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[ex-priest]

heartbreak log # 2

my presentation went really well. exceedingly well. my first thought is to share it with you. look at me, all grown up. moving on from the demotivated, ambition-less girl you once looked at with disdain. i want to share this win with you. all of this joy is undercut with that grief again, that you are no longer by my side. i can imagine your grin, how you would tackle me to the bed and envelope me as a warm congratulations. i knew what i was going into, ending things so abruptly like that, but i guess i didn't think of all of the happy times we would miss out on. too focused on the sadness that always seems to prevail. i feel the need to apologize, again — this is my fault, i chose this, i wanted out. because i said i no longer needed you. in retrospect, that wasn't true. i did need you. (maybe i still do). or at the very least, i needed something from you. but i rarely got it.

[ex-priest]

heartbreak log # 1

it's been a year since i've been on here — i think i've lost all of my words. i have tried to write, but all of my poetry fell to deaf ears and the void known as my iphone notes app. so let's cut to the chase: i have loved and i have lost, just like i always wanted to. if you have been reading along all this time, you might have seen both sides: the excitement of falling in love, the happiness that comes from someone else's fingertips running through your hair. and then there is the opposite of it: the misery, the loneliness, the agony of being tethered to someone who does not make you feel loved. this is officially my first heartbreak log. today i pose a question: is it a heartbreak log if i'm the one who broke our hearts? what else do i call it, if my chest feels empty and every movement aches? i see him everywhere now, more than i ever did when we were together. in my dreams, in a song, in a random guy wearing a basketball jersey in the mall. every time i step out into the world, i half-expect him to be walking towards me, nodding to me in that half-hearted way i eventually came to resent. (i resent that i resented it). some part of me wants to see him again. some part of me thinks i will run away if i do. that's what he thinks of me, after all. (a liar a cheat a manipulator) always running at the first sign of distress. i don't think i will ever grow out of that impulse. i tried and failed. over and over and over. and then it became the death of us. even at the very end, he painted it as me giving up on him. i did give up. i did break it off, just like i always knew i would (in the most intimate of moments, i think about ending things), and yet i still feel like the world is caving in on me, like i can't breathe without blinking back tears, like i am so fucking alone and no one will ever love me the way he loved me: the whiplash kind of love, so saccharine that it hurt, so painful that it circled back to devotion. (i kind of understand catholicism more). and yet — i still love him, deep down, buried in all the built-up resentment and the screams stuck in my throat. what do i do with all of this? where do i put it now? i want to run to his arms and feel the dimples in his back again. i'm sorry, please don't leave me. i should've waited for you. you should have met my friends that night, they would have loved you. but every time i am on the brink of doing so, i get flashing red, violent visions of sweat, raised voices, and fingers around our throats. you are not good for me. i am not good for you. so why do i keep scrolling through our old messages, inhaling all of your sweetness?

i miss you. i think i miss myself more, though.

[ex-priest]

when i’m with(out) you i don’t want to be with you

i have a confession to make. sometimes, when i miss you, i go back and read our old conversations. i especially love the ones where we’re both hurting: you screaming and throwing every insecurity i have against me. me always starting out strong, desperately trying to plead, but always ending deflated. a sad unforgotten balloon at a spoiled child’s raucous birthday party.

before you say anything, let me clear my name: yes, i love you. and these fights are in the past. but reading them again—i feel every bit of pain and resentment and anger just as i did the first time you told me all of the sick, twisted things you thought of me. i remember all of the tears, the agony, the phone slipping through my fingers because my hands were shaking too hard. i remember lying down on the bathroom floor, saying over and over again: i have nothing, i am nothing. i remember sitting on the grass, both of us in the rain just like a romantic movie except instead of whispered words of admiration it is you telling me that i deserved to be treated like i am not someone you love.

i wonder if you remember any of these, too.

like that time when we were fighting by the highway, when i told you that the reason you were the only thing i love was because you took away everything that i used to love before i met you.

