neosphytezine

[neosphytezine]

Walk. At Twilight.

The sky, purple.

The sun, amber

We don't say much as we walk.

The dog is well trained.

Walking in front of us

Obediently.

No need to hold onto the leash.

I wish I could remember

the last time

we took this walk.

But I didn't know to hold onto it.

[neosphytezine]

What happened to your big dreams child?

What happened to the life you saw set before you?

How did you end up going down this miserable path?

A form of suicide, slowly cutting yourself apart day by day.

Is this who you are?

Is this what you want?

How long have you tried to remove the part of you

That screams this is not where you’re meant to be.

Your thirst for validation

To prove everyone wrong

Has brought you misery.

Hide under the blankets of your mother’s bed.

Sleep for so long that your arms grow moss

And your body turns to stone.

[neosphytezine]

Recede into the safety of your home.

Not the home you once knew

But the one that never was.

Find comfort in the arms of friends

Who never materialized.

Who never could.

Your eyes are weary now.

The skin heavy and swollen.

Find comfort in the fact that this is it.

Good or bad.

Though that fact would be less comforting

If the latter was more dominate.

[neosphytezine]

I find myself trapped between receiving salvation and selling my soul.

A constant battle between life and death.

Which one’s embrace would feel the most comforting.

To float or to drown.

To see the sunrise or to fall asleep to the stars.

I feel myself ripping myself into two and then trying to force the halves together again.

Who am I?

I know.

But I hate this person.

I hate her naïveté.

I hate her creativity.

I hate her mind.

I hate her face.

I want to destroy her.

I want to sleep.

[neosphytezine]

As I stare out at the highway, I wonder if it would be so terrible to release my hands off the steering wheel and allow destiny to take control.

I’ve felt this way before, both emotions caused by the same person.

It was 6 years prior when I was sitting in the car with this person, fantasizing about opening the door and rolling out onto the street.

To visit fate is to pay the price for disruption.

Maybe accepting the uncertain will set me off on a better path than the unchanging one I see in front of me.

To give into destiny in this moment would cause many people to bitch and moan as they sit in the traffic that my impulsiveness caused.

The same way I bitch and moan when I see the same.

But then I imagine what it’s like to be in that situation. To have the worst night of your life. That’s when I say a prayer and apologize for my selfishness.

No one will say a prayer for me as they scrape me off of the freeway off ramp.

They’ll just complain about how I added another 15 minutes to their drive.

[neosphytezine]

Oh love. You have never been kind to me.

Sleepless nights. Tear stained cheeks. Swollen eyes.

These were the marks of love I recognized.

Crying in the shower, trying to scrub his touch off of me. Digging my nails deeper into my skin and wondering why I still felt so dirty.

He loved me.

Catatonically lying next to him as he described our future. A future in which I was an accessory to his life with little more to do than look pretty and support his passions.

He loved me.

Listening to him say that only he could love me. That no one else would want me. That I was too much for anyone to handle.

Was this all love had to offer me?

I gifted him my favorite book inscribed with some advice and a reference to 1 Corinthians 13 before we broke up. He told me he had tried his hardest to show that kind of love to me but he resembled nothing described in the verse.

Now, when I look into the eyes of my love, I feel as though I am meeting the emotion for the first time. Anything that came before this was an false promise cloaked under a desire. Anything that came before my love was a deception trying to infiltrate my life.

When I smell alcohol on my love’s breath, I don’t fear what’s going to come next. I don’t have to worry about my love yelling at me when I won’t let him touch me and coercing and guilting me into changing my answer to a yes.

No, my love is sweet. My love is kind. My love has the brightest eyes I’ve ever seen.

[neosphytezine]

Sadness comes to me like large crashing waves.

I simply close my nose and shut my eyes and go right through them.

Everything feels cold and I feel an immense pressure pushing against me.

But I know that soon enough it will pass.

Another wave will eventually form.

But I can enjoy the peace of the still water for a moment.

[neosphytezine]

Everybody is Alex

All of their faces blend together for me now. Where once there used to be distinction, there is now a smear of paint meshing everybody’s face together.

Alex.

Oh Alex.

