#Excerpt From A Book I’ll Never Write

[lost-in-time-marie]

Life almost doesn’t feel real anymore. I never really acknowledge it as it happens, and I don’t know why. I don’t think I can bear the joy, the pride, the accomplishment. Some corner of my heart is still convinced I don’t deserve it…I am so many things. Not all of them are good, I’m still not sure enough of them are good.

~K.

[yakultstan]

our salted tears remind us the human condition is rooted in the oceans, the lakes and the soil

[abbigailnichole]

"How do you move on?" I asked the darkness.

Grief, l've learned, is really just love. It's all the love you want to give, but cannot. Grief is just love with no place to go. Sometimes, the bad things that happen to us are not valuable lessons. Nothing can be extracted from them, there are no positives to some things. It is okay to feel grief for what happened to you, to mourn what you have lost, to know it was not fair. Sometimes, we can only let go of the past by grieving it, by admitting it was not okay, but now that we are dealing with the pain, sometimes you can't move on.

-but we can hope for a better future

[thewhitehousewiththepond]

And even if it didn't last long, you brought some light to my dark world and put my mind at ease even for a split second.. but the aftermath of you is what lingers and lingers leaving my mind more of a mess than the start.

It's the feeling of not being good enough that fills me once again.

[awhisperamongechoes]

Even after 23 years, I’ve still never quite learned the difference between putting in effort to continue something and the desperation of holding onto something that wasn’t meant to be.

[wannawriteyouabook]

You called me loyal and all I could think was "I am not a dog."

I'm not a dog

I'm not a dog

I'm not a dog

I am not a dog

I am not a dog

But then, why do I keep coming back to you like I am

[gracefullyinkful]

I used to be so passionate. Words used to come so easily. And in the grief…the despair…words have failed me. Somewhere within myself I am screaming, begging, clawing at the walls to get out and yet, here I am…a faux version of myself. Someone I don’t recognize. Thinking that if I can manifest a difference by thinking about it hard enough, things will change. Sitting on my couch, waiting for someone to take my hand and show me the way out. But when people show up, they’re wide eyed and starved; desperate for relief themselves.

- c-ptsd series: I don’t think anyone else knows the way either

[issapia]

Then There Was You

Months ago I was convinced that I no longer wanted any form of romantic relationship with anyone ever again.

Then there was you.

You came into my life the way the sunrise comes over the horizon. Slowly, lighting all the dark corners. Before I realized it my world was lit up, I saw blue skies for the first time in what felt like an eternity. I was able to find silver linings in all the awfulness of day to day life.

I so easily believe every word that escapes your lips and I don’t feel scared. I don’t have to worry that one day you will just be gone.

I feel held by you.

I feel seen by you.

I feel heard by you.

I didn’t believe I’d ever feel those emotions again.

You feel like the first warm morning after a cold winter.

You feel like the relief of my second parachute when the first one had failed me.

You feel like the safety of watching a tidal wave from high ground.

You came and you stayed…

You’re slowly fixing something you didn’t destroy and for that I will be forever grateful.

- I love you, please always stay

[sofiasrebellion]

I don’t know how to tell this to you. It may be I have spoken of it already in different words. Some amalgamations of words have the same meaning as others. I dreamed of the children I used to teach. I dreamed that I was back there in the building with the green apple tree in the back and they were around me and I was showing them the map, the green hills, how to read them apart from the mountains, the blue river snaking up and down, encircling a city or else a town, the seaside climbing down the path we stroked upriver, how really this ocean and that sea all went around and around, the big blue wave we lived upon in our houses of stone, wood, and mud. I told them how the land beneath us shifted, and even the land beneath the ocean, oh yes there's land down there too, how the center of the earth was a blazing rock as hot as the sun, and above a fiery current of magma, sloshing thick, and so bright you could almost believe it was the sunset melted. I told them how the pressure, like anger, or sadness, builds up and up, so much that it pushes the land, strains and strains until mountain forms and it shakes the earth and the china in their showcases. Then I tell them that sometimes they can’t find a way out, all that emotional magma, and it goes up through a volcano and shoots light and soot into the sky, it sputters and the lava flows like hot, angry tearfalls down its side, and sometimes it's in the middle of the ocean, and an island is born. 