do you remember that?

what about that time you called me just to watch my every move? we were a thriller movie, you and i. if i listened close, i could almost hear the haunting soundtrack of shrill violins, the sure sign of impending doom. i guess in this scenario i would be the victim, but you’d laugh if i ever said that to you.

and what about that time when i locked myself in your bathroom? you left me a water bottle outside of the door. i kicked it on the way out. i can still hear the crack of wood against the floor when i screamed: i don’t want to do anything just because you want me to. and then i sat by your front door for almost an hour, just staring into space wondering how my life had come to this.

sometimes when i am lying down alone i think of you lying next to me, half-asleep in the morning light. i whispered, are we breaking up? and you said, i don’t know.

we morph into a nighttime struggle: your rugged hands on my arms, pleading with me to stay until you got on your knees. i was wearing your red jacket, i think. seems ironic now when i was so close to giving you up then.

then it is me, drenched in rainwater and tears as the 8:00 bus chugged down the highway, taking me miles away from you after what seems like the worst fight in the entire history of you and me. (to be fair, every fight seems that way until the next one.) i was freezing in my wet clothes while i sent you what i thought would be one of the last things i’d ever say to you: i can’t do this anymore.

funny. after remembering the greatest hits of all our worsts, i’m still here. still reading our old conversations because i miss you.

i don’t know why i’m here writing about it—it’s not like you’d ever read anything on here.

at least, that’s what you said the last time, but you and i know what happened next.

[ex-priest]

i am such a fuck-up. can’t do anything right anymore. i feel so worthless. what good is being seen if all anyone can see are the faults? there is no redeeming anymore. all i do is ruin. people. days. moments. my words are simply apologies. all fillers until the next shaky i’m sorry. i’m sorry i can’t do anything. right. or good. or worthy. i’m sorry i’m giving up on you on myself. it’s only a matter of time until i go. for good? maybe. maybe one day i can finally do something right even if it’s the last thing i do.

[ex-priest]

i feel like i don’t know how to talk to anyone anymore. so i don’t. i go through my day, smiling, nodding, furrowing my eyebrows when necessary. (in my head, i do everything right.) i enter the stage, say my line. exit, stage left. i leave all my asides unspoken because i know the audience won’t understand. or care. what significance does the rambling of the miserable fool bear when there are more important soliloquys to be heard? the last time i tried, my voice came out as a squeaking echo that you never noticed. or maybe you did, but you didn’t think it mattered. so i didn’t think it mattered. so i didn’t think i mattered. sometimes i wish you said all the right words, too—just like the way the scene plays out in my head. that’s unfair, i know. i never gave you the script. i guess i just wish you knew my heart well enough to know the lines anyway. i’ll say, i’m lonely. you’ll say, let me be lonely with you. and then you’ll ask me about my day, grand to miniscule—what did you have for breakfast all the way down to what do you think about when you’re lonely? but it never plays out like this, and it wouldn’t make sense to be upset that you don’t know the words to a story i won’t even let you read. it’s probably my fault anyway—i’m breaking my heart on a different act, you’re still scenes and pages behind. for now, i say nothing. better than saying something and getting hurt when you go off the script i’ve written in my mind. so i will smile, nod, furrow my eyebrows on cue. i’m good at this—playing along, losing myself to a character that looks and sounds like me. but when i’m alone on stage, i’ll keep all of my depths and worries to myself even if it means losing my limbs and stitches. i’m more afraid to open my mouth and be met with an empty auditorium at the end of my speech. the fool, after all, requires an audience.