I don’t remember which one you where.

You come to me in my dreams, asking to be let back into my heart.

But there’s no room for you now.

None of them are you but all of them are.

In each one, I see you Alex and in you, I see nothing at all.

Why did it have to be you that sat next to me in class on that first day of school?

How different everything could have been if that one seating chart had been rearranged.

I’m sorry Alex.

I’m sorry that I’m still searching for you.

I found no love in you Alex.

I hope to find an Alex that can love me back.

But everybody is so disappointing.

[neosphytezine]

Not the One

My whole life, I’ve never been “the girl of your dreams”. No matter how hard I tried to be alluring, it always fell flat. I’m not the one you dream about being with. I’m not the one you stay up all night fantasizing about. I’m not the one you brag about to your friends.

I’m the one who somehow intruded their way into your life. The one you can clearly tell is infatuated with you but you pity too much to turn down. Then a year later, like clock work, they call or text me trying to apologize for the way they treated me.

I know this song and dance really well. I know how it feels to be rejected in the most roundabout way over and over and over again until I feel like all the life has been crushed out of me. Only to one day receive a call out of the blue trying to make amends and start anew.

I’m so tired. I hate being the back up plan.

I try so hard to hold onto the dream that one day someone will see me and I will be the one they were waiting for. One day, all the pain and hardships will have been worth it because I’ll meet someone who can see how pure my love is for them.

Deep down, I know that this will remain nothing but a dream. The voice of my film professor rings through my ears, when he had once advised me “Guys don’t pick the intelligent girls”.

I don’t know if I’m all that intelligent. I just know that when I see him looking at her with so much admiration in his eyes, it makes me want to shrivel up and die. When I remember the way she talks about him behind his back, how little care she has for his feelings, I want to slap him and make him see reality.

But how can I even blame him? Who’s he supposed to be looking at…me? When she’s standing there, as radiant as the sun. How can I ask him to shield his eyes when I’m nothing more than a dot in the night sky, millions of miles away.

I just wish he would look at me like that. Not just anyone, him. I want him.

[neosphytezine]

The Fool

I don’t enjoy falling in love. Falling is the perfect word to use in association to love. As soon as I find myself caring about someone, I take a tumble down a hundred flights of stairs, scraping my knees and bumping my head on every step along the way. Down I go, further and further, telling myself that it will be all worth it once I reach the end.

Finally, there it is, the final step! One last tumble and it’ll all have been worth it. But, as I smash my cheek bone one last time and reach the bottom, there’s nothing. No one was waiting for me.

[neosphytezine]

Ripped Pants on Easter

3 years ago on Easter day, I ripped my favorite pair of pants. The crotch area completely split in half while I was sitting in a chair in my usual “goblin” position (both legs propped up on the seat of the chair and my right knee upright). I remember exactly what I was doing when the tragedy happened. As I sat in “goblin” position, the computer monitor in front of me was playing a church’s Easter service that had been livestreamed on YouTube the year before. I had Photoshop opened up next to the video of the service and I was drawing some random character I was making up as I went. It was a pandemic Easter celebration to say the least and as I got up from my chair to grab a snack, my pants tore in half.

I immediately broke down into tears. Just like the crotch of my pants, my sanity had been hanging on by a thread and that thread had seemingly torn alongside with my jeans. I was completely inconsolable. It was as if I had just witnessed a murder happen right in front of me. Those pants were the first “big girl” purchase I had ever made. They were $115, way more than the $20 pants I was used to buying at Forever 21. As I looked in my reflection in the Nordstrom mirror while trying them on, I felt something I had never before felt in a mall dressing room; joy. The pants were perfect. They hit my curves in all the right ways and made me look like a woman. I used the money I had made from my first job to buy them and my newly 18 year old self was convinced that I was now officially a grown up.

