scooter

a coward tries out vulnerability for a change

[acousticscooter]

[acousticscooter]

6.17 2330

drove around the earth a couple times

foot to the floor, highway hypnosis

can’t tell if I’m chasing a feeling

or running from it

another benny arbor in my teeth,

pocket full of dead ends

am I chasing the feeling

or running from it?

eyes linger on the forbidden section

I consider drinking again

chasing numbness

running from this

stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it stop stop stop stop stop stop stop

[acousticscooter]

06.17.2025

drove around the earth a couple times foot to the floor, highway hypnosis can’t tell if I’m chasing a feeling or running from it another benny arbor in my teeth, pocket full of dead ends

am I chasing the feeling or running from it?

[acousticscooter]

06.05.2025 // are you burning in the wind?

I don’t want to lose this

I don’t want to lose you, but it’s

much worse to stick around and hope

to make a fire out of smoke

are you burning in the wind?

hoping it’ll carry this flame to

someone who can hold it,

without being swallowed whole

[acousticscooter]

03.21.2025 // seasonal sickness

birdsong quickly overcomes the frigid silence of winter. They flit about the budding branches, just a few days shy of exploding color, while steady rain falls from swift-moving clouds.

Halfway into my work uniform, my phone buzzes with a text from dispatch. No work today. I sink into relief for a while, watching The Menu and relaxing. But I grow restless by the early afternoon.

I feel numb, but not nothing— there is this sense that I am on the precipice. the sound of pressure is pulsing in my eardrums like distant thunder from a storm that’s just out of sight. I can feel it coming. There’s no stopping it.

I wait for rainfall to come hammering down on my mind, holding my breath in the stillness.

so much of my skin has nearly forgotten the sensation of human touch. the craving for affection is as constant and incessant as hunger deep into my anorexia; starvation I am acutely aware of, but refuse to satisfy. a need I cannot meet without mental battle.

my deprivation is self-inflicted on the mere illusion that consistency is the same thing as safety. the hunger is constant. the pain is normal. familiar. satisfaction is foreign.

sleeping, I feast on affection offered from vague figures crafted by my subconscious. gentle fingers combing through my hair, arms wrapped around me, a hand on the small of my back. softness.

when I wake up, this body wastes no time in reminding me that the affection I got was fictional, demanding retribution. as used to it as I get, it’s still pain, still gnawing away at my core.

I am mind numbingly starved of affection, and it’s hollowing me out. I am afraid I will get lovesick if I ever satisfy this hunger. Satisfaction makes the pain real all over again, and suddenly, I don’t know how I ever lived without it.

god I want to be held. how could I possibly know how to ask for it now? I fear refeeding syndrome, when all at once, the pain becomes real again— satisfaction makes the hunger urges too strong to resist, and I binge.

[acousticscooter]

03.08.2025 // chrysalis

I’m a shell of who I once was; hollowed out, altered, wrapped in a cocoon of uncertainty.

who will I be when I emerge? overgrown, shuddering, pressing on all sides of myself until I crack through shallow safety.

this shelter provided me with what I needed to become something new. I will emerge, unrecognizable.

[acousticscooter]

03.07.2025 // pseudo fanta

hindsight always seems clear as crystal, even when going through it was like swimming in mud.

the clarity changes, though. perspective alters perception: consider a dolly zoom, disorienting because the subject appears to change shape, but not size, as the camera moves further away. you can see more of a subject the further you are away.

things appear different. there may be less details, but from where you now stand, you can now see it for what it was, as its whole.

that doesn’t mean the events itself changed, or that any of this is changeable. you seem convinced that the way to change yourself is by figuring it all out in your head. there’s gotta be an answer, you’re sure of it, but the more you look back the more things seem to shift.

you can change direction at any time, but can never go back. Leo Tolstoy, “the only time for which we hold power is now.”

you’ve gotta out of your mind and into experience.

you’re digging for more evidence, and the hole is getting deeper. you think you’re getting somewhere, but it’s just getting harder to climb out of. but you got yourself here, and you can get yourself out again.

if you physically feel yourself wanting to change, it’s time to do something physical about it.

