mycardinaltruth

[mycardinaltruth]

The sky was meringue today. Folding together like whipped egg whites and sugar. Wind pushing each thick cloud into the next until the ether was all grey peaks and ripples. He asked how I like my coffee.

1.21.24

[mycardinaltruth]

T. Hall Caine, ed., Sonnets of three centuries (London: Elliot Stock, 1882)

[mycardinaltruth]

• Silent 11.2021 •

I got really good at crying silently.

I got really good at orgasming silently.

I got really good at existing silently.

Silently tormenting myself for needing to feel, needing to express, needing to be. "Handle it on your own."

"Keep it to yourself."

"That's not my problem, is it?"

They said...if not with words so direct, then with plates too full.

I am learning that it is okay to cry.

I am learning that it is okay to express my pleasure.

I am learning it is okay to exist.

Only this time, I won't be silent.

[mycardinaltruth]

• The Lovers 2021 •

I released you into space, into the void to live your own separate existence, and like a satellite you orbit back to me. Only this time, I don't know that I want you to. I am not the same girl with fresh wild eyes looking at you from across the tarmac. I am not the same girl who traipsed around the lobby emptying out coffee canisters who fantasied about our first touch. I am not the same girl who jumped out of her car and into your arms, to kiss you for the first time. I am not the same girl who fled in the late hours of the night, leaving behind a husband, a home, and her entire life. I am not the same girl who took the elevator up to your room and let you into me. I am not the same girl who drove around aimlessly with nowhere to go, after driving you to the airport.. just so I could spend a moment with you. I am not even the same girl who sat across from you in that diner.. that final time I saw you. Holding onto the air between us, suspended, neither of us able to eat. I remember that feeling of clinging to hope, and at the same time feeling like something was impending. I remember how you opened the door when you realized you left your sunglasses in my car. Sometimes, I wish you'd have forgotten them; for me to find later on, but then I wouldn't have gotten that final kiss. I am not that same girl stuck in the parking lot waiting for you to turn back around. I think I have been a million different versions of her since, and I anticipate being a few more even still. See you taught me something so important, the journey has always been mine. You were a part of it. A wild, firery, breathtaking, and heartbreaking part of my story. I loved you. God how I wish I had gotten to say those words to you. Now I just mourn the girl who never got the chance.

I admit sometimes I daydream about what would happen if we'd bumped into you each other one day. I don't know whether I'd bubble up with fury or wilt with forgiveness. I have come to realize that it doesn't matter either way.  So much has changed, and I don't know that either of us fit into each other's current stories. Yet, a part of me would still love to know if maybe we would. The part that feels like that place where the breeze meets the ripple of the waves...unyielding and natural. Calm, and yet wildly wavering all the same. Like an existence somewhere between. Not still, not storming, either. Just somewhere in the middle place passing by. Clarity. Serenity. Yet anguish, because you know that the tide will shift. The winds will change, and like every moment, it is both brief and eternal all at once.  Perhaps we can always meet in the place where the wind meets the waves. From the gentle summer air caressing the exposed skin of a lake, sending shivers in all directions. To the breath of the wind, pushing the tide forward to lap at the shore and soak the sand. To the immense power of the storm thrashing the water.. till they are both reaching out for one another in a chaotic dance. Pulling themselves apart, just so they may be intertwined.

[mycardinaltruth]

• The Woman Who Breathed Fire 2023 •

The thoughts boil in my brain, bubble up my throat, and sizzle on my tongue.

Singe my lips and sear the corners of my mouth. I want to whistle like a tea pot.

To screech and release the steam from my lungs, and yet I stay quite.

Press my lips together firmly to contain the flames lapping against the backs of clenched teeth.

I swallow the fire and let it settle into the depths of me.

Best not to speak when you fear your words may burn others.

[mycardinaltruth]

• A Girl Named Pretty 2022 •

A boy called me pretty, he carried my books.

A boy called my pretty, he held my hand.

A boy called me pretty, he kissed my lips.

A boy called me pretty, he touched my skin.

A boy called me pretty, he asked for pictures to prove it.

A boy called me pretty, he snuck into my room.

A boy called me pretty, he pushed his way inside me.

A boy called me pretty, he used me.

I told myself I was pretty, and I remembered, at last, that I was.

