your chest,

think not of me, but something once confessed.

[e.carry]

[figmentsfragments]

You know what the worst part of having a dissociative disorder is, for me personally?

The emotional amnesia.

Your entire life feels like something that you watched on TV, rather than something that you actually lived through.

You know that some of the most horrific things imaginable have happened to you, and you feel nothing about it. Sure, the memories disgust you on principle, but you don’t feel anything.

It makes you question if anything that you remember is real. If that actually happened, shouldn’t it feel significant? Shouldn’t you be sad, angry, hurt, something?

And to top it all off, nobody understands. Not even yourself.