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[chloe--bug]

40 days and 40 nights for a period that makes me see god

I’m in my parents’ backyard in Texas, watching the sunlight filter through the branches of this big oak tree that must’ve seen a thousand lives before me. I wanted to write to you a little life update. The essence of it is: I’ve never been this good before, and I’m crying about how positively I’m interpreting the fig tree metaphor, and I have my period in a really literary way right now. 

Life is a thousand years long, and only a moment, all at the same time. What seems solid and unchanging will always crumble in an instant and nothing will ever grow there again as it had before. Virginie Despentes wrote about that. You live further outside of your body than you might think, and you’re usually looking into the universe or perhaps some dense fog instead of within, always seeing yourself, never looking into a mirror. There will always be this huge thing that is every moment and every memory and every wish all the time. It will be breakfast and lunch and dinner and the creak in every floorboard and every stranger at the coffee shop, and you will reach for it and wrap around it and yearn for it inside of you. And it will follow you, attached at your feet like your shadow, to the places you wanted to go alone, and the places you needed to be with only one other. Sometimes it becomes realer and, in turn softer, or sometimes it gnaws at you until you just fucking hate it, and sometimes it just sort of grows differently than you and one day you set it down and forget to pick it back up again. The latter is the strangest. To feel something in your teeth when you wake up every morning, and to cry for it to eat you alive, then to one day feel the same way about it that you feel about a shirt you never wear anymore. It’s just weird, your life will always happen in seasons, none of them ever stretching too far. 

Four years in Savannah, each of them sweeter than the last, watching the city get smaller and my perfect house fill up with photo booth strips and endless pieces of art school ephemera. The same three bars and the same twenty or so friends and the same bike route and grocery store and park and exes and weird stories and people I can’t stand. Four years and then last week I told my shrink I’d need her help finding a new one, because I decided I’m moving. Because I get to decide this sort of thing now. I sort of approached it sheepishly at first, thinking I’d toy with the way those words sounded from my position on her couch, then I meant it, and it was real. So I decided.

I did everything I could to spend almost all 365 days of 2022 in Savannah. I felt like I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t miss a moment, it was impossible to imagine what would happen if I spent a Saturday alone at the beach. I was pining. Yearning for someone intensely of course. I have never known what it’s like to want something a little bit. When I want, I want like I want to swim in the fountains within someone, I want to drink their thoughts so bad you’d think I was some traveler in the heat of the desert; I want to wash myself in their sweat. I want to pour every ounce of myself into their cup and watch it overflow over and over – knowing it could never hold me, I want to give all of me to them regardless. Where else would I go? But oh, my god, no one ever talks about how marvelous it is to feel that want dissipate. I’ve spent so much of this year away from home and I never worried about it. 

Atlanta earlier in April was something else. Just one night, it didn’t end well, but a funny story if you leave out the bad parts. Charleston for groceries by myself because I finished my work early. Florida with my sisters for the weekend was sweet and slow and warm and quiet. Austin to visit friends, I just got back today, and it was so fun I couldn’t hold in my heart from bursting the whole time. I don’t think I stopped smiling at all. It’s beautiful and people are smarter and kinder there. I saw old friends and new friends and they all have lives and jobs and apartments now and I couldn’t even handle it. And now here, at my parents’ house, getting a pedicure with my mom and watching Marley roam in the backyard. My parents have their own lives now that we don’t live here anymore. I feel like the adult now.

Two months of freelance work that I didn’t really look or ask for, then two perfect job interviews last week. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t care, there are so many good options I’m excited about all of them, I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. I really am the happiest girl in the world. I’d argue it in front of a judge. I’ve never been this good. I thought I was going to die 11 days after I turned 17. When I was a kid this was all I ever wanted and now I have it and the weather has been beautiful everywhere I’ve been for the past two months consistently. I think I’m just always going to be confounded with a happy day, let alone a perfect month.

I had to wait 40 days and 40 nights for my period. I’m like Jesus in that way. You don’t trust the Clearblue “NOT PREGNANT” flashing at you when you’re a girl who loves sleeping with a vast array of men and hates using condoms. Peeing in the graffitied pink stall in the bathroom of a karaoke bar we were drinking ranch waters at last night, I saw blood on my shorts and started laughing out loud. It’s all just continuing to feel so serendipitous. If this goes on forever, I’ll never get anything done because I can’t stop smiling and hugging whoever’s nearest.

By the end of the week I’ll know whether or not I’ve got to pack up and move to DC. I’ll be happy either way. I just wanted to write to you happy for once. I’ll let you know what happens next :p

[chloe--bug]

aaaaa

I wished that there was a world in which the things he said to me were true. I wished for longer fingernails, too, and I wished for rainier days and a different voice and I wished and I wished and I wished, and then I got still and quiet for a while, and it was nice. I found that that neglected, hungry yearning to be filled and shaped and made whole was leaving me perennially thirsty for more than any one’s cup could hold. That time I spent asking for nothing and hoping for nothing and letting myself be whatever and pretending like life wasn’t real was new for me. That contentedness hums within you, and it keeps you warm. I am, at the core, too much of a lover girl to let that last forever, though. 

