leeshy121
leeshy121
Alesha D C
42 posts
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leeshy121 · 12 days ago
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Differential Association Theory / Newsletters To The Things That Made Me Sick
Differential association theory is the theory that deviant behaviour is learned through social interaction. Dear all, you have made me deviant. You have made sin crawl through my bloodstream into the inner recesses of my brain. You have made me a pariah on the sides of your streets, begging for the forgiveness that I could never give you in spare change.
You saw me, cuffed me; put me on house arrest without trial and threw the key to my cell into a waterfall that was just outside my window. You have locked me in, perhaps for good. Congratulations.
Now the scent of the mould killer is trying to bring a swimming pool to my bathroom. Now the salt grinder is trying to bring the sea to my dinner plate. Covering a gammon in waves of the flavours of the outside world. Turning the broccoli into coral. At least it has the gravy as a roof to sleep under.
Now my carpet is littered in a flash flood of bitten fingernails. Books fall from the shelves of the library in my head. The showerhead cries once I stand beneath it; the teardrops hurl themselves onto me, hoping that their bitter end is down the drain. Just an inch further. Just a way out. Just a road that I don’t have the guts to try to drive down.
The front door has started to creak, beckoning me to go outside, but my bed screams when I move a millimeter in the morning, both of us remembering that I am indeed alive. It mirrors my misery when I open my eyes. “I am still alive.” “I am still…alive.”
Dear all, I’ve realised that I go back to you a lot. Years on, my mind still brings itself to the pages you’ve stained. The tears you’ve given me scars with. The poems you’ve written for me. You stare at me through your peep holes in the chairs I’ve cried on and I hear you chuckling when I sit down and sob again.
A while ago, I took your photos out of their frames and before long you found them lying next to a fire. You put them back in while I was sleeping, because you knew that they belonged there. You put them back so I could still wake up next to you. So you would be the first thing I saw once I opened my eyes.
I kept the songs that make me cry on my playlists as my brain’s way to commemorate you. To show that you were here. To show that you still are. Each time they play, I don’t know if I end up worshipping you or making a eulogy. Maybe I’m doing both. I play them and tell myself I’m sorry.
Dear all, I know that I go back to you a lot, but I know that maybe I could break from my shackles if I don’t. Maybe the plaster in the first aid kit could suck up the blood if I leave. Maybe the scales of the chemical imbalance could become level if I go. Maybe the noose I’ve constantly imagined could just be a rope, a hair tie, a chandelier that God forbade I swing from, and one thing my sentence has made me realise is that I don’t want to eat an apple to prove them wrong.
Yet you linger in the tally markings I’ve etched into my bedroom walls. You try to taunt me when you wave from outside, your skin glistening in the sun I never see. You try to taunt me when you swim in the river; when you find the key buried in the sediment like a forbidden fossil you never wanted my instability to find.
Yet you still rule me; You still torment me. Each year, the earth comes back to its starting position and I do too. Each year I still feel your fingers around my throat.
And no matter how many times I try to put the books back; no matter how many candles I light; no matter how many times I fill my house with your smoke, I always think about how I spoke with you. How I interacted with you. How I still depend you when you give me no choice.
Differential association theory is the theory that says I learnt this. Maybe I learnt this…from you.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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Umbra
When I first tried to memorise a poem, the lines haunted me for six months, but when I look in the mirror, I still see the ghosts standing behind me. They stalk my unworthy shadow and sneak  behind me in each silhouette that branches from the lampposts. They hide in the trail of my footsteps and feed from each breath I take when I sleep.
They whisper into my unconscious ears that have tried not to hear them for years. "This is going to hurt." They kiss my dreaming forehead and  each cell of my body wails  like a guitar solo longing to be freed into the air. Yells like smoke alarms in a fire as a warning for the danger that swarms me. Each one can detect the flame that has festered inside my chest since I was thirteen, so when the alarm outside my bedroom never stopped because it could always detect the smoke, the rest screeched a battle cry of estrangement  when it was taken down because they never had time to say their goodbyes.
