Month: September 2015

Home.

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here is a poem I recently wrote, out of quite a passionate dissonance of emotions. if you’d like to read more, head over here. thank you.

I am in love with someone who is unaware
of any aspect of my existence

how egregious this pain seems
I am unremarkable in my sufferings
but I miss him all the same

sleepless, hollow nights
there lies an ache
inside of me
in my stomach,
my bones and my ribs,
aching without apology
without a cure

with the weight
of knowledge that you
will never see me
the way that I see you

or love me
as if I’m not made of
paper.

the thing is
you are unequivocally
most certainly
and unbearably
my home

but I
don’t know
if you can build a home
from a stack of cards

and I don’t know
if you can build a home
inside words never dedicated to you.

4:42

sofseaLeave a comment

this is a short story of mine that I wrote for English class last year, centered around the very broad theme of “catharsis”. it makes little sense and is quite vague but please tell me what you think, and ask what’d you like. please do not steal or post anywhere else as I worked very hard on this last year.  thank you. 

4:42 AM.

My head is hurting and my feet are sore. It’s too dark out to feel the pain, though. It’s much too early to feel anything. I am not supposed to be here, of course not, but I could not sleep and I could not stay put inside of my small, claustrophobic, room. I had to let myself out. I had to.

I am standing at the exact spot where the waves break against the sand, the fine divide between the rugged darkness of the sea and the soft motionless existence of the earth. I used to love that- the metaphor of the break between oblivion and life. I suppose I still do, but in a much different way. I slide off my sandals, tossing them somewhere behind me, dismissing the common necessity of footwear for a time of lesser importance than this.

The night air is dipping down, settling around me, a charcoal tip smudging against the papery sand. I am silent but my mind is certainly not. All I can think of is how this came to be. How did this happen? How did the person that I used to so willingly be become the person that I now so unexpectedly am? Everything is aching inside of me as I slip my toes into the coldness of the water. The temperature is almost unbearable, but all I can think about is the girl that once was. And the memory hurts far more than the death chill.

A slippery smile crosses my lips as I close my eyes, breathing in all of the night and all parts of the wide, unbreakable universe. Breathing in what was and what would’ve been. It is peaceful, surprisingly enough. It is peaceful.

That day when the tears stained my cheeks like cracks in a sidewalk, the outer darkness that surrounded me threatening to choke me to death. The weight of her troubles was passed subconsciously unto me. And I know that she never meant to make me carry her heartache, but I did. I did for too long, and too deeply. Her demons were never meant to be mine, but somehow, they laid eggs inside of my heart and have grown there since.

When the person closest to you breaks, you do not imagine how deeply it will injure you. It does, though. It breaks you in places you did not know even existed until now. You do choose your friends, but you do not choose their heartbreaks. You do not choose their insecurities, or their many, many flaws, or their instinctive hatred that has been relentlessly instilled in them since birth. You do not choose their humanity. You only choose what they allow you first to see. And, after that, all you can ever hope to do is to try to hold onto the person you once believed existed. After a while, though, that weight grows tiresome. That weight pulls you into someone else’s darkness. One that was never supposed to pass into yours.

Is it better, I think, solemnly, to feel complete indifference to everything, to feel absolutely nothing but to thus never feel pain? Or is it better to feel all of everything at once? It is the unspoken and unanswerable question. But I think, now, I have finally somehow answered it. I have felt it all: the grief of your own soul lost, but stitched back together by brand-new needles. The maelstrom of a thousand devastations cleaning your spirit and washing away the disbelief into an understanding for what life really is. It is a ridiculously painful thing, but a necessary cleansing. After all of the vehement madness I have so exhaustedly pushed myself into, I now can say that it is better, to have felt it all, for the strange feeling will lead to understanding. The feeling will burn inside of you until you have absolutely no choice but to allow the fire to grow. There is no other choice, and there never was.

The girl who once was, isn’t anymore. The young, inquisitive girl who believed in saccharine goodness and in the bright, shiny parts of the world, who believed in unconditional kindness, isn’t anymore. That girl, however hopeful, however fervently inspired she was, is inexorably gone. That girl is long dead, not buried, but burnt. And I am suddenly, overwhelmingly, okay with that. It is no longer a terrible epiphany, but a momentous one. I left pieces of myself in every person that I used to love, and now, those pieces are forever broken, but all I must do is find new ones. All I must do is let go of the remains of the past and instead dare to pass into the new world of myself. There are parts of me where the sun will never shine, and this is no longer a disgrace, but an understanding. There is no requirement for perpetual sunlight, not when you are capable of controlling your darkness. Not when you’re at home in your brokenness.

I still miss you, I do. I will never stop missing you. But the water is growing colder and the waves are getting bigger and I need to go back to bed. I love you, as always, but I will never see you again. And I have to live with that, for now.

I turn my back to the sea. I search for my shoes in the pale dawn.

They are long gone.

this is our youth

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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

I’d have to agree with Joan Didion on this one. We, indeed, do tell ourselves stories in order to live. We are constantly hunting after the reasons behind occurrences, patterns within disorder, magic within the mundane. We drown ourselves in fiction, in literature, in the words that explain why we are the way we are. What is life is not one constant, dissonant story in itself? Truly, what are we, if not each our own little personal essay, perpetually being written, scratching out beliefs we’ve outgrown and adding a multitude of experiences along the way? Painful as life is, we constantly have control over the narrative of it. What is frightening is when we lose control, when we no longer are comforted by the stories we tell ourselves and instead lose faith in fiction.

Adolescence is a story unlike any other. Unanimously disastrous, but infinitely different in its disasters. Being a teenager is something you experience once. A brief and brutal period of confusion, of identity vs. conformity. Basically, adolescence is a mess. And we are messy. We, as the confused, but undoubtedly capable, teenagers we are, either choose to embrace the messiness or control it. The common goal is this: self-discovery.

I haven’t any idea what “self-discovery” entails. Is it a definable phrase, even? To many, finding yourself seems to somehow be equivalent to losing yourself. Losing yourself in whatever is accessible; whatever is popular; whatever seems desirable. This, I believe, in the greatest error one can make.

You do not have to aspire to the same heights as others. You do not have to fit impeccably and neatly into the boxes of what others label “maturity” or “youth”. There are so many ways to grow up. There are so many experiences to indulge in. Reckless abandon does not have to be one of them.

I understand the desire to be what everyone would like you to be. I understand thinking you’ll miss out on some emblematic rite of passage if you do not take part in a certain activity everyone else is. I understand it all. I understand the need to be anyone but yourself.

But.

You- solely– control the narrative of this messy life of yours. You control how you choose to participate in it. You do not have to tell yourself, repeatedly, to be what you truly are not. You do not have to engage in the reckless ideals of everyone else.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

There is no particular story you must tell. There is only the one you choose to tell yourself. I find myself in literature, in words, in fictional places and people. There is nothing I find greater enjoyment in than finding the reasoning behind the illogical; understanding why we do what we do.

However, there is not always a reason to be found. Not in life, and certainly, not in ourselves. To pretend that we are all alike in our hunger is egregious. Throw yourself into no one else’s story but your own. It is difficult, it is sometimes isolating, but it is the most liberating thing you can do.