I’ve always been magic. It sparkles on my skin and I feel it breathe inside of me. I create things from thin air, and my words are always so cardinal, and I just know things. I knew when I met him that I would like him for a long time, that he would love me for longer. The natural warmth of my mind has always impressed me, for it can so easily ignite into something hotter, this burning, mystical tool that I just started using on accident one day. My magic frightens me sometimes, though; I feel like every word that leaves my mouth grows roots in my days and grows into something oh so real, so often so tangible I’m convinced I’m practicing some sort of witchcraft. I say I’d like to have something and it’s in my lap before I even finished talking. I realize through this that I often don’t actually know what I want. 

I accidentally asked the universe to remind me of someone I was beginning to forget. I hadn’t thought about him in a while, now I miss him like I am a baby missing her blanket. It is not that I have yet to love another, but rather it is that no other will be the first to open me up and look through my insides as he did. Even at my most heartsick, I loved every inch of him; I looked up at him as though he was a saint in between my legs. All I felt was devotion; it swelled inside of me and ate me alive and drowned me again and again. I once believed that when I shed my mortal form, my devotion would dissipate out of me and crawl into him, finally free of the vessel creating the borders between it and him. No longer aching to hold him or make him belong to me, only mirthful in his skin.

Love for another hurts, it just hurts no matter what. The ache of yearning is alive and well and wonderful inside of me and everyone I know. There will always be a friction between two people, two lovers, an irreconcilable difference flickering. Where we meet the parts of each other that are strange and confusing and we either give up on them or get past them or swallow them. I find that others are often chuckling at me or looking at me a little sideways, amused maybe, but never really kindred to the person I am. I’m so drawn to someone that can get my mind, the strange parts and the smart ones and the sad ones. Love is to see the eternal flame that burns within its differences, maybe. I can’t remember the last time someone saw me like that, other than him, that’s the thing. 

I cried to my mother on the phone today, I hate holding this sadness in the same hands I held it in when I was sixteen, I hate how heavy it is and I hate how familiar it is. There is a magnet within me that wants to be near him. It pulls and hauls me like a rag baby being contended for by a circle of hungry dogs. Oh, I’m so humiliated.

[chloe--bug]

Limerence

The second I got in your car that night, I thought about getting back out and just asking you to run me over. I could smell the cologne you only wore on special occasions as soon as I opened the door and I couldn’t not notice your new favorite red shirt buttoned all the way up for the occasion. The passenger seat was leaned way too far back for my liking, as usual, and the windows were down despite the weather, as usual. I still wanted you terribly. You and I talked about whatever, me failing to mention that I was sitting on my hands to keep from reaching out to trace yours. And when I looked at your legs I made myself sick with how turned on I was. I had spent that afternoon grappling with my unquellable sex drive, trying to convince myself that it was normal to think about sex (with you) as much as I did. And then there you were, tall and strong and so familiar, driving with a confidence I could only ever fake, and you just smelled so good. I was hungry for you to a fault; I wanted to be sweet and well-fed, but I was so starved and desperate I would have begged you on my knees to touch me if I wasn’t so scared of you.

It wasn’t because you gave me any reason to be, but simply because I knew how much I could let you hurt me. There were so many things about you I had never seen in anyone else – and all of them hurt me in how right they were, how perfectly the idea of you fit into the gaping hole in my chest. I knew you would never fill it in the way that I wanted you to, because I would never ask. 

When I sat next to you eating dinner that night, I wondered what you were like when you were twelve. Would you have been as easy to talk to, as funny and smart as you are now? Were you disruptive in class? Were you always so alluring? I wondered what you’d be like when you were 40, too; hoping that by some stroke of magic I’d be near when that day really came. I wanted to know you across every decade, not just that night, and your past and future lives too. I’ve never thought like that about anyone. I’ve never watched someone slurp their food and still wanted to crawl inside their mouth and live there like the remains of their dinner, stuck between two molars, hardly noticeable but significantly There.

That unsubsiding pining was beginning to feel like it’d be the thing to kill me. Why was it that every time you said goodbye to me I had the adamantine urge to cry? I felt like a computer programmed to break down whenever I had to watch you walk away. I wanted to be a different girl than that. I saw myself appearing effortlessly sexy and aloof in the presence of any man that wanted me, but anywhere near your vicinity, I couldn’t stop from becoming that soft, fragile creature that needed you to catch my eye or else I may crumble. 

That dinner was a while ago. A few weeks ago, we drove to the quiet hum of the tires against the road, this time you in the passenger seat, and me nervously hovering over the steering wheel as though you were my driving instructor. I was 16 again, and I felt ashamed every time I had to merge. I remember seeing the sun catch a freckle on my wrist and momentarily daydreaming about you knowing me so well you could call it by name. I rolled down the windows, but a few minutes later you rolled yours up. You were tired, I was thoughtful; we didn’t say much, but I felt as though I knew what you were thinking and vice versa.

[chloe--bug]

the moon knows

Everything is melting around me. I think I see crystals hanging from the sky, then I turn away for a moment and they become a river barely running, slow and partial. The dirt on the ground reveals itself to be the walls growing rapidly taller around me... and so on... It's true that the earth is ever blooming and withering and I am just as much nature as I am girl, but I find it so tiresome, the relentless superfluity of it all. Nature is always pulling the rug out from under me.