The world never thought that my body was  a bomb found buried in a garden. A family walked over my unexploded battlefield  and a tree grew from the drying blood of a martyr. I never thought that my joy was trying to blossom  in a forest covered with intertwined snowflakes. It was an improvement from the permafrost that once blanketed the dirt, but it melted and grew the ecosystem of a life I never thought I would have. I still wonder if that's a good thing.
But I saw it thriving behind my back.  I saw how the woodland held species that I never knew existed, and I  tried everything to keep it that away. I tried everything to banish the banshees; I tried everything to kill the bugs that came with them.  The flies that flew like spitfires around their scent. The spiders that made my body a headstone and dangled from the strands of my mossy hair. The snails sticking to my shoes,  chaining me to the riverbed I was buried by with their slime, but I needed to do anything to break it,
and in the years that I did, the ice melted too. The snow angels spread their wings for a final time  and rained on the grass with their sacrifice. The icicles dripped and made a pond out of a crater. One of the evergreens gave me a piece of its bark, so I fashioned it into a quill and  wrote a love poem on each petal of every rose that had bloomed. One by one, the phantoms vanished, and so did the undying night sky.
I took you there one time. I lost you amongst the shrubs and found you nestled in the arms of the fallen leaves. I was with you when you called  the place “paradise”. I was with you when you called the bugs beautiful, and you said you loved me  when I told you that I was the reason they were there.
You kissed me on the forehead, but when you kissed me there, each spirit slowly rose from its grave. One tapped my shoulder and hid in the shadow of the rising moon. “This is going to hurt.”
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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Inundation
When the storm hit, they said I was lucky to leave my home. They said that we left at the right time. But I wanted to be in a home near-flooded than the house I've been exiled to.
There's a leak dripping through the smoke alarm from the pipes upstairs, but that water is the only thing that's made me feel closer to it all again. The streams gliding down from the eyes of
the doorframes, soaking into the floor. Each drop falling into the mop bucket has become my new beating heart. Sometimes slow, sometimes quick. Sometimes I have 2 of them.
2 drops of water; 2 pumping hearts, both longing to return to seeing the rain race down the old window, both longing to win, both longing to escape from the sky's night club and the strobe lights outside.
Both aching to return to being certain that my best friend was only a short walk up a hill. Their embrace will always be a short stroll away to me,
but I will always forget that once I leave the front door, they will never be so close to me again.
I knew I didn't like the place when I called it a house rather than a home. A cell that my arms have been cuffed to instead of the landscape where my mind needs to be.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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I Think Therefore I Am
They say that the reason you exist is because you think, but the ideas of mine die in the thin air above my bed. I'm worried about speaking my truths because I'm paranoid that each breath will become a suicide note, an escape to nothingness; something that - like me - feels like it can't be saved.
You think, therefore you are, but I've always thought too much. So much so that my brain has began to melt like an overwhelmed wire, both from the potential difference of my views and the flaming resistance of my mouth. My brain always breaks down its barrier and goes rogue before I can cram the wrong words back onto my tongue, chew them up and spit out new ones like mouthwash. Their tang still lingers on the inside of my cheeks.
My brain is so overactive that my thoughts have become a mathematical equation. The y=mx+c of my not-so linear line of life. I think too much, therefore I am paralysed. I think too much, therefore I can't get up and brush my teeth. I think too much, and I still do before I can flip the light switch I used to try and balance before I can go to sleep. I think too much, therefore I can't sleep.
I think too much, therefore all I am is thought. My haemoglobin evolves into the conserved teardrops that never ran down my face, and carries the oxygen of my instincts' refusal to die. The refusal to hold my breath on a flooded bathroom floor. My eyesight is barricaded by layers of binary coded notions, so that they have to use luck to get across a road. My skin is a padded cell that my ideas are not sane enough to escape from.
But I think, therefore I am. I think, therefore I have a body. I think, therefore I exist as someone. Each day that I think too much, I am still here, and who would care if I thought more than most? Who would care unless I became their ghost of locked away opinions?