I like to think about that island in the middle of the water with no inhabitants. It learns to wait. Eventually vegetation sprouts, I think birds would be the first to arrive, and they are welcome friends. But I think of my own self and what waiting has done to me. Waiting has instilled quiet in me. I am not a person who enjoys self sufficiency, but the waiting taught me that there are some things no one can give you. It makes me sad even now. When that island receives its inhabitants, it blossoms. But it was a volcano first, then a small rock in the swirling water, and then a barren rock sunning atop the sea. All that time alone, all that time learning to live with small pleasures. A lichen attaching itself, the ripples of a whale just barely reaching it, the sun coming up earlier, the small rock growing a little bigger. I wonder if it sees an eclipse for the first time all by itself. I would be scared. I would wonder if the earth was going to die before I had my first inhabitant. Then it would pass and the next day I would appreciate the evening colors a little more. I’d look at the indigo sky and realize there are many stars I can see which can’t see me back and I love them very much and they don’t know. I bet nothing lives in the sun and the sun doesn’t know I love to sit in it after I wash. The sun doesn’t know. There is something thrillingly sad about that. 

I dreamed I was telling the children I was coming back to show them so many things they would love, slowly, slowly. How the maps would be etched into their memory, and when they read about all those places, the Mediterranean and the South China Sea, the Aral Sea and the Great Lake, the Himalayas and the Appalachians, Peru on the long coast, the Swahili by the sea, the three Gorges in China, the Amazon and the Sahara nestled in the hearts of two continents, the Nile flowing down the length of upper and lower Egypt, flooding the banks as the Ganges do the Indian plains, the Bay of Bengal touching the longest beach, I told them how they would be pictures projected behind their eyes when they closed them to sleep. I was only half kidding; the other part of me was hoping they’d come to love it as much as I did. 

dreaming of the island, s.p

[lost-in-time-marie]

I find myself thinking tonight about human touch. There’s something written in the biology of a human to want touch, to need it, to be healed by it. The infants in the NICU that get held, a gentle hand placed on the head, one finger too large for them to even grasp, get better faster, grow bigger. You’d think I get some personal pleasure in making a mockery of biology the way I insist upon breaking its rules. But like so many biological behaviors and inherent drives, this too has become a twisted and corrupt thing for me.

I don’t like to be touched. I don’t remember anymore a time if I did. When some blaring catastrophic alarm wouldn’t go off under my skin at an unexpected grasp, a tap on the shoulder, a graze in passing. Even if I wanted the touch, or thought I did, if I had a crush, if I loved them, even if in a relationship with them. I would still feel the wrongness of it like a weight sinking in my chest.

I’ve learned to grow accustomed to certain touches. The familiar ones, akin to me or some effect of time and depth with me. Of course, the most difficult always remains with romantic love. There’s people I’ve loved with my whole heart and it didn’t stop the ants that live under my skin that can’t stand the feel of theirs. I’ve only known three men in ten days shy of 27 years that could touch me. That I didn’t have to bear, that I didn’t have to hide the grimacing, that didn’t cause that jarring screech to a halt. So far, I’ve lived to see two of them wither away and turn into something foul and rotten, until the skin shrinks away once more.

I can’t figure out what causes it, where the pattern is, what rules it follows. I’ve wanted to be in a loving relationship with people, but I couldn’t stand for them to touch me, and I could never grow accustomed. The three men that cause the anomaly couldn’t be more different, maybe a certain type or set of features here and there, but nothing significant. When I first meet them, there is something inherently familiar, comfortable, easy.

I’ve only met the third recently. I only met him for the first time less than a week ago. That was my worst fear, my biggest risk on this trip. I didn’t care about navigating the airports and all the flights and connections. I didn’t know if when I got there he would feel like a stranger, something foreign, something wrong. I didn’t really have a plan for what I would do if he did, maybe just pretend or run home early. I was hedging a bet, putting a lot of faith in that feeling in my chest when we would talk on the phone. It’s the first time I hear his voice and yet I’ve known this sound.