I used to think I was melancholy inherently: sad girl at the core, nothing more to be said or done about the situation. With time and a period of maturation I adored so fondly for its gentleness, I saw within myself a stronger power, one untouched by the moon or the wind or the water. She wasn't real, of course, only a glimmering vision I constructed because I didn't know what the ebb and flow felt like or meant yet. Regrettably, I'm forever partial to my body which is forever partial to its origin. I watch myself change in stride with my cycle every month, every week. There will never be a stronger power within me, virgin to the mortal flood. I will forever stand at the horizon, peeking through the thin seam between the sky and the earth, only to be pulled away from the hem just as it splinters. I don't know if I'll ever feel like the same person for longer than a month.

January feels like running underwater. I've always held a dislike for this time of year; I see it as a gateway to a darker world. There is something about the emptiness of every street corner and the jarring lack of life outside the window that never fails to make me miss even the times I didn't care for at the moment. I notice that I love December, only once it's been over for a couple of weeks. The holidays felt slow and languorous. The beginning of the year feels rushed, and sad. I've tried everything, and I face depression like no other every time. To be manic-depressive is to constantly forget mania's existence when depressed, to forget depression's existence when manic. Although swinging about on a constant pendulum, each end of the spectrum manifests in such a foreign way to the mind that it is never predictable, or easily understood, and rarely dealt with as it really should be. I can't keep up with a brain that will never know itself.

I hate that I have this proclivity for self-sabotage, for shoving my despair down my own throat by the spoonful. I try to remind myself that, as the carousel reaches the ground, it is only inevitable that it will rise towards the sky after some time. There is no peace without unrest. We are only thankful for something by being disgusted by something else.

For now, it's cold and nothing interests me, and the river runs lazy and docile. The sky does not open itself to reveal anything, in fact I don't even really look at the sky, and I wake up afraid every morning, having gone to bed the same way. I'll get through January, and it'll warm up and get greener and I'll get more excited about life, then I'll find something else to whine about. The moon is always giving me something new to hurt about, something new to feel love for, for she knows, she always knows

[chloe--bug]

winter with no gloves

I’m in a dark cafe drinking hot tea. I like coming here at night to write, in part because the cafe stays open late, in part because they refill my tea steeper with hot water until then, and mostly because they leave me alone. The men are sympathetic and they let the sad girl do her work in the corner without any judgment or constraint. I feel like I’ve been using this place to keep me alive since the weather started to change. It’s true that each season brings its own host of complications, there are different hard things that happen with every advancement of time. But winter will never not be the hardest season to maintain any sort of vigor through, I feel like it takes everything in me to be strong for it, but I’m not sure I want to be strong.

I wake up in the morning and I don’t know where I am. It gets dark early. I wear the same boring outfit every day and I order things I don’t like to eat. Or do I like eating them? I can’t remember. I hate the cold, that’s always been true, and I like eating cucumbers and chocolate, and I drink water, and I’m funny. I’m not sure I should avoid something just because I hate it. I perform for new people, I tell them stories, I tell them about what it’s like to be an artist. I confuse them. I explain my passions again and again.

If a bird leaves its flock, if it flies away from the other birds and vows to never see them again, to look away at the flap of a wing, does the bird forget that she’s a bird? Does she stop dreaming of cooing and nesting? She sleeps whenever she wants and hunches over the computer and prays that her wishes keep going. She just ate a whole box of macaroni and cheese and a bowl of grapes. She wishes someone would tell her that’s not a real dinner and ask her when she’s coming to bed. She wishes someone could check up on her. She wishes home didn’t feel like a stale cookie or an empty hallway.

I think that winter is a time that reminds me of who I am at my bare bones, who I am alone and cold, nowhere to go, and every night I’m on my hands and knees going crazy over that one spot on the bathroom floor I just can’t get clean. I notice that without the excitement and freedom of summer or the change and growth of spring or the color and coolness of fall, I am left to invent my own reasons to live with intention. I have to just take this time to warm my hands over the stove, put my cat to bed when the sun goes down at 5:30PM, stay in the cafe with the tea steeper and the hot water and the dim lights until it feels too late to be in such a place by myself. Accept nature for what it does best, which is never lasting, which is changing and dying and growing anew. Nothing stays the same, not even for an instant. My feelings are gossamer; they are only assumptions I apply to waves and sensations. 

I’ve noticed myself writing a narrative that does not actually exist when I am trying to make sense of something unfamiliar or scary to me. I hear the voice in my head saying the most drastic things, it’s a bad habit I’m trying to break. Never is a false word to me, like the mouth of an endless cave. Things are hardly extreme in this life. I try to be careful when my mind goes sharp and starts making up facts, saying things like always and never and forever. The mind can veer into black and white in order to swallow what it doesn’t understand. I know better than to let my thoughts take over like this. 

I drank all of my tea and it’s freezing cold in here, my fingers are turning blue, but I feel glued to my chair, and somehow the music in my headphones blending with the music on the speakers is my favorite sound now. I think that being part of the movement and the quietness of this place, clicking the keys on my keyboard and flipping through the pages of my journal, is helping me not feel so dreadful about it all. I’ve got a lot to tell you but all I say is the same things you’ve heard me say a million times before.

[chloe--bug]

Sixteen days of winter, with nowhere to be in the morning, or normally even midday. Sitting at my desk with Kiwi for hours, drinking green tea all day, scrubbing the floors on my hands and knees, talking on the phone for the afternoon with someone I'll soon spend the next 12 hours with. I feel fortunate for the extra space between the minutes to sit within myself, to think about what I've been thinking about, and to breathe as slowly as feels right to my body. 