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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Dover, Dear
“Taken from life when life and love were new” - Oscar Wilde, “The Grave of Keats”
When Oscar Wilde visited Keats’ grave, some say he laid on it face down and cried. His tears seeping through the soil to conjure a quill and reignite the life of poetry. The mournful droplets watered the lilies on Keats’ brow and stopped the fading roses around him from withering. Each scream gave the grass blades life.
But my sobs won’t reach Rome nor the nearby cemetery. I’ve cried an ocean, but my tears won’t erode the chalk of the White Cliffs. The town that holds all I know lets me go like a balloon uneasily drifting between the stars. My name won’t be written in water.
Dover dear, you hold the house I’ve lived in for nearly seven years. Those thin walls have moulded around my misery for the last two. The waves I once traversed try to make you crumble, but you, like me, still wish to be seen. I don’t tend to observe your beauty, but I wish I’d have done it truly by now. Now I am taken from life to an unknown home; they say it has all I want, but all I want is you.
Dover dear, I’ll enshrine my memorised maps so I can see your streets with eyes wiped clean. I’ll embrace the new scent of your bookshops; wear it as a newly-bought perfume. The tote bags and t-shirts from here are discarded, and they slowly hover away from memory’s wing mirrors. I’ll leave your mossy headstone grieved but unseen.
Some say Oscar Wilde laid face down on Keats’ grave and cried, but others say that he never cried at all. Yet he did pen a poem about someone he held dear. Dover dear, the only home I could ever truly know. In time, I must rid you of my injustice, and my pain. But my dear, I promise to soon return again.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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Before We Become Martyrs
I understand how any crowd could be flooded with resentment, suspended over their heads like a flotsam float of historical erasure. I recognise the burden of wearing the metal mask of another like an old friend. I know how the pages of padlocked journals can be protest signs; our fight becoming etched in rainbows on poster boards. The pigments, a symbol of hope; twisted to become an attempt to destroy. “We are who we are,” continuously leaps from the diving boards of our devoted tongues.  We graffiti “Pay it no mind” on the town’s stone walls, and yet, we’re still forced to colour between the lines. All of which next to an open palm, drawn with the words  “you can’t count the number of countries that have made it illegal to love like we do on one hand.”
I envisage a day when the rest accepts our identities, without responding, “pride is a sin.” A day that still glimmers beyond our unsmashed windows. A day when the masses see us as we are; see us through the blood of those who came before us. Blood that was snatched as they marched in battalions, separated into sections of 28, their hearts crashing like a battle drum  or the gunshot that was fired as a reply, carrying the bullets that  their armour tried to deflect, but could never  shoot back in time.
We hope that you will call us by our names before we become martyrs.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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Agnorosis
Sometimes I ask myself if it's weird to miss when I felt empty. When not even marrow lingered in my bones. When nothingness gnawed at my muscles, manipulating them to cave in. I ask if it's weird to miss the constant writing prompts overtaking my bloodstream like sugar or an overdose. To miss my lack of ambition. A lack of fearing death. Sometimes I miss planning something that I never knew would never happen.
They were a clifface staring at the ocean knowing that the waves will perish once they reach the rocks. The bridge staring at the cars going under it, the people going under it, with a premonition that one of them will crash. That at least one of them will die.
I miss when my tears were swept away from the gutters, so that not even they could mingle with life. I miss my desire to be left as mangled remains surrounded by a coffin's mahogany casing.
Now I'm left with the past's burden. Now I have to plan the future I was hoping I would never have. Now I have to plan the future I was hoping to have if I got better. Now I have to face getting better like a sunray to the eye.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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What I'm Wishing She Won't Say
'So what you're saying is...you're not always a woman? You're saying I can't call you my little girl? You're saying that sometimes you're my daughter, sometimes you're my son; sometimes you're just my child? Normal people don't behave like that.
You think your gender changes? You call yourself "genderfluid"? No, no, no. It just doesn't work like that. You say it's an emotional thing? Well I'm sorry, but how do you feel a gender?
The hell do you mean you can't explain it? Now, girl, I heard you say you were certain; that you knew, but you saying that it's "unexplainable" really just tells me that you have no idea who you are.