[mycardinaltruth]

• Seasonal Depression 2022 •

I have been stressed lately. Clenching my lungs tightly, ribs squeezing. Keeping as still as possible. I have been forgetting things quickly, letting things fade into the part of my mind that dumps the experiences and thoughts deemed forgettable. Lately, I have noticed my brain doing that with the things that I am meaning to remember. Fighting with my own subconscious. Wondering how many things have happened to me that I have hidden away or that I have forgotten altogether. What of this will I remember? Does it matter what I recall, if I myself become a memory in the end? I want so much to have the life I invision. Of peace and filled with warmth and love and children and connection and true beauty and nature and home, but I fight against my reality, that at times, can seem so destitute. So fragile. So frail. Sometimes it seems as though everything is right on the brink of total annihilation. The fear of an uncertain futures makes me weary of becoming anything, or of trying to. Of creating anything, art, change, family. I go to sleep with an existential dread. My dreams; in far off places, so vivid and magical they have not given me true rest. They are where I battle my deep unyielding fears and fight through the wildest of alternate realities. I awake stressed and tired. I'm here still, Susie barks at the door. A dull light slices through the stale darkness of my room. It's noon and it's cold outside. I don't want to wake up.

I am hopeful that happiness will come again. I feel it there below the surface. The sun that is never far, existing regardless of if you can see it or not. It's cold outside. I rub my feet against each other and feel the snug cotton fabric of my socks. Is this seasonal depression?

[mycardinaltruth]

• Mom 2021 •

The older I got the more I realized how complex my relationship was with my Mother. Every Easter she woke us up with stuffed animals, candies and kisses. Every Christmas, she gave her all to get us what we wanted, even when that meant being on the Angel Tree, because gifts couldn't be afforded when we didn't even have a home or a car to call our own. Every birthday was celebrated with cake and candles. She even made time as a single mom to spend with us kids individually. There is no denying she loves me and my siblings. I know that she tried her version of her best for us. The issue was in that though, her best was distorted because she was hurt. The saying goes that hurt people, hurt people. She had experienced her own trauma in life and she had never healed from it. In turn she never saw her worth. So the cycle repeated. She left my Dad for better love and I watched my Dad's twisted resentment grow. In having to leave my Mother he left us too. Every attack he plotted against my mom devastated us also. My mom didn't find better love, instead she accepted the "love" she thought she deserved from men who would spit in her face and beat her mercilessly. I was forced to watch the abuse she endured and it killed me to see it and to not be able to do anything about it. I felt utterly helpless. She was my protector, or atleast she was supposed to be, but she couldn't even protect herself. I had to go where she went, and unfortunately she went right into the lion's den time and time again. Sometimes the lion bore a different mane, but the claw marks were just as brutal.

She never acknowledges those years or the effect it had on us kids. Only repeats to herself how amazing of a mother she was because we all survived.

As I got older I realized I was haunted by the memories of glasses being thrown across the kitchen and shattering to pieces around my mom. The image of bruises and scars ingrained into my adolescent brain. I was traumatized by the fear I lived in constantly. My sister and I both have nightmares where we feverishly pack to escape the end of the world, because once that was our reality. One night we had to pack and hide all of our belongings after he had beat my Mother to a blonde, bloody, bruised up mess and go stay in a motel. We quickly ripped the TV my mom was renting to own, from Rent-A-Center, from the wall and wrapped it in blankets to hide under my bed. I shoved all of my stuffed animals under my bunk with it worried that he'd tear them to shreds to spite me. We missed school. We were exhausted. Every beating she endured was a battle we had to fight also. My mother leaned on me. She called me her "rock" which I took to be a term of endearment as a child. Now I see it as abuse. I was too young to carry the burden of her issues and my own. I wasn't allowed to talk about mine either. I wasn't allowed to talk about how the abuse was affecting us.

When I was a teenager the urge to flee grew stronger. I was still using escapism to run from my issues and so it was no surprise that when grown men I met online wanted to throw me into their sexual fantasies, I was a willing participant. One man called me everyday after school, and he would tell me to do things to myself to get him off. I would pretend, but wouldn't actually do it most of the time. He had fantasies of brutalizing me, and my deranged perspective on life made me think this was normal, infact I saw this as special. He made me call him after I lost my virginity at 15 years old to recount to him every detail, so he could pretend it was him who had been inside of me. He still messages me from burner accounts over 10 years later, and it took me that long to realize this man was a predator, and I wasn't "worthy" of his "gracious adornment."

Being desired sexually was the first time I felt seen. So I gave my body away freely. I didn't even like the boys I let into me. I just thought they would make me like me.

I was wrong.

I stacked trauma on top of trauma.