I think I have just been confounded by the way things have been, waking up on a couch with my shoes on and remembering how girlish I still am, taking a bite of breakfast that was cooked for me and thinking ahead to the rest of the morning but never the rest of the week. My emotions are spilling out of every part of me – I am fuller than usual, it's wild and mystifying and diverting. But it does not always feel good: much of the time, it feels like there is something bigger than me inside of me that is trying to get out but I can’t open myself wide enough to empty it. But there is something so invigorating about feeling to the kind of degree you’d feel to when you were younger, less bound to reality, less concerned with what might be, less guarded. There are times that I worry I’ll never fill up my heart like I did when I had yet to grow up, times like this remind me that isn’t true. 

I often think back to a time earlier this year, when I would walk alone on the beach and turn my thoughts over and over in my head until they grew bacteria on them and mutated into something completely different. It’s a bit of a habit I have, to run away and separate myself from the world and its flow. I found myself enamored with the idea of convincing myself of delusions that were entirely false. Both feet in the sand, breathing to the rhythm of the waves, I worried myself sick over something that never happened: a nightmare, a darker, more twisted version of reality that I invented because I thought if I could imagine the worst-case scenario before it actually happened, it would soften the blow. I neglected the healing power of the ocean in its vast, incomprehensible power – she moved towards me constantly with her dormant strength, and I kept my eyes on the stillness of the sand beneath my feet. The answer was right in front of me: turn to what is big, hold space for all of it, mirror what is powerful. I could not possibly understand this lesson at the time for I was too perplexed over a profound emptiness inside of me, a confusion about what I was supposed to be living for. I think when that feeling of void and empty approaches you should not try to fight it or fill it up… it has its own purpose, you can spend time in that space as it reveals itself to you, listen to its magic like you listen to all the rest.

There is something different about the lessons I am learning now, they are the first I am teaching myself as an adult. There’s a lot more room for error now, there isn’t anyone really supervising me. It never gets more normal, when it’s 10PM on a Tuesday and I can go wherever I want and do whatever I feel like. I feel invisible in the coffee shop, and walking down the familiar alleys of my neighborhood, but I’m not, everything I’m doing is forming and shaping me and everything I touch, but that doesn’t compute yet. I feel sometimes like I’m doing everything I can to keep me inside of myself, to stop her from shooting out into the ether, leaving the gold dust of her thoughts and ideas shimmering on the leaves of the trees and the tops of the hills. I’ve always known that there was something in me that not everyone would understand, but I didn’t feel so complete with it until recently. Now I’m older, and it no longer feels like the right decision to hold myself so tightly within my body. I sometimes sense that the earth has this hunger, and I want to feed it, I want to let my voice touch every edge of this earth. I will learn the answers after, it’s not important to me to be perfect yet.

There are always a few things left for me to decide, I know I go back and forth often, and I know the decisions will drive me crazy but it won’t change what I’ll find. To decide at all is to uncover something I’ve yet to feel, to live with that decision is to touch it all over and know its texture and the way its corners work. This morning I sat with my tea and watched the sun rise with my purring cat in my lap, knowing more than I knew a year ago or yesterday, and that was enough in that still, slow moment. I walked quietly down the hallway and felt the wood through my socks in a new way, warmer, sturdier, stronger. Maybe that was me feeling something inside of myself and not the floor, maybe this is all unfounded. As always I am trying to trust highs and lows and center myself on both feet in the moment that offers itself to me. Soon I will go back to the ocean and listen to the hypnotic murmur of the waves, I will let it all greet me and face it bravely, and there I can practice letting my soul shoot out into the clouds like fireworks.

[chloe--bug]

I am not everyone

I’m writing from my phone today, which I don’t normally do, and I feel so childish, for somehow there is shame in what I am doing. I don’t believe I’ll ever know how to hold that feeling in my hand and let it be. I have to turn it over and over and press it from every direction because I’ll always hope I can somehow change its shape, make it join my side, although that plan has yet to work out for me. I can feel my back curving over as I lean into the tiny light box, and I feel as though I should be hiding.

Love has been on my mind a lot lately, I feel it washed over me all the time, and I oscillate between loving and hating the girl it makes me. Loving the kindness in my voice when we speak, the way I notice when our feet touch under the table, the way it feels to get the phone call; hating the insecurity, the unknown, the jumping to conclusions. I worry that my love will always have to be enough for the both of us. I don't know if it's right for me to choose to be content with the way things are. "By nature I cannot trust my desires, because I only desire the things that I shouldn't. I will desire, and then the next moment I will be repelled by my desire. Mostly everything I desire is not good for me. Maybe I love feeling like the world is ending. Maybe I will grow out of it." Life is short but it’s also long, soooo long, and I am standing with both feet in this specific eclipsed moment of life. I don't know if it is going to happen for me, but I have learned to listen to my god-given intuition as it whispers to me what will happen, and if I feel us, I just feel us. The door used to feel slammed shut, it no longer feels this way.

Last November I tried being an idealized version of myself, it didn’t work out, I ended up having to learn about a new kind of guilt, and I acted out of insecurity. this November I drink a lot of tea and use my computer in public and think about what's next and talk on the phone with the same person often. I’m coming back inside and surveying the space for the first time in what feels like forever, I’m wondering why I don’t recognize any of it, I’m trying to feel at home again. Everything changed. Everything will continue to change. I still don’t know where to put my shoes.