Don't say you showed me hints when I clearly couldn't spot them. You never told me what those colours meant. You never told me what your bracelet said. You only told me once that you didn't like skirts. You only asked me twice to buy something else to wear. How was I supposed to know you wanted to be a boy? I told you that you couldn't cut your hair too short and you never objected. You seemed...fine with it. Until now.
So all I'll say is this. Go to your room, girl, take down that flag, break those bracelets apart, and think about what you've done.'
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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Bad Date
She abandons the restaurant waiting for a cab.
The tears in her mind are not running from her eyes.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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A Londoner's Typical Street
Nights and days are winks in the bleakness.
The chill air is drowned by exhausts and urban fumes.
Nature has gone extinct, and humanity claims to be progressing.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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the unwritten poems that keep us up at night
What can you feel when you are shielded by darkness? Not cast away from normality, but rather a shifted focus to nebulousness; a switched lens. Flashing fairy lights when you know Christmas is there, but not for you. Fairy lights flashing; illuminating the book of poems and prose you borrowed without them knowing. Neither would call it stealing.
"If I ever find a book missing, I'll know where it'll be."
That sentiment left a mark like the rings of a tree; the ring on his finger. The ring you wish you gave him. The ring you wish you wrote about when somebody else did. The ring you couldn't bring yourself to write down somewhere because of what happened last time. The ring you never needed to write about, because you knew you would never forget it.
You wish your photographic memory would stop working in the dark.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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The Thing I Never Thought I Could Be
The one thing I never thought I could be sick of was being alone. The one thing I never thought I could be sick of was venting to a room slowly filling with my carbon dioxide. A room unable to exhale the affliction; forced to devour my dejection like a medicine.
I used to think that basking in my loneliness like sunbathing on an arctic beach was never a bad thing. I never thought I could slowly come to hate how the orange light bulb hanging from my ceiling became a new sun behind blinds forever closed. Blinds beckoning for an eternal rest that they know won't come for decades. I never thought I could make my duvet turn into the Channel. Instead of knowing that the monotony of my melancholy made it this way, I imagined it was the swash of the waves, drowning me in each one's unique tranquil tune.
The thing I never thought I could be was a shipwreck, abandoned when they saw the tight grip of the sea.
The thing I never thought I could hate to be, was isolated.
The one thing I never thought I could hate to be, was alone.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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Ode To My Life After January 11th
My self-esteem was drowned by cackles and whispers at 13. Being stopped in the street and getting asked questions, or being recorded on my way home converted itself into a new recurring nightmare, and it wasn't like I was getting those already. One of the only things people surrounding my incongruous life learnt about me was not how I was feeling, or if I was feeling. It was my name.
Happiness became a spider that evidently hid in the highest crevice in my bedroom, and it left me bedridden. Standing in the corner like a prison guard, staring me down, knowing that it was beyond my reach. That I couldn't catch it with a cup and paper, nor act on a poison driving me to hit it with my least favourite shoe. A shoe that I didn't care about having the dying glittering guts of joy's remains on its sole. Instead, it became an unattainable goal that crawled further and further away, until it escaped for fortnights at a time.
Whenever the people that I never called friends caught me sulking, they asked me where my smile went, and after a while I said that she left, long ago. When they told me to have a good weekend, I started saying "I'll try" before "you too." I waited until there was nobody else home before the gates of my puncture wounds were opened for hours, spewing tears who fled from their custody of being held behind the bars of my skin all day. I sat in the same spiralling desk chair that I cried in on that day, pleading for sorrow to stop trying to make my starving body its state of bliss. Begging for the radiation to decay before I did.
Trying to resurrect my heart afterwards was like trying to revive a withered flower that had died in a blizzard. If love was the food of life, then I had evolved into a lion, famished for one hundred thousand years. It took me the same amount of people I had to learn to get over as the amount of years that I had been alive to realise that I couldn't love the way everyone else was supposed to. It took me months of making my thighs a piece of abstract art to realise I wasn't living the way I wanted to, and so I wanted to give up.
They told me that they would stop talking about it soon. Nobody made it clear whether soon meant in two weeks or two years.