you’re all in your head, you’re not even feeling the physical presence of your body and it’s beating heart— it only beats for you.

why does that bring you shame?

feel it.

feel it.

the electricity splintering through your spine, telling you your feet are on the ground and your eyes are open and they are reading this text right now and comprehending the lines on the glass box as something further than the pixels: as a reminder that you are alive and your lungs need air. breathe in, breathe out.

stop waterboarding yourself with reminders of your past. the earth is spinning beneath your feet, and you’re holding your breath again.

roll your eyes. whatever. the truth is: you’re an animal. you need oxygen, or the electricity dies, and didn’t you say you feel afraid you’re losing your spark?

breathe. all the way in. all the way out. remember who you are. not who you’ve been. breathe in. breathe out.

look up.

you might not like where you are, but you have free will. use it. look around. what do you want to do? you say you don’t know, but what happens if you just start?

[acousticscooter]

3.5.25 // birthdays i can’t forget

I bite down on another reminder of him, dry swallowing it like a heavy pill. My chest sinks. Is there nothing for me that is left untainted, untied to him by some invisible string in my mind?

Will I spend the rest of my life seeing him in someone else?

Saltwater spills onto keys, teeth sinking into my cheek until the flavor of iron fills my mouth. I shake my head, my eyes fixed on some distant memory of him in my mind. Even after all of this time, I'm still scouring every last detail of it all, certain there must be some explanation, some reason as to why my heart remains tethered to him.

Every conversation, every hug, every touch, every time someone says my name-- just on the other side of the sensation, a whisper: it's not the same.

A more painful question: will I spend the rest of my life seeing him in me?

As I scribble notes in my hand-bound journal, Solace II, I see him. All-capital-handwriting, pen doodles, squared-off letters at the top of the page, military time. He's in my hands when I drag my pen across paper or strum on the acoustic guitar, in my feet spinning to keep the rhythm, in my throat and face when I'm singing. In my mannerisms, in my repetitive obsessions with time, in my newfound fear of wasting it. Spending hour after hour alone in my car, trying to figure out what I'm doing, who I am, what I want, over and over and over, failing to find answers, meticulously analyzing my past, trying to figure out what I did wrong-- every bit of this spiral is all too familiar. I see him in me.

When I spend days alone, hiding in my room, I catch a glimpse in my reflection. I hear him in the corner of my thoughts. I see him in me, now. I'll never be unchanged by his touch. He'll remain permanently part of me. I don't dare to wonder if I remain as anything but a skeleton in his ossuary, or as his last stop on the way to true love— I don’t want to hear my mind answer.

Today, he turns 24. I didn't forget. I wish I could have. I don't bridge digital silence to wish him a happy birthday, because I want him to have one. I want him to be happy. I overstayed my welcome in his life already, I would hate to steal more of his time.

Happy Birthday, █████ . I hope you have peace, now.

[acousticscooter]

2.26.25 // sunken touch

I have a dream. in my shed. it felt real. I was talking to youbut I don’t remember what I was saying, anxiously massaging my neck and looking at the floor. then, hands on my shoulders and a sense of safety. I knew they were your hands because of how safe dream-me felt i had sort of sunken into the touch, and from that point on it was just sensations. your arms that then wrapped all the way around me and hugged me, the warmth of your another body against mine. I thought about you all day I tried not to think about it. the tenderness had relieved some physical tension in the real world, but strained my heart. it’s been aching, again.

[acousticscooter]

1.10 00:56

FROST

ninety days sober. or, well. ninety-two. three months since him and since alcohol.

I feel leveled. Part of me feels like that’s a bad thing. I felt in such extremes that a normal emotional volume has been reduced to a light buzz, where once lightning struck and thunder reverberated through a constantly stormy mind.

now, there is just steady rain.

///

I am called by two people, drunk, tonight. Out, with other people. also, inevitably drunk. Their syllables are sticky, slurring their words through a crackling phone line.

It doesn’t really bother me, until it does. Until I hang up, and my eyes scan for someone that I know won’t be there.

I am alone in this room. My room.

Starved of any affection and validation, I huddle around sparks of notifications and slight compliments.

So, which do I prefer? the bite of the frost, or the singe of the fire?

I hate both. I want to just… Be room temperature. Right now, the frost is biting at my fingertips, rattling my body, numbing my will for desire. How could I possibly want to be near fire, when I'm still coughing up smoke from when my life burned around me?

Even now, shuddering, I won't risk a match. One spark, and I remember just how it felt to be swallowed whole by the fire. Even freezing, I'd pour water on any flame. I won't risk being burned again.

[acousticscooter]

tachycardia

01.08.2025

I scream sob at 04:44 in the morning, my tachycardia holding my consciousness hostage from sleep. I beg my heart to let me rest. It decides, instead, to get a running start— racing back to replay memories that have degraded in quality like an overplayed VHS. They are so much blurrier, now, scenes skipping, faces fuzzed with grain.

“Just let me fucking sleep,” I wail, my cats looking up at me from where they still sit on the end of the bed. My noise is stealing sleep from them, too. “I’m so tired… please,” I crack, quieter as I run out of breath— only to subsequently swallow another whole, hitching the whole way up.

Who am I begging?

Is my heart the twist villain of this story? The one whose side I take again and again in a bid for love that has only betrayed me?

Have I let my heart demonize my mind as cold, callous?

Is it my mind that is the terrified child, cowering from a heart that races back to fantasy, a heart that holds the present and still drops it without hesitation for a rerun. Does my heart hold my mind hostage, dragging its hand at a sprint, much too fast a pace to keep up with? Thundering in my chest and grabbing hold of every organ, giving my brain no choice but to compensate and come up with a reason for the fight or flight?

44 minutes later, at 05:28, I crawl back into bed, my heart only sedated to a walking pace after smoking two joints. my fingers numb, I can feel my own body heat still on the blanket, and for a moment, almost cry again, wishing that it was someone else.

Instead, I turn my phone off and go to bed. I might still get 3 more hours of sleep.

[acousticscooter]

1.7 16:53

SWANS

a group of four perfect tundra swans fly over.

the january sun is setting now, the clouds rolling in.

I spend four hours sitting at the refuge, pondering my path, writing alongside predawn.

I do not feel like the swans, so intuitively pointed in the direction of what they need. They don't sit and wonder. They just fly.

They know no home, any familiarity is stripped by the seasonal return of frigid winters in the north and scorching summers in the south. Permanence is hardly a concept to them-- it is understood that when the sun rises, they move again, and it is okay, because that is the way things are.

I remain on the ground, looking up at them, wishing that some internal compass would suddenly lock onto my path, with a clarity I have never been capable of reaching.

I always go back there, mourning.

Will I ever be free of grief? Or is it chronic, something I will carry forever?

[acousticscooter]

moral of the story

you cannot run from time, but time can run from you. there is no good thing that is permanent. all emotions, like time, pass.

in moments of joy, the passage of time feels like a loss to grieve. it’s easy to allow the knowledge of impermanence to sweep away a moment— harder to hold onto the love and joy before it is merely memory.

in moments of pain, time is an answered prayer. this, too, shall pass. however agonizing this moment is, a distant version of you is looking back with pride: you survived.

cling to every detail and savor it. the moment is already ending.

november 19, 2024 • 16:22

[what-even-is-thiss]

“Cats don’t actually love you”

A cat is a small creature in the middle of the food chain that is fully aware that you are a very large thing that could stomp its head in at any moment and yet it chooses to rest its tiny little head on your leg for a nap and spreads out on the floor near you exposing its belly and its most sensitive organs. It brings dead mice and bugs to you to share food.

Don’t you get it? This tiny thing trusts you. It wants to help you too. It licks your leg thinking that it’s helping. It kneads on you to find comfort. It shares its body warmth with you in the cold and gives you your space in the heat. It hisses at other mammals it sees outside including other cats in an effort to protect its family.

Cats love you so so much. But they will keep trying to eat plastic.

[that-fan-girl]

[sowearecleariamhere]

has this been done

[vexheart]