I’m trying to make plans, I’ve realized that it’s time I get my affairs in order, but I feel so unreal. In fact I feel like none of this is real, it just doesn’t feel right, I feel like my mind has too much control over reality. I am the universe experiencing itself, I am the god that can grant me forgiveness, I am the masterpiece and the artist. I started talking to the walls and it got confusing. All I really want out of this life is to make good things and to be known for what is good about me and to let my thoughts turn smooth and as real as water, still as a pond… “I want to let my mind go clear as glass.”

I dwell on the fear that people think I'm intense. I wish so badly that I wasn’t, I’ve cried and prayed to be an easier person to be, an easier person to deal with. On one hand, I've met great beauty and great sadness and I live for its novelty and teaching power. But on the other I look kind of weird at family parties, I’m always running across town with a crazed look in my eyes kind of, nobody understands what I want to do, not even me, and my bosses are always kind of bewildered by me. I’m always going to be someone who cries on the walk home.

There is never enough time to think about any of these feelings as much as I want to – in my perfect world, every day lasts weeks and every thought or theory of mine is fine-tuned to perfection, squeaky clean, bulletproof, fast, hard. I often feel alien in my mind for lack of this privilege – there are thoughts floating around in there that I don't even understand, and I'll never get the time to. I need a lifetime more in this head. I will catch myself staring in a cloudy mirror in a dark bar surrounded by people older and less exciting than me, wondering if I'll ever "get" myself. I force myself to trust that because I am like this, it will all work out, it has to I think, it always has.

[chloe--bug]

Savannah is beautiful like a mall is beautiful. It's where I grew from a child into a woman and into an artist, I always loved the way I never felt like the most creative one in the room. It seems like the rules are looser here, like people can be true and enjoy themselves without purpose or reason. I could be mistaken. No one waits until the weekend to get drunk. I find it funny how everywhere you go there is an inner circle and if you drink enough Fernet you get to be part of it, it feels a little like teenagehood, I love it, does that make sense? I feel very lucky for my collection of thrifted clothes and my books and how easy it is for me to befriend strangers.

I went to the coffee shop next to the park today, imagine a big big room with tall ceilings and mismatched chairs, and a playlist that's wildly different every time you go in. I ordered a hot green tea. The loud music makes it hard to focus but keeps you awake, I guess. I met with girls from my class too, laughing about our professors and complaining about the final project. I felt like a real college student and a real girl. I drove home in the dark feeling warm inside. I didn't eat dinner. I was exhausted from the way I've been going at it with my mind, I know the key is to listen to your body and treat it like you'd treat a loved one's, I wish I could take care of myself that easily, sometimes I can but not as of late. So I went home and I kept working.

When I first got here and I was 17, the streets felt much further apart, and I thought I knew exactly how I'd spend my time here. In some ways it is exactly how I pictured it, exciting and creative and busy. I've never lived somewhere that felt like it touched me and held me every time I stepped outside. I think there is something interesting in this, I think it points to my future and lessons to be learned. The feeling of knowing the city is breathing has in turn made me much more alive, I worry about keeping up with the neighborhood often. I think this is a good thing for both of us. When I first lived here it felt frightening almost, the way I got to class on the bus and didn't even look out the window or know which streets we were taking. Now I can go anywhere, I can give tourists directions and advice.

When I am in the park or driving away from class or picking up my prescriptions at the grocery store I forget that I haven't lived here forever, like I know this place better than I've ever known anywhere. And now my application for graduation got approved, and the barista at the coffee shop next to the office knows my order, and I've made my way to the place I prayed to be at for years, and life is happening fast, and I feel beautiful in my sweatpants, and I feel lucky to be here in such an independent way.

I wasn't sure exactly what I was getting at when I started writing this, but I think I know now, I already knew that I was scared of things changing, I'll never not be scared, but I think I'm getting excited about it now. I've never been one to be comfortable being comfortable, I don't think I could be a good artist if everything was so effortless like that. It's nice to sit in the ease of it all, for now, I can award myself some pride for making my mark here, and I speak silent thank yous when I can walk for miles and find my way home without trying. But I know it's time for me to leave soon because things are easy and floaty and calm now.

I used to worry a lot about the election, I would get emotional imagining not having the job I have now and having to say goodbye to my best friends. I used to worry a lot about my lease ending in April. I picture these things to be the last ropes tethering me to my current life: I should be so thankful to see them cut so gracefully at such a perfect time for me to try something new. I see myself as fortunate to be so young and healthy and brave. Making my place here was hard, but now I have practice and I want to try it again somewhere new.

You will be the first to know when I decide where I'll go next, and Savannah will always be my special town where I became the kind of special you can only become here. I will make my last five months here the sweetest months I've lived yet so I have something to top when I leave. It feels so good, it feels real and warm and windy, it feels like I can picture myself telling this story in my old age.

[chloe--bug]

The hurt is so big and painful inside of me, what should I do?