[ex-priest]

when it’s good

it’s good

i am invincible. nothing can hurt me

it is a thousand

burning suns,

red hot but new

springtime and boiled tea

and this heat against my skin

is so lovely and i feel i

am so lucky

to have these golden pools of light

snug in the spaces between my fingers

but

when it’s bad

this heat turns into

a misplaced hand on an iron

(and how can i stay angry

when it is never the iron’s fault?)

but it is also

breathlessness and panic

a submersion into the deep sea

where i always come out shaking

wobbly, watered-down from

(crying on the bathroom floor so no one can hear me)

a wet, written down list

of all my faults and flaws

the ink has seeped into my pores

that i bleed blacks and blues

no longer golden

unless i turn my cheek the other way

yet

even then,

when you smile

it makes me forget

that i was ever in the waters

or that blood should be

red

when it’s good

it is so,

so

good

when it’s bad...

[ex-priest]

this morning i crawled in my mother’s bed and asked if i could sleep next to her for the first time in years. half-asleep, she takes me into her arms, holds me against her warmth, and kisses the back of my head. just like that she is gone again, snoring in that cartoonish way that is so uniquely her, and i am left staring at our entwined fingers through suddenly-blurry eyes. when i was a child, morbid as i was, i used to sleep beside her just like this, secretly weeping at the thought of losing her to the future, to the grown-up version of me who will inevitably think i will not need a mother.

and she was right. i have not been the best i could be for her, for my parents, my siblings, anyone i have ever loved. i can hear the hurt and disappointment ringing through my ears with every step i walk on these tiled floors. yet here my mother was, breathing steadily in her sleep, pulling me so close i can feel her heartbeat in my spine. she murmurs, here, have my pillow, and i hear: i love you, then and now and forever.

suddenly i feel all my ages, sandra cisnero-style, and i want them all back. i want to be nineteen again, suffering from a two-month depression but still racing to the kitchen so my mother could be the first person to hear a breathless and flustered version of myself shyly announcing i got into the university i was aiming for, and relive the warmth of her proud embrace that lifted my spirits enough to convince me i didn’t need to harm myself any more. i want to be fifteen again, when we were lying in the darkness of my room and she asked, in the most quiet voice, if i hated her, and in that moment i was so ashamed of myself that i allowed my mother to think of such things that i cried into her chest for the rest of the night. i want to be ten again, watching my mother make my favorite dessert for my birthday, still so at awe at how something so simple could be so delicious. i want to be five again, cradled in my mother’s arms as she comforts me after a bad encounter with our housecat, singing a melody that i have never forgotten to this day: don’t cry, little one / ‘til your hopes and your wishes come true / you must try to be brave, little one / someone’s thinking of you.

lying there, i didn’t want to be twenty-two, when i couldn’t bare to look my mother in the eyes and tell her all of my sins. i wondered if she heard me crying in the other room all night over a phone call with my boyfriend—and if she did, i wondered what she thought of me and all of the countless times i’ve waded through this home with puffy eyes and a quivering lip that has never told a soul about the decay and deterioration that has been eating me from the inside for the last few months. i am afraid she thinks i am weak when she has raised me to be so strong—but lately, she might be just right. mothers usually are.

but at twenty-two, i say none of these things. i tear my own feelings down and convince myself that no one else needs to see these scrap pieces of me. but the child in me is begging—i am suddenly four, seven, eleven— to just melt into her arms, turn my back to the world, and tell my mother everything.

she stirred in her sleep, waking herself, and just like that i lost the chance to feel like her child again. i am now just twenty-two with nothing to say. the bed is empty. i am alone. and in the loneliness and darkness of these moments, i just want to call out for my mom.

[ex-priest]

10 lines from a love letter or a suicide note

first of all, i'm sorry.

i wish you didn't have to find out this way, but you know i'm not good at making sense of words until i've written them down.

when this first started, i didn't know how much it would consume me. how it would occupy my thoughts, first and last and always. it's hard to remember my life before it, how i would use to think of the most mundane things, like homework, and breakfast, and tying my shoelaces. now, all of that - every thought that has flitted through my head - seems so small in comparison.

you laughed at me when i told you i listen to your favorite musician when i miss you. i was laughing with you, then, but all i wanted to say was of course. of course i would listen. how could i not?