Still I kept it all to myself. My issues were a burden to my mom and I felt as though I couldn't tell her. Her reaction to any issue I had was like adding another stressful situation to her pile that she already couldn't climb. Everything was overwhelming to her, so I was left alone with it all. Even though I was shown love, I couldn't imagine compassion for me when it came to the big things. I was never shown healthy ways of coping, so I dealt with my depression with a combination of self-loathing, sex, and writing. Most of the time, my journaling made me see myself as a sinner and drove my guilty conscience spirling into the interning doom I thought I was deserving of. I couldn't see past the guilt, so I kept repeating the same mistake. I slept with over a dozen guys before leaving high school. You would never have suspected it, though. I was a good kid. I made good grades and didn't get into trouble. My mom had enough stress and she vented to me about that stress, so I knew I couldn't add to it, and I would have felt even more guilty if I did.

I moved out with a guy I thought I loved when I was 19. Turned out I really just loved the way he took me away from home and told me I was pretty. It didn't take long for me to see that I deserved better, and so did he. So I packed my stuff and left. I moved into my own place, and that's when I immediately fell back into my self-loathing pattern and started sleeping with a coworker. I thought things would remain casual, but he was hungry for love and affection and would have taken it from any willing woman. This man became my husband, and once again, I mistook limerence for love. Like my mother before me, just 21 years old and married to a man from the same small private airport as my father had been working when my parents had met just over twenty years prior. He didn't know me and I didn't know him. Daily, he begged for handjobs while in the shower and saw me as little more than a means to climax and woman who could keep the house clean. His mother bargain hunted for baby furniture and clothing for a child I was neither ready nor willing to conceive. How could I have a child in the same position that my mother was once in and expect a different outcome? This time, I chose escapism in a different way, by dreaming up the best version of me I could be. So I left. By leaving behind a husband, a home, a career, i became someone else entirely. Someone that none of the men before would recognize. I spent over two years alone in order to heal these broken parts of me. I thought meditation and mindfulness would battle the demons for me, but it was much harder and much darker than that. It's something I am still working out. Healing, I have come to realize, is not linear. Forgiveness is the truest companion of peace. So, with great love, I learned how to forgive myself and my mother for the "mother wound" that had bound her to me. To accept that just as I had been so naive and so starved for affection, my mother had been also. The cord that joined her to me held the memory of generations of women who were begging me to fly. I heard their calls asking me to rise and to become, and it is with the voices of a hundred ancestors I speak my words today.

[mycardinaltruth]

• Beds 2021 •

The womb my Mother held me in, my first bed.

The crib that she placed me in once I was on the other side, pink and perfect.

The bottom of my parent's bed, where I slept with the edge of a blanket and my Mom and Dad's cold toes.

The picket fence bed, with the bird houses on the posts that filled my day dreaming heart with inspiration.

The trundle, that I hid under so my Dad wouldn't leave.

The pallet on the floor of my grandma's studio apartment, when he did.

The bunk bed, I cocooned myself into for years and made a safe space out of a house of chaos and violence.

The hotel bed I shared with my brother when we fled drunken wrath.

The metal day bed, shrill with white lace covers and pillows at my new Step Mom's house.

The top bunk of my soon-to-be step sister's bed I spent my summer reading in.

The hand me down queen bed I gave myself away in for the first time...then several times after.

The bed I shared with the first man I lived with, cried myself to sleep next to him most nights.

The mattress on the floor of my own apartment, my first time living by myself.

The brand new king bed I picked out and made to share with my husband.

The guest bed at my sister's house after leaving him.

The air mattress beside my sister's bed when she decided to leave too.

The hotel beds I shared with lovers.

The $200 futon, because the air mattress popped.

While this is where I find myself tonight, I know that one thing is true, that change is inevitable, and this is not my final place of rest.

[mycardinaltruth]

• Sadness •

I carried the sadness with me through each day. It clung to me even when I tried to brush it from my hair or sweat it from my pores. It burrowed deep into the parts of me I couldn't reach and made itself at home. A vagrant. An intruder that was so at home. It threatened to consume me, yet I smiled. I smiled because I was feeling something. That was better than the numbness that had buzzed within me for years. The saddness recoiled and thrashed deeply inward, tearing me from the inside out. It forced me to recall a time in my life when all I felt was that familiar tortuous ripping. It's existence made me face myself and made me see the hurt that I was put through and the damage it had inflicted on me. A voice peeked in. It reminded me that since those past, momentary painful injuries, that I had felt great joy. I had felt great happiness, great sorrow, great anger. I was reminded that the sadness would pass. This realization pulled me back into my body. I was safe. I wasn't going to be clawed from the inside, I was going to be fine. I was going to be happy again. My muscles relaxed, and I took a deep breath.

I'm healing these days. Coming to realizations more quickly and for that, I am proud.