I look up to see him for the very first time in the airport. I’m staring down at my phone on purpose, because I don’t know what to do with my searching eyes, barely balancing the teeter-totter of unease and excitement inside me. He says something about finding me. I look up and I smile. And he is so familiar. I know him, I recognize him. And relief pours down in a rainfall from the crown of my head, soaking all the way to my toes. I feel self conscious, nervousness falls a blush on my cheek, but not because of a wrongness or strangeness. There’s a touch of something familiar, a curiosity at the yet unknown, excitement about all the possibility. And there is nothing wrong about it.

Funny, how that’s the part that scares me the most. I don’t know when I got so afraid to want things, not exactly anyways. But it is the first reflexive kick of my brain, the stone I turn in my pocket just for the comfort. If I don’t want it, if I don’t hope, it can’t hurt me.

~K.

[yakultstan]

You made me a poet

the universe daringly united us together only to tear us down harshly, apart forever greater intent was placed upon us you'll live in me eternally for you made me a poet

[journalingasher]

You'll try to catch your breath, but it won't do any good, because the air is missing, just as you're missing him. To the point of death.

[abbigailnichole]

I started writing poetry to numb the pain and stopped when it came back.

Trauma has a crazy way of numbing you to things. I'm still living in the aftermath yearning for the life we could have had together. How do I love myself, even after all the ways I failed you? The ways I failed myself..

Sometimes I don't think I know how to live without chaos.

[awhisperamongechoes]

Somedays I am haunted by the thought that if we had know each other for longer than we had, I would have fallen so helplessly in love with you.

[wannawriteyouabook]

Who do I talk to, about you

I mention you sometimes to just one of my friends, late at night when I feel so low I fear i'll never feel like myself again

The friend tries to comfort me

It only makes me angry

I want someone to blame me

I want someone to laugh at my face for driving you away

I want someone to tell me you deserved better anyway

And they try to comfort me.

Who do I talk to, about you

And if i whisper my apologies to the moon would she deliver them to you

I told them about you and they told me I would heal from it,

I don't know if I want to

If this ache is the only thing that reminds me of you how can I let it go

Look what you've done to me

Look what I have done to me

I am okay and building a life, I just can't let go

I just can't stop thinking how good everything is, and how you are the only thing missing.

I am not a writer nor am I a poet

I don't even know how to put my hurt into words, but I've written hundreds of paragraphs trying to let it out. Some are published and most are deleted.

Sometimes I feel so guilty that I feel like even my words aren't worthy of reaching to you. Sometimes I feel honored to have been broken by you.

I am a hypocrite too.

I'll talk about healing and moving on and dream of it, then I'll wrap the hurt around me like a blanket, feeling safe in the familiar ache. The closest feeling to you I could get.

My unsaid goodbye, let me be.

How will I learn not to look back when the ghost of you walks with me?

My forever what-if, do you ever wonder the way I do? If we could've been happy if we realized things sooner, or if I was braver?

I am so sorry, my unanswered prayer.

In another life, we will have the answer

[emilieswriting]

She Hates Me

A poem by me

She was a quiet sufferer. A shifty-eyed ponderer. With creased brows and dejected dullness in her eyes, she never said a word.

I’m always the one to get fired up. I’ve a hard time biting my tongue. Ever since I was young.

If something feels wrong, unfair, unjustified, expect a storm of emotion from me.

She never matched this.

I’ll throw my hands up as I angrily cry about the dissatisfaction that is life and she will listen.

She’ll look on the verge of tears and then shrug before going to the room to be by herself.

She doesn’t say a word in moments like those. Where we’ve just been kicked while we’re down and I’m on the brink of snapping.

“Why are you not as upset about this as I am?” I’ll ask.

“What good will that do us?” She always answers.

“You have every right to be angry.” I’ll say.

“I am.” She’ll respond, solemnly.

And that’ll be that.

Perhaps that’s why she hated me.