The world seemed so bright in those few months before everything came crashing down. I would have never imagined that 3 months after buying my “woman” jeans, I would be having a meltdown over the death of them. I had barely worn the pants, just like how I had barely gotten to play grown up before we were all forced into isolation. I cried for hours as my mom tried to comfort me but I held the limp body of the pants in my arms while I sat criss cross on my bed in a pair of sweats. Now, every Easter I remember those pants and how much it hurt to lose them. Now I know that growing up takes more than just buying an expensive and cheaply made pair of jeans. I’ve done almost everything poor 18 year old me was incapable of accomplishing at that age. Even though it took 3 years to get here and I have a much longer way to go, I’m hopeful that I’ll never cry over a pair of pants on Easter again.

[neosphytezine]

I Miss You, Rookie Magazine

In the 7th grade, my best friend at the time pulled out what looked like a textbook out of her backpack. As she smashed it on top of her desk, I peered over her shoulder to take a look at what she was reading. Each page was massive and filled with colorful collages and handwritten playlists.

“What is that?” I asked her.

She gave me a smile like she knew she was about to completely change the trajectory of my life and handed me her copy of Rookie Yearbook 1.

“It’s like Tumblr in a book,” she told me, but it was so much more than that.

Rookie introduced me to fashion, photography, and music through the eyes and ears of real teenage girls. I read stories about people’s first loves. I learned who the Golden Girls were and what Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings are. I read an interview with John Waters and became obsessed with this man photographed holding up a copy of “Dad’s in Jail” as one of his favorite books. The people in Rookie were eccentric, they were raw, and they were everything I wished I could be.

I prayed that my teenage years would be captured through the lens of Petra Collins. That I could write stories about my life and make collages and be effortlessly cool like the girls in Rookie Mag.

Whenever we had our state mandatory silent reading time during history class, I would beg her to let me borrow Rookie. Whenever she would get sick of me hogging it and tell me “no”, I couldn’t help but look over her shoulder longingly. Rookie was everything I was incapable of saying and making on my own, what my 13 year old soul had been yearning for. Even now, I realize that there is an essence of Rookie Yearbook 1 in everything I create.

I miss Rookie Magazine. I miss who I was when I first discovered it. I miss what the world was like back then.

I hope one day I will build something that can honor Rookie.

[neosphytezine]

Writer’s Block

There used to be a time where I could sit down with a blank doc and type away for hours. Whether I ever finished any of the stories I wrote is a completely different question but, at some point I used to have an arsenal of words I could put down on paper. Now…there’s nothing. Even as I write this, no part of what I say feels genuine anymore. It doesn’t hold the same weight and power that it once did. Each word is airy and cheap, just there to take up space so I can say that I wrote something.

I feel a lot of anger lately; towards myself and towards other people. I used to have so much to say but now everything seems so meaningless. The world used to seem limitless to me. I used to seem limitless to me. Now, I feel confined; trapped in a cage of my own design. Every time someone reads my writing, I retreat further and further into my cage in an attempt to hide from all the criticism. I don’t want to think about grammatical structures or my “audience” when I write. I don’t want to put each sentence through a logic filter. I want to slice myself open and allow whatever falls out onto the page to remain there forever. Raw and untouched. Why must everything be “good”? Why must everything make sense? What has happened to the ability to decipher meaning for oneself.

Like a senile politician, I blame TikTok. Now, all art must be spoon-fed and accessible. It must be good and virutuous. Every main character is right and you should agree with them. There is no such thing as an unreliable narrator. I even find myself falling into this trap. I can’t enjoy books with “problematic” main characters because that means I’m problematic. I must hate them. I must spend every second reading the book assuring the watchful eyes of the public that exists in my head that I too condemn the main character and I am a good person.

There is no more gray in the world. I am the art I consume and it is a reflection of my character. So why consume anything? Why create?

I am not a good and right person. I am a person. My flaws will bleed into my work and I will be condemned.

I don’t want to write about good people doing good things. I want all the worst aspects of myself to be heightened in each person I create. I want all my worst nightmares to reach a fever pitch. I want to create worlds that are bizzarre with characters that make puzzling decisions. I want reality to bend underneath the weight of its own rules and fold into insanity. I want a release from myself. I want to write for myself.

I crave the bizarre. I crave the unusual. It is so exhausting pretending as though I can fit in. No matter how hard I try, I will never be in. I will never be liked. I can never be digestible. So, I hope to make myself the most potent poison there is.