Turning inward
to inspect my introspection
Things are new and different but still the same. A new day lighting an old room.
Too many questions.
Why won't you believe me?
Grief is as big as we are.
But grief stays the same and we grow around it. It never gets smaller, we get bigger. Our lives and memories keep growing because we are still alive.
You'll always be bigger than my grief.
I have to control how I express my feelings because you can't control how you feel about mine.
"Life's Not Fair" (TM) and other things i've believed. Also titled "mom, your dad was awful, don't take his advice anymore."
1. We aren't valuable so we are expendable and should be grateful we're allowed to exist. Others' emotions trump mine.
2. "Sometimes you have to hurt others"
3. "sticking to the narrative is more important than your own emotions about what's going on. lock them down and move forward anyway"
4. I deserve to watch myself destroy what I love. I deserve to see the pain in graphic detail.
5. I'm just one of those sad people who doesn't get to have friends because I happen to have undesirable/irredeemable/unfortunate defects in my personality.
Things I might believe now.
Maybe being family means you would choose each other.
Speak anything like a prayer and it is made sacred.
I cant tell who i am anymore and its exhilarating.
Life runs through me like a stitched thread down my body. Dragging pulling against the sin. The skin. Inconsistent symmetries of perfection.
Am i well if i am not declared sick? What if the flutter, the thump and hollow suction, the empty and irregular stillness stay my secret? What if i never tell? Can you see inside me? Will anyone?
A string of pain flashes in my toe. A stinging sliver. A single nerve rioting. I gasp and draw my impossible, invisible wings around my shoulders. Over my face a veil of feathers. It is nothing. It is just me.
if we balance and never fall
crest yet never break
inhale and never deflate?
Do we die?
Is pausing ever really staying alive?
If we stay when we could never leave are we still faithful?
Can life be held inside a seal? Or can posession only ever kill off vitality.
Can skeletons feel their fantom skin? Does no one else realize they have no right to touch anothers bones? Do they watch us pick up their pieces as we stand locked in our separated glass jar of time, the one they escaped. Yet linger around still to watch through all time? Turn the line and look straight down it and view everything as one moment. One dimension.
Can it be true that if there is time there is also not-time? Or perhaps its symmetry is imagined. A theory written on stained paper pulp which grew when fed the bones of dead people. Which made itself and was killed and sterilised and bleached white.
Not all the bones though. Sometimes the living collect the bones. Save them from their fate. Pause them. Keep them still, some call it safety.
If i didnt know better id call it kindness. This forcible haunting. Do their ghosts stick around? Watching students sketch them sitting in a public middle school in October of 1996. Still shaking off their downey fluff and preening their sticklike unopened quills. So far from their natural ends that they still breathe like its only ever a beginning.
Is it safety to be held outside of the world you deserve? Which is your birthright?
To be held captive in these scaffolds that once held hope and blood. Empty castles paused upon the brink of their destiny to tumble off a cliff. Suspended inexpertly, waiting for their next home.
Trapped when they should be molecules, elements in a thousand living cells. Making trees to make paper to carry ideas from the past to the future. They should be burning into carbon while regimes try and own someones soul. They should be joining all the other lives they are owed. Carried by the rain into the earth. Carried by the flush of mycellium to their new life. Eaten by a child. Settling in the childs bones and becoming one more person.
People write down memories on their ancestors. Every part of us had a past life.
i collect abandoned houseplants at night as i sleep. In some imagined house thats three times over in excess of my need. Too big and too much to keep. I take what i will myself to believe i can save. I save these living things which dont exist. Terrified of loss and losing and death. Wanting value.
Eight years is not quite a decade. But perhaps I'll round up. It has been a long time since I spilled out words instead of winding up my thoughts and feelings into skeins for storage away from the tender parts. Tangled and tightened, wrapped and biting into fingers. Burning and cutting through skin. Instead of weaving, the weft was taken off the frame and wound away.
Neat boxes of spun fibers. Art yarn. Twisted and spun so each fiber secures the next.
Now I guess it's time to weave, knit, sew, braid, loom. Forgive the dropped stitches and spliced yarns. It's not for show, this tapestry of self. Forgive the uneven gauge an loose ends. It will be alright in the end.
