Facets, Shattered

Unrepentant self discovery

[agnosthesiasti]

It’s been over 6 years since I started this blog. I was in college, in love, heartbroken and so full of emotion I could barely breathe.

Reading back, I feel all these things again. Funnily, I am still this person. I’m older, sure, I have a career now, and a dog, and a long term partner, but these emotions, poured out haven’t changed.

That says something, doesn’t it?

[agnosthesiasti]

God I’ve missed this version of me. 

Every word, every utterance felt poignant. it felt like the world was at my fingertips, like love and loss were lessons that I needed to learn.

Instead, I have destroyed this self. Destroyed the depth of emotion, the passion of the soul that drove this wild, intense person. Every thought, every feeling was new and deep and worth utterance and remembrance. Each sadness was felt and commemorated.

Instead, it is a slog. It is an every day, quiet sadness. There is no passion, no romance, no wonderful camaraderie. there is... tolerance. There is comfort. I don’t think I’m happy anymore.

I think I am passive now. I think I am watching things go by. I don’t want to do that or be that anymore. lets fix it.

[agnosthesiasti]

Ask me why you feel like decadence and sin combined, hazy mornings with the light slipping through the cracks. Warmth.

[agnosthesiasti]

I am remembering now.

I remember being held in my mother’s lap, pink frothy crinoline around chubby little knees, a good girl, precocious, a prodigy.

I remember lying for the first time, remember hiding my face, remember the sound of a wooden spoon against my thighs.

I remember kissing a boy on the cheek, the phone call home, the tears.

Remember my daddy’s hands making shadows on the ceiling.

Remember the smell of dust coating grand pappy’s garage. 

I remember the first time my palms bled, from the raspberry bush thorns that I grabbed too hard.

The next time there were half moons on my palms from my nails biting in and my mouth was filled with blood and I just kept pressing down and down and down and it tasted like iron and wine and sea salt and my eyes are the color of the wine dark sea and they are wet.

I cut my hair off then. Ripped the golden halo from my head, painted my lips the color of that taste, flicked my tongue out to brush against the bruises.

I am remembering now. I am being remembered.

This is not a random act of violence. This is a swan song. 

This is it.

This is the memory.

[agnosthesiasti]

We spoke of faith. We sat staring at the stars on the front porch of a dingy house on a hill with plants all in the kitchen jungle and your roommate's smiling eyes over whiskey - the color matched - and i drank my first white russian on a Thursday night and you pulled me up the stairs laughing and i tumbled into that bed with the red sheets and dived deep until the cloth imprinted my skin and you stole my breath with your hands in my hair and kissed my collar bones and smiled into my shoulder and I breathed in and in and - We spoke of burning - burning lungs, burning lust, burning balls of gas hung from strings in the heavens and - they switch to edison bulbs in the restaurant downtown and i watch the man with the kind smile and round middle tip the server not even 10 percent and i become incandescent with rage and i wonder where you are when i light a cigarette in my high red heels and tired eyes and i burn like an ember about to extinguish. We don't speak anymore.  We don't speak of my high heels and red mouth and the way i let my hair grow long down my back and the smell of mint and cigarette and gardenia that you always hated and i wear because it doesn't make me think of you the way sandalwood and smoke do and sometimes i swear i breathe in and all i can taste is you on my tongue when it's about to rain and the light is hazy and i break. i break.

We Spoke of Faith

[agnosthesiasti]

As if you were on fire from within. // The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

Neruda

[agnosthesiasti]

I want words to drip from my mouth like blood, not like pearls. Pearls are an imperfection wrapped in a sheen of brilliant luster, a shiny thing magpies take to store in their nests and marvel at. Blood... well. Blood stains.

Words, words, words

[agnosthesiasti]

The rain comes late. A fox cackles somewhere in the darkness, probably pushing through the ribs of the deer that fell down the ravine last week, it’s bones picked clean by scavengers before this one. He stubs out his cigarette and I lose details, his broad shoulders just a rough shape. I loll my head back, marionette strings cut, and take another drag and tobacco mixes with loam and he laughs, rumbling like the thunder off in the mountains. His voice, all honeyed wine, slides over my skin. Do you believe in angels? My eyes, hazy and unfocused, meander towards his boxy shape. We are some weird mix of angel and ape and darkness, motivations lost to lust and fear but so good it makes my heart ache. How could I not? I can see the glimmer of his teeth in the haze of my cigarette and the house on the corner flips the porch lights on and their twelve children are blessedly silent and I can see that he’s - He’s smiling. I take another drag. Do you believe in God? I blink. Do you remember that time we danced together at that tiny dive bar and I was young and stupid and you held my hand afterward and I stumbled on the way to the car and you held me up? His eyes crinkle. That was god. When I felt like I could reach up and hold the stars in my palms, when I was myth and legend all wrapped up in girlhood and naivety, when I knew. That is my god. The fox blinked, eyes just over the bottom step. I’m sure she smiled.

Theology and mistresses 

[agnosthesiasti]

Writing prompt - Write a very short story that includes this line: “I must get back to the sea.”

He looked at her, dark hair fluttering down into his eyes. He brushed it away, observed how the movement made her flinch.

“Tell me again why you have to go.”

Her grey eyes turned up. She remained mute.

“Is it me? Am I not enough? I would give you the world.” He let out a deep breath. “Can’t you see that?”

Her lips turned every so slightly downward; her long tresses obscured her face.

“I must get back to the sea. I’ve been gone far too long.”

His throat clenched. “It’s because of her, isn’t it? Why can’t I be enough? Why is it always her?”

She sighed softly. “She is the sea. She is chaotic and turbulent and wild and vicious and you will never compare. Ever. Stop chasing me.”

She turned and he watched as she didn’t look back.

[agnosthesiasti]

The first snowfall was today and I woke in a bed that was not my own. The light was soft and grey through his large windows and his curls were disarrayed, lashes still dusting his cheeks. And I sat, bedclothes pooled around my naked torso, and stared, tracing the curve of his mouth with my eyes, and wondered what it would be like to wake every day to these high ