it takes a lot to know what you are
instead i trace the holes, press the edges like a bruise
Oceans into heights, those dogs smaller than 50 pounds, the man who passes by without a smile, a heart rate more than 100, not being the tallest person in the room.
They’re like backwards affirmations to me and myself only, read aloud like any other tabloid cover—things that I’m afraid of…gossip, throw that in there too.
Dare I slip in an image of my frame?
After so many awkward conversations about the topic, I found myself in time. Speaking with a bit more of a forwardness, one that could be akin to a grace—finally.
I thought of it as ‘getting over it’, or that whole… processing thing—was finally coming to an end. But being ecstatic to speak out on the things that would once hold you at gun point underneath your covers, still doesn’t feel exactly right either. If I were not to be a downer, I certainly would become the one with the eyes that ‘never stop darting’ soon enough.
Maybe another fear?
Being labeled the ‘crazy one’.
And that is the one I get held up on a lot.
It’s what they called every other woman in my family. First a moment, plunging into her past, and after—those eyes.
Those…were never the same. Much like what’s inside the head that hid beneath the skull of silky hair, the one with a fresh set of drug store boxed-dye, blonde. To keep the questions away.
Or, at the very least, have a formidable excuse as to why the clumps keep degrading out, and out, again.
There’s this relay that if I am too, here. I am here to suffer the same fate.
And if there are just some inescapable dispositions we are so disposed to, that when they do appear.
That ‘better action’ is so shrouded. That we never know what could be the best for our own-self.
Am I to lie towards a rebellion from nature? Defiance, upheaval, rooting so far into what the stars tell me, rather than what the thing staring directly underneath my mind’s eye.
Every. Single. Night.—Say back.
I saw her look back, then towards me…up, and down. In pity and admiration all the same, a naked exposed feeling—your ego checking your stature all whilst it knows what it has, wants…gets.
It gets you.
It runs a hand down until it meets the scars on my spine from the surgeries,
It’s soft in touch because it knows anything more than a surface level caress triggers a panic response,
It lulls me to rest instead of ‘putting me to sleep’ because it knows after the sixth time I was put under anesthetics in a four week span, a sudden slip into unconsciousness results in amnesia for the coming week.
I still forget what I see in dreams, and the overwhelming fragments of what the lucidness of being awake feels like…that takes longer than I can admit to parse out.
There has always been this saying that confidence is a performance, that much of all the human nature we have, is so even more.
What’s ironic is that during an actual performance of your arts, that there. In those fleeting moments, is when you feel, can—must. Drop the mask to escape into your own performance, the self.
I would think the self knows best, but never in the moment, no.
Never when you need it to fix the aforementioned ego down your neck. Those two work in tangent—Self & Ego.
There, it holds your own breath. It doesn’t know what’s best. It exists to suffocate you, into your self. Figure it out, those are its lashings.
The ego exists as the ember, as you are the catalyst. Both waiting for the oxygen after the asphyxiation it righteously will cause.
And exactly like that high you get from a praise you didn’t deserve, or that drug you love to abuse, the money you spend off another’s kindness—there lies the same thing.
You weren’t meant for any of this
I find myself in the distant meetings, on that edge of insanity and the teetering of expansionism. Because well…I love ‘the self‘ — myself.
But to get away from the head-y third person nature.
It would be wrong of me to not think of myself as a ‘good person’ as well, despite moments of instability, and change. I believe the newest thing for me has been my whole life seeing this same frame. I’m still not quite too sure if it’s because of changes becoming so apparent they pass through any prior disassociation towards myself or…that that simple cause of yeah, the change is inevitable and has hit me in a force that in what I’m coming to understand—no one gets used to.
I’m certainly the one to have big dreams but never particularly have been the one to look so far into the future. “Whenever it happens, it happens I guess.”
There’s no road-map, or flowchart to hit X goal into a lateral move to Y then, make this, and that to finally achieve that One Thing I Really Want.
Money, career, marriage, success of an art?
All the million things I’ve considered to be the dream, set goal—Achieve or, ‘what would it all be worth anyways?’
I want to say none of it matters either, but that would be a lie.
What matters now is that I find myself being more open towards the idea of ambiguous change, rather than the change that Will, Must—NEEDS, to happen.
How would I ever somehow fit in a finite box, like my own Pandoras.
Opening it to find my own despair and lust and virtue and everyone I had ever wronged staring right back at me with no words, no experience. Just my only one mortal fear, the feeling of —
I can’t believe I let my own self consume in such a way. with my own righteousness, with the other’s blame. Only to find it will forever be me, from the start, to the finish.
How It starts,
How it Ends with You.
Instead, I trace the holes. press the edges like a bruise
“i watched in bleached skies as they took you out, it was over in four ticks. they shouted for you as it took over, under. back in forth—i never knew it could cling to you, some sort of death cradle. it went again and again until there was blood. then there was no more. now it is silent again”
-alice
thanks for reading,