When I was a little girl, my father would give me a rake and instruct me to make a huge pile out of the fallen autumn leaves in our yard. Sometimes, we would pick up all of the leaves and put them in big, thick, paper bags. On especially happy nights, when it was cool and dark outside and I had tired myself out from playing with the neighbors and climbing the tree and touching the dirt, we would make the pile particularly robust so that I could run towards it, and jump onto the cushion of foliage we had just created. The leaves would fly everywhere and I would laugh and laugh and laugh and we wouldn't rake them back up that night. On a night like tonight, I wish I knew where my journals from 2007 are. I'd like to know how little me described that moment in her writing. I know it was magical, but I no longer think in the same language I did when I was so young.

When I was a little girl, my father would give me the rake, and I would jump into the pile, and I would drink a glass of milk at the soft wooden kitchen table with my name scratched into it, and my mother would brush my hair, and I would put my toys where they belonged, and I would kneel beside my bed to pray before I slept.

I no longer live in a house with a backyard, and I don't own a rake, and the kitchen table is soft (I found it at Goodwill for $10) but it's much smaller and it doesn't have my name, or anyone's, scratched into it. There is no one here to care for me now that I have broken bones. There is no one here to sing me to sleep when I'm awake and upset past bedtime. So much happens every week. I'm worried that I am not tending to my physical or emotional pain because I have forgotten how to slow down. I looked at the calendar and I cried. All of the time I depended on is up, things have to happen now, and I can't even find the time to crawl under my bed and collect my cat's toys, or to lie down and rest my weary, weary, body, or to sit and feel the pain of everything that has happened.

I realize that I am, by nature, a tender, thoughtful girl, but my dedication to pleasing others before myself has forced me to bear this very silently. I know that it is sweet that I feel in the way that I do. I really do have so, so much love in my heart, but I also carry a lot of worry which is probably directly correlated to the love. I worry that I do not love in the right direction, or that I will love the biggest in the moments I am crying myself to sleep. I am carrying these things very close to my chest, and it is all beginning to ache so intolerably hard. I find it troublesome that I feel incapable of letting any of my sufferings be real to anyone else. They have grown to be everything I see – the hospital bracelet is on the floor because it hurts too much to pick it up, and the bowl and spoon are on my bedside table, and the poor, sweet, quiet cat climbs over my piles of unfolded laundry to come cuddle with me. It is all becoming too much for me, yet my voice echoes quieter and quieter down the corridor of reality. I am letting this hurt swallow me from the inside.

I know what I want. I feel lucky to faithfully believe that I deserve all of it and more, and yet... I am too frightened to ask for it. I have become the sad type of person that would rather ponder forever the things she wishes she could express than just voice them out loud. I closed my eyes and pictured myself saying it all, and it was as though a cloudy mass began to exit my body, pulled by a string, freeing me of the weight of everything that keeps me so miserable when I'm alone. I could feel it so deeply, but the thought of acting on this daydream, subsequently forcing everyone in my life to have to deal with everything I want to unload on them, pains me in a wholly unique way.

Regardless of what I choose to do, soon many things will change. I find solace in the thought that maybe this will fix the problem – I will have a new job, he might leave Savannah forever, I will have some time to luxuriate in things like sweeping the halls and reading alone in my clean bedroom. But when I am being intimately sincere with myself, I have to concede that these developments will not absolve me of the affliction of my heart. They will not relieve the sting of feeling so underloved as I do now. What should I do? How could I cherish myself in this time of so much discomfort? Where do I start, getting the cloudy mass out of my body that I want so badly to just be my own?

I will see the sun in the morning and the leaves on the front lawn and be reminded of the still evenings spent jumping onto the leaves, but I know that I will not thoroughly relish any of it before I choose to unburden myself of this hurt. It is so big and painful inside of me, I need to know, what should I do?

[chloe--bug]

writing a recipe for unplumbed change

Feeling so foreign in my body today. It seems loud and heavy but manifests as such a quiet, weightless resolution – no one I speak to today will have any idea how strange I feel. Many Mondays feel somewhat like this... I try to relax on the weekend but end up a bundle of nerves on the first day of the week, unprepared and somehow unrested, only able to worry about the week to come. I tried to savor my walk at sunset yesterday, but everything I saw made me dreadfully sad. Not just the old couple holding each other by their waists, or the slow-moving dog bearing down the sidewalk, but the things that probably should have put a smile on my face, too: the teenage boys sharing a bench with 5 pizza boxes stacked high on one of their laps, the kids swinging alongside each other on the playground. All of it hits me in a different spot, each one as tender as the next. Since when have I been bruised all over?

I think if I go deep enough I can sort out the root of this trouble: things will change soon, and I am well too aware of it. I have a morbid habit of trying to brace myself for incoming pain, but ultimately feeling the pain even more because I've prolonged it – made it an event, something to fear – and then I regret ever trying to predict when I would be sad in the future. Why can't I just feel things when they happen? I know that change is inevitable. It is supposed to be one of the most exciting parts of growing up, yet I am sick to death of wondering what I'll do if it's not what I'm doing right now.

There is a recurring concept in my personal diaries that I call The Dream. It refers to a dream I have often that feels more like a picture of the future than a figment of my imagination. It feels so true and clear that I wake up really believing I watched myself experience something that will soon be real to me. The problem with The Dream is that it fundamentally relies on certain things not changing... certain things that I know will change. I somehow still find myself unable to let go of the belief that it is real, and I think this is what's making it so impossible for me to accept that my life is ever-evolving. There may not be time for The Dream to come to life. This has become The Problem.

