ashesthendust

[ashesthendust]

Before we ever start typing, don’t we need to believe in something essential about ourselves—believe that somebody else should read us?

January 10, 2024

[ashesthendust]

But here’s a trick, instead: I’m pretty sure that everything I just wrote can be twisted behind my teeth like a cherry stem and come out good again... I work to become better, for myself and my world, even when I feel clumsy and unskinned. I live in a world where sometimes weapons are needed and I am still learning to wield mine.

December 29, 2023

[ashesthendust]

What else can I write? My regrets? Many, all the time. When it’s dark at night and when it’s the middle of the day and I pretend to be awake. I drink too much. Try too hard. Gossip more than I should. Am stubborn and argumentative and egotistical. Act like I am the center of a universe that is more interesting than it is. Lack emotional depth, empathy. Cry too easily anyways. Become frustrated quickly. Hold myself apart. Lack firm ethics or boundaries. Am too self-satisfied. Am deeply insecure, worsening every year. Take too many shortcuts; claim the accomplishments anyways. Treat knowledge like a weapon. Treat humanity like a skill to learn instead of a state of being.

December 29, 2023

[ashesthendust]

I will unbog myself.

November 24, 2023

[ashesthendust]

This is my long project. This, and everything else I’m doing with asexuality: all the early, fleshy theory, all the strange, puzzled-through experiences, all the hours on my bed, talking to doctors, reading books, listening to my closest friends tell me I’m probably not, writing both lists and poetry, desperate to understand, sitting in the silence of my relatives, and the questions, and questions, and questions, and questions...

November 18, 2023

[ashesthendust]

In twenty-three I broke my own heart twice. I made enormous, wrecking choices...

September 23, 2023

[ashesthendust]

The heat lightning, for the record, was beautiful—coming on soft and fast at the same time. A rip in the fabric without any sound or devastation afterwards. 

September 8, 2023

[ashesthendust]

I’m scared the inside of my throat sounds like a hollow steel pipe again I can’t stand the smell of lavender something wet is going to come gushing through my teeth any day now I’m afraid of seeing my own blood I’m afraid of crying I’m afraid of losing sight of the air I wish I could see my own skeleton sometimes the mirrors crack when they look back at me I am generally sure that the crows outside my window have the right idea today I am not sure I’m meant to be here I’m not sure I’m meant to be anwhere I’m desperate to believe in a thousand different futures for a thousand different better versions of myself I want to take photographs of myself again I’m scared of what I’ll see if I do I am buzzing through the library again I am digging my deep into my laptop again something murky and bosky is coming back out I am coughing it is wet it smells like lavender it is growing in the dark in the hollow pipe 

August 18, 2023

[ashesthendust]

Syracuse had to go. And I clung like god to the scaffolds I had built there, but the whole church needed to burn and ash. Part of me feels like dancing and sowing salt across that landscape—but, at the end, I am the salt, too, and the landscape, and even that husk of a church. The land has weaseled its way into me by now, and I can’t dig it back out.

July 12, 2023

[ashesthendust]

But I couldn’t explain it. None of my crushes ever made sense, but they always seem to boil down to some sort of expertise, and maybe some willingness to stand with me in the cold.

November 19, 2021

[ashesthendust]

Maybe I’ll love my ex a little bit forever, but I’ll love myself more, and I’ll find new loves, too. 

May 3, 2023

[ashesthendust]

My childhood resentment has been buried and gone for a long time, but sometimes conversations with my mom feel like a bit of an excavation. 

May 25, 2023

[ashesthendust]

The price of transforming into the writer and scholar I’ve always wanted to be, I think, is shedding my attachment to hometown validation.

June 2, 2023

[ashesthendust]

As much as I joke about living on the opposite corner of the country from my brother, I can’t help but acknowledge that there’s something combustible between us when we get too close. We’re like sharks who can’t resist circling each other, waiting for the other to bite, taking vicious satisfaction in each other’s mirrored, toothy faces. Maybe it’s even the logical consequence of our fissured independences, running deep in our blood—we can’t help but rely on each other; we hate that we do.

June 2, 2023

[ashesthendust]

I want my brother in my corner; I want a relationship with him. I hate that I want it so badly. I hate that I don’t actually need it.

June 1, 2023

[ashesthendust]

And my eyes burned as I drove home. And then I couldn’t bear to go inside, so I took a drizzly walk, down the park hill and to the rose garden at the edge of campus. I cried the whole way down, and then I sat on the bench and cried some more. There were no roses in the garden. It kept raining. When I walked back up the hill, there was chalk on the hill from a community race earlier in the day, and the rain was bleeding it out. But there were still faint, colorful messages like: You’ve Got This! and Head Up, Wings Out, which were so blatantly ironic I cried even more.

May 7, 2023

[ashesthendust]

It's like today. Ithaca is the destination, but I love the drive. I think best in the car; I sing loudest on the open road; most of the fun is in the feeling of leaving. 

October 21, 2022