when my brother ran away from home, he left me letters and clues and map coordinates. i always think about the fact that he chose me, that he wanted me to piece it all together and make sense of why he left. i don't know if it was out of love, or revenge, or maybe just circumstance. i don't even know if he wanted to be found. when he eventually came home, i was too afraid to ask. i don't think i can handle the truth either way.

i hope your mom likes me.

i never thought it would happen like this. embarrassingly, it reminds me of a john green quote. it's like falling asleep: slowly, then all at once.

you were the first person to read my journal, albeit accidentally at first. i don't know why it was such a big deal to me, keeping it a secret from everyone in my life. i guess i just wanted something to be mine and only mine, a place where i could line up these darknesses until i could line them up and create a silhouette of who i am before anyone else could figure it out. but if i were being truly honest, there was a tiny part of me that always hoped you would be the first to find it.

i considered buying you a set of 39 clues, but i didn't want to risk tainting your favorite childhood books.

you don't have to do anything if you're not ready. i just wanted to let you know. besides, i think i already know what you're going to say.

[ex-priest]

notes from my drafts pt. 3

poly amor

i like the idea of a polyamorous relationship because i like the idea of being loved twice as much.

with you, my love—you give me the love of two, three, a thousand people at once.

[ex-priest]

notes from my drafts pt. 2

an update to number 7

love is a dog person, but he knows all your cats' names. he asks about them, sometimes, and you'll hold them up to the computer screen to show him yes, they are doing fine. love loves sports, and travelling, and going to bars with his friends. but he likes the quiet days, too, and he somehow knows exactly when you need the silence. love doesn't like any of the same music, but when you show him a song he will remember it. and you have a playlist of songs that make you think of each other, in all the ways and genres to say i love you. but love isn’t afraid to tell you he loves you, again and again, and each time it makes you feel like a rilke poem: lying amongst the flowers, face to face with the skies.

[ex-priest]

notes from my drafts pt. 1

love is—a fight. an extenuating circumstance.

[ex-priest]

you’re always sorry

and i always forgive you

but this loop is getting tiring

how many times do i have to beg you

how many times do i have to

sit there

and feel your ugly, stewing rage,

wiping off the venom you spit

in my head?

i am running out of antidotes.

i am running out of forgiveness.

i am running out of things to say.

but youre always sorry

so i have to

forgive you

even if it

means

i

[ex-priest]

oh, cool. i really did get diane.

taking a which bojack horseman character are you quiz only not really taking it because i already know i’m diane. i remember the scene where she tells mr. peanutbutter that their marriage is like a magic seeing eye poster, and that if you squint just right, everything is magical beautiful wonderful but then she bursts into tears and says she is so tired of squinting. that feels like me, most of the time. that is me. i am someone whose happiness takes so much out of her, when everyone else seems to do just fine being fine. and remember that other scene, where she realizes that she has a stable job and solid friends and a loving husband and therefore should be happy? but she wasn’t happy. and again i think me. all me. it is a crippling form of depression that she will not realize until season six, and i wonder now when my season six will be. maybe it’s right now, while i type this with my head under a blanket so my sister doesn’t see me crying again. perhaps this is episode one: getting off an hour-long call with the person i love the most and feeling worse instead of better. (and i usually almost always feel better.) it is a mixture of the feeling of missing him and the knowledge that i am in another one of those depressive episodes i do not understand myself. i contemplated telling him, just now. hello, my love, i am so fucking sad, and there is nothing you or i can do about it. i have had visions of violence against myself again for no reason but i hope you understand. i am imagining the scene as it will play in the future: the look on his face as i tell him this, the responses and assurances that make me believe that i do not deserve to be with someone like him. and it makes me remember why i rarely tell people anything about me.

i think i’ll just go back to taking that buzzfeed quiz.