I think of my first time listening to Fiona Apple. "Days like this I don't know what to do with myself," she sang, how did she know how I was feeling? I really don't know what to do with myself on days like this, as I wait for life to change. I walk in the face of such uncertainty – in a month, everything will be different. There is no way for me to predict it. Sick to death, like I said. I'm sick to death about it.

So, with all of this being said – I think it is time I write a recipe. I need ingredients and instructions to follow. I advise you, dear reader, to find your own version of this recipe for when you face a change that feels unfathomed, uninvestigated, abysmal, deep, eternal, soundless, unending, unmeasured. It rarely feels like only one of those things. It usually grows to become a dark cave with room to be all of those things.

First, I will clean my room and thank myself that I can always predict that a tidy room will make me feel better. I will not deny myself the time to cry about the things I feel afraid of (after all, what will I gain from treating myself poorly for feeling strongly?) and I will set aside five pages in my diary for lamenting the aforementioned change. It is paramount to remember that it is more than okay to fear and hate it. I will comb through my shirts and find the one that feels the softest on that particular day, and I will wear it to bed with slippers and my favorite underwear. I will tell myself: It is okay, it is okay, it is okay. I cannot observe a world without transformation. I love you life, even if you don't understand me at all. This is my recipe for uncharted, boundless, immeasurable change.

[chloe--bug]

Shame

I have chosen to again be fond of the nickname my father gave me when I was little. When I dream, it is not often that I see more than a white ball rolling on the white floor of maybe a floating orange box. But sometimes I dream of baby Chloe. At the time, I was only a product of my mother. I am now a product of 21 years of the world.

When I think of chloe bug I think "free, close, empathetic, young," maybe a sprinkle of mischief. I remember my father's friends commenting on the glimmer in my eye and getting a kick out of me when I winked. I have yet to come to a decision on whether that's a little weird or not.

I shared my journals with my mother (not really by my choice, but I understand why she wanted to read them.) so now I have to share a few pages from my journal every now and then with a few people I chose to trust. It is strange how once you've done something for your parents, you feel the need to do it for someone else to replicate the feeling.

There is something different about living in a small spot on the internet. I like to think that the only people that have seen what I have chosen to share are those that I see following me, but I am mature to think that my posts have probably wandered elsewhere. I would rather you didn't share them with people but I understand if you do.

I spend a lot of my time on the internet talking about things I wouldn't talk about with friends out loud. Not because I don't trust them or don't believe they'd like to hear me say it, but because I worry about burdening people with the task of deciding what face to make, when to nod and when to furrow their brow, what to say in response that reads "interested and caring but not controlling or overbearing." I try not to spend so much time picturing the effort it takes to react to something I came up with, but I myself spend much of my time struggling to react to my own thoughts. In the end, I am only trying to save everyone a little leg work.

I often walk for five or so miles with the express purpose of mulling over something I feel shameful about. There is nothing wrong with feeling it, and moving my body helps me sweat it out. If it were up to me, I wouldn't have done the thing I feel so regretful of. If it were up to me, you'd have no idea. But every good woman must wear her heart on her sleeve!

I am very familiar with a guilt bubble in my throat, dreaming of the past, wondering what went wrong, what I could have done differently. Something I wrote before: "There's something about me that is prone to ceramic vase syndrome (the satisfying crash, the silence that follows)" It's true – I have yet to figure out how to break the cycle. For now, I put on my headphones and go to the park... I write in my journal and I think it over as I go to sleep.

[chloe--bug]

Little bluebird girl

I saw a blue bird and I thought of you. We once took note of every omen together, every bird that landed on a tree near us. Every rain cloud and every red door. You watched me knock on wood, on plastic, on whatever was next to me, to absolve me of misfortune.

I held your name in the back of my throat for so long. I expected you to stop and meet my eye so I could tell you Look! Look how long I can stay alive for you. You only knew me when you were listening for a response to something that you said. "I was carving my name into your side and you were calling me soft, calling me gentle. I do not think you were paying attention." (Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed)

I moved to a different city; I spent some time at home. As I went on with my passage through every phase of my late youth, I found a version of myself I never could have imagined when you first knew me. I've spent our years apart on the edge of disappearance – would you even recognize me anymore? I don't listen to the same music anymore. I wouldn't hide behind you, afraid to be caught disagreeing with you, anymore.

During my first year out of Texas, I often watched the happy people around me. Interlinked. I did long to have my heart interlinked with another. I was so, so, tired of pretending I was fine on my own. There, a boy skateboarding as his dog ran alongside him. There, a toddler running after her father. There was so much love, and none for me. I saw you in every room I walked into. I've never felt so passionately, voraciously hungry for anyone as I was for you that year. I missed you in my stomach; I couldn't wear that jacket without thinking of that one time you walked me out to my car.

I turn 21 next week. I think about the 16-year-old girl you knew, the one who begged you to respond to questions she knew the answer to. She lives inside of me still – we have the same teeth, the same sparse eyebrows and the same long legs. But something is different now: I learned that love means more than you. I'm more worried now about the inevitable sadness I'll feel on my birthday (more on that when the time comes) than about whether or not you'll remember to say anything. I couldn't change the way you felt about me so I changed the way I felt about myself, about everything else. It worked.

But I'll still think of you when I see a cardinal land on the tree in front of my house, I'll think of you forever. That's how love works!