Some people would call me undiagnosed, some would call what happened trauma. I had to call it survival, because the one thing I wasn't doing was living. And while I tried to recover from it all a year and a half on, the only thing everyone else recovered from was a laughing fit.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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epicalyx
It took me four years to realise that my body is just a coalition. Held together with the strings of pulled out hairs and broken rubber bands, and fastened together with a crochet lock and key. A prosecuted iridescent diamond, a ruby made from dysphoria. A model of crystalised agony.
When I first heard a girl say that each person is a piece of abstract art, for a while I thought that my painting was black and blue brush strokes, pinned to a white wall, like Christ to a cross.
I forgot that she said that after I spoke about wanting to change everything for a reason I never knew. An unease that I couldn't describe as gender dysphoria yet. An agony that I have taken four years of crisis to learn to embrace.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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Icon
Praised for my confidence in being uncomfortable in a female body. Sitting before what seems like a job interview, trying to fill my mind with yellow hibiscus. Grab my phone, stare at a calendar to check if the date is Friday 13th,  and check again at least five times. Look down at my trainers to see if the laces are done up. Cut my own chest open just to watch my lungs  expand with another shaking breath. 
But the purple flowers were the only ones to bloom when my words evolve into the residue of a vase broken into pieces. The splinters of glass stabbing into me like they stab into a carpet,  make me sound like I know nothing because I can't describe things that come with my own gender. I sound like I know nothing, when I try to get the words out of the cave of my mouth, lash and whip them with my tongue  but they crawl away into the  oblivion my throat has decided to hold.
And that's how it usually ends. Simple explanations,  "I don't know" fountains, hands that strangle my vocal chords  so I can only gasp and stutter. In some of those moments, I felt  those hands take the words themselves; felt a cat's claws rip my oesophagus. Take my breath so I could never breathe again.
My guts were wrenched out by  social anxiety by the time I  got to tell them the basics. I never got to tell them how I have to figure out if my heart is female, male or something other or something more each morning. I never got to tell them that I try to deepen my voice, and yet I still sound like an awkward version of me. I never understood how to tell them  about that feeling of joy, or disgust, or nothing at all when I figure myself out, because the words chickened out before I had the chance to.
Instead I told them that I kept my name  because I would be broken without one. Told them I wear what makes me comfortable in my own body. Told them that I kept my hair long because I didn't want to make the strands victims  of a stereotype. I hardly ever told them the pain.
And they applaud with their thank yous from their voluntary education. Acting like they got a college degree in my gender identity. Thinking they got the whole picture, when they walk away with a  fragment of my self portrait. They still call me "icon."
And I knew I'd pretended that I'd done it all right when the dried tears turned to rainbows, and my aged screams turned to symphonies.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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Starved body, not enough
I saw when your eyes wa       nd          er              ed to my stomach  when I asked you why I should do something that  I've said I don't enjoy. I ran past the excuses disguised as bright light. Excuses that were  facsimiles of laser beams shot into the eye. Made to blind.
I saw when the pupils  of the eyes that once looked like mine f e l l to my hips, f e l l to my waist. I saw the sharp move and took it with me, like the drink  you gave me after. The drink that would give me  more hours to fend on before you force-fed. I saw the sharp move and took it with me, away.
Devoured the starved body that to you, is not enough.
Embraced dysmorphia in the reflection  of a girl  who once tried to embrace herself.
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leeshy121 · 2 months ago
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Scales Don't Lie
When they say  that it's ok, the voice  contradicts. The mind flips the switch until it means the opposite. 'It's ok'  becomes  'the scales don't lie.' Embracing yourself  becomes skipping meals and feeling ill.
Seeing weight fluctuate, intense eyes glare as the numbers go up and down. You start to count calories like seconds to a clock. You start to desire  to dance with skinny skeletons  and ragdolls until you become a sun in a galaxy  filled with small stars.
A reminder, a small pinprick  in a void of who you once were. They take inspiration  from the supernova of who you are now until your broken mirrors attempt to reflect you.
The cycle repeats.
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