[ex-priest]

taking a which bojack horseman character are you quiz only not really taking it because i already know i’m diane. i remember the scene where she tells mr. peanutbutter that their marriage is like a magic seeing eye poster, and that if you squint just right, everything is magical beautiful wonderful but then she bursts into tears and says she is so tired of squinting. that feels like me, most of the time. that is me. i am someone whose happiness takes so much out of her, when everyone else seems to do just fine being fine. and remember that other scene, where she realizes that she has a stable job and solid friends and a loving husband and therefore should be happy? but she wasn’t happy. and again i think me. all me. it is a crippling form of depression that she will not realize until season six, and i wonder now when my season six will be. maybe it’s right now, while i type this with my head under a blanket so my sister doesn’t see me crying again. perhaps this is episode one: getting off an hour-long call with the person i love the most and feeling worse instead of better. (and i usually almost always feel better.) it is a mixture of the feeling of missing him and the knowledge that i am in another one of those depressive episodes i do not understand myself. i contemplated telling him, just now. hello, my love, i am so fucking sad, and there is nothing you or i can do about it. i have had visions of violence against myself again for no reason but i hope you understand. i am imagining the scene as it will play in the future: the look on his face as i tell him this, the responses and assurances that make me believe that i do not deserve to be with someone like him. and it makes me remember why i rarely tell people anything about me.

i think i’ll just go back to taking that buzzfeed quiz.

[ex-priest]

self-care in the time of the pandemic

i am watching my boyfriend sleep through the tiny zoom call window of an almost-four hour call. when he wakes i tell him, it's okay, you can turn off your laptop and sleep, i will see you in the morning. he frowns and says no, closes his eyes, and i fall in love a little bit more. it makes my chest ache that i can't hold his hand and kiss his shoulder - gently, so i don't wake him - but for now, this is okay. this is an i love you in the twenty-first century. and now, i am realizing, that among the most difficult times in this difficult time, the hardest part is not getting to sleep in his arms every night.

[ex-priest]

i really am trying !

i want to write like f.t. willz in diamond rings don't shine so bright when you know where they came from, but i don't have enough angst and adhd in me right now. here it is, for reference:

Show me who you are on the inside… Really? Me too. We’re so alike, where did you grow up? NO FUCKING WAY! A small town? That’s so wierd; no one ever listens to me either. Wow. What a small world (exclamation point) LOL. We should be friends, what’s your number? Wanna hang out sometime? Are you on Myfriendsmakeoutspace-ster(fuckeachotherfuckeachotherfuckeachother) club? Me too. Wanna fuck? I’m just like you. Can I borrow your car? Live at your house? Eat your pets? Kill your parents? We’re so perfect together, (for each other)… Opportunity is knocking do you hear it? BANGBANG. I wrote a song about you, it has 25 different parts that don’t belong together. I skream and cry and there’s no melody what so ever, you’ll love it, listen to it every day… Until all your friends like it too, then you’ll say it sucks and call me a sellout. Do you wanna get matching tattoos, have the same haircut, go steady, and just be friends so we can fuck everyone else who looks just like us, thinks like us, and feels like us too? Fuck, look at me, look at me; right here, right in the fucking eyes. Can you see it? No? Look closer then. How about now? No? Maybe it’s the atrocious lighting in here. Wait let me take a crooked picture with my hair in my face while I cut your name into my thigh. Do you see it now? You don’t see anything? Nothing at all? Are you sure? Positive? Wierd, me either, small fucking world huh?

end scene. i wish it was as easy as that, ending a scene. instead i have to go through self-realizations and depressive episodes and a million i'm sorrys and crying alone in the bathroom at three in the morning because i don't feel like a person anymore. (i've said it time and time again but i feel like a sociopath. how? well for starters i have three thousand karma on reddit. also i don't care about anything that matters.) the past two nights have been very Not Fucking Good and i keep thinking if it goes on for a third night the charm in question would be me killing myself. ha ha, just kidding. i wouldn't kill myself over that. at least, i don't think i would kill myself over that, but i would take this with a grain of salt because i have considered killing myself for less. spite, for example. and curiosity. and just for the sake of never having to see myself get old and weak and shitting-all-over-my-pants disgusting. but i digress. Hello Jeffrey, I am afraid. I am writing to you now to inform you of my shortcomings as a person and as a person in relationship(s) with my loved ones. it sucks to suck at something you don't want to suck at. and it sucks to be put to the test and failing so fucking miserably it's not even funny. no wonder no one has ever loved me before. this reminds me of a few of f.t. willz/ frank iero choice pieces of poetry/lyric such as:

but you're on my mind / and the things that you say hurt me most of the time / but i'm on your side / because i know i'm not easy to deal with sometimes / but i'm sinking fast so it's alright

and:

i wanna do what's right by you / but i can't seem to get my shit together / not ever, no matter how hard i try / i never seem to get it right

and how can i forget:

i wish i was good enough for your love

i knew i can count on good ol' frankie boy and the entirety of .stomachaches. (2016) to say exactly what i'm thinking. guess me and him are the same after all. we're so alike, can't you see? so edgy and forlorn and so fucking in love with no outlet but angst and adhd? NO FUCKING WAY! it feels like 2016 again, referencing frank iero in my prose like a fucking mla citation. it feels like 2016 again in the way it feels like i am constantly crying myself to sleep and waking up after lunch just to guzzle coffee and stare at some kind of abyss in the corner of my room. (luca, if you're out there, i miss you.) and it feels like 2016 again with the way i am constantly tired. but i guess this time around it's because i feel like i am always fucking trying and getting nothing but lashing out and a billion more i'm sorrys. but you know, maybe it's just really me, you guys. maybe i'm just not good enough. hey! it's just like what the voices in my head say! we're so alike, we're so fucking cool. what a weird coincidence, huh?

[ex-priest]

There Is An Imposter Among Us

i am tired of the tears and the self-realizations that force their way out of the tiny box hidden in the corner of my mind. but today it finally told me why i never like talking about myself in a real way. i can’t believe it took me two decades to understand that i am an imposter. (i knew i was fake, before all of this went down. i just didn’t know to what degree.) every time i share something remotely “real” about myself there is a snide voice at the back of my head telling me things a fake woke sjw would be proud to come up with. everything i say about myself is Performative. there is no real me—there is only a performance of who i think i am based on who i think others think i am. and so there are layers and layers, onions and billowing skirts, faces of me that i do not recognize in the mirror. everytime i say something about myself i am standing the background, pointing, laughing. fake. attention-seeker, desperate. that’s not who you are. you are not this person. and every time i have to shut up because the ringing in my ears begin to sound like ambulances dispatched for a girl lying in a pool of her own blood. i am an imposter. everything i think is genuine about me is simply something i picked up because it looked shiny and neat. i am a magpie for identities and personalities. and what bothers me about this self-realization is the belief that none of my relationships will ever truly mean anything to me. my parents. my siblings. my friends. my boyfriend. all of them—inconsequential. all of them just loose threads and pocket change, people i Perform for to get some semblance of love and warmth. (i wasn’t lying when i said i don’t have passions like he does. it’s all just smoke and mirrors, the way i care about things. everything happening in the world right now is as significant to me as the needles that stick to my skirt when i walk through a field of grass. it sticks, for a while, but i can pick it off as i like, and it would mean nothing to me.) but the worst of it all is that i also think that everything i have said in the last paragraph is complete and utter horseshit. the sociopath in me, trying to convince itself it can survive on its own. so i am looking myself in the eye, lips trembling, finger pointing. asking myself: who the fuck are you, if all these yous are not you? i wish i knew the answer. i wish i knew myself.

(my imaginary therapist flips a page of her notebook. it is our first session, and i twiddle my thumbs out of nervousness. she raises her eyebrows at me, purses her lips, and says: tell me something about yourself. i swallow uneasily. and begin.)