[chloe--bug]

[chloe--bug]

Thoughts on the last night of my last summer

This summer saw me sadder than most. This is the freest I've ever been, yet I spend most of my time feeling ever so dreadful. It's funny, growing up – you wait so long for it to happen, and then it seems to creep up from beneath you, swallowing your every inch before you even have the chance to change your mind. I often find myself ruminating on how lucky I was to once be a child. How unlucky I am to hardly remember it. Summer came and went, and the days are growing shorter and shorter. It's true that time eludes us most when we need it desperately.

I noticed it first in small things: getting excited about drinking my coffee in the morning and tea in the evening, slow cooking an elaborate meal when I have the house to myself, sweeping the kitchen, bringing an umbrella when it looks like rain. I'm much more grown-up than I was when I first moved to Savannah, and I often dwell on the idea that it all happened before I got the chance to plan any of it out. Certainly, I'll read this back in 20 years and think "oh Chloe, you were so young. You hadn't a clue what it means to grow up." Probably even ten. But for now, I've never been so old and I've never felt so lost – as much as a teenage girl is afraid and insecure and confused, she knows exactly who she wants to be: older. There was not a second of my adolescent years spent worrying about growing up – in fact, I begged whoever was pulling the strings to let me skip ahead in life. That lust for the opulent dream of freedom and beauty and opportunity that comes with not being a teenager has since evaded me, and some days I only long to be riding home from school in the passenger seat of my mother's car. "Though we give the appearance of it, I wonder when we were last truly carefree. Were we ever? It's an odd, impalpable thing to always chase. I've felt it in small, delicious fragments, and usually when I'm dancing. The only way to achieve even the veneer of such freedom is to resist being pulled down by the weight of everything." (Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour).

I watched the sun set on a warm and rainy day, feigning boredom by stretching out under my sheets with my book... but on the inside, I only worried. I lost sleep thinking about how I'll never experience a summer so sunny and quiet and loose as this one. I'm trying not to mourn it, but sometimes the only way to accept something is to allow yourself to feel the grief first. The days of my last summer with nowhere to be in the middle of a Tuesday, my last summer having to use a fake ID to go to bars, my last summer of truly just being a girl... lay behind me. I will put those days to rest as I march into the unfamiliar. I just wish I didn't have to...

[chloe--bug]

[chloe--bug]

I am, I am, I am

It's the end of August and I can feel the warmth taking my sense out from under me. I spend my time writing and being afraid – when you are living in delusion, you are busy doing so all the time. It seems that everyone I pass on the street is watching me with a distant, reproachful gaze. I'm pale, I've spent every summer day inside. But the one thing I don't ever forget to do is long for something that only would have ever torn me to shreds. All I ever loved about myself was gone in the blink of an eye as soon as I was in the hands of a man who would only ever leave me waiting...I was putty. I became disposable. I turn into something I never wanted to be every night when he calls me. All I ever wanted was to hear him tell me I was best. I watched a blue bird at my window, convinced him to join me in my pathetic stupor for an hour, and now I see him at the grocery store, on the drive to the doctor's office.

Now and then, I wake up sure of one thing only: today, I will not know what to do with myself. My mind is patient with me, but I know that even she grows tired of my constant musing. I find myself unrecognizable – listless, disintegrating, obsolete: a heavy, tired burden. There is so much hurt in this game of searching for true "happiness." And then you realize you forgot it was just a game but it's too late and you're watching the bugs crawl on the window as you cry, and cry, and cry. Some might wish to remain stagnant, just as they are. Pull up a chair and stay for a while; stare into the mirrored pool of thought that is the heart. But life is long. I want to keep searching.

I walk past the hallway mirror and catch myself actively avoiding my reflection. It is just that I don't recognize her – I don't care to spend time with the version of myself that other people see. I built a fortress just to hate every inch of it. I couldn't leave, I can't leave. I want to feel everything, to live and experience every point of the spectrum of emotional experience. And I am horribly limited.

anyways this was a story about why i have a hard time taking my medication, and about maybe why i enjoy hurting sometimes. some of the man stuff is brought back up from past journal entries just for fun. thanks for reading

[chloe--bug]

When the most beautiful thing in the world is peeling an orange in bed

It has come to my attention that I have spent the entirety of this year – possibly longer – sitting around and waiting for something to happen. This realization puzzles me, for all of a sudden I'm unable to recall what I could possibly have been waiting for all these months. I suppose I could savor this strange feeling, let it linger. Leave it in my mouth and wait until I've tasted every flavor. But I find myself so starving I cannot wait and it's gone before I can even really chew on it.

I collapse into my unmade-for-3-days bed, watching my stuffed animals watch me stretch my body underneath the sheets. Why does August always feel this way? Dreadful. The condensation on the window, the fan shaking on the ceiling, the underwear laying on the hardwood floor. I think that I'm not often sad, but right now I know I am. I just don't feel good.

It's silent in here, except for the whirr of the fan I keep under my bed for noise purposes. I haven't turned it off since I moved in. The silence is making me ill. There is something formidable about spending all day shut in my purple bedroom. "It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction – every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour." (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar) Wherever I sit – my desk or the green velvet loveseat or my half-unmade bed or the pink fake Persian rug on the floor – I am sitting on my own two legs, my muscles growing sore as the hours go by. The sun filters through the blinds until it doesn't. I light a candle. I can't see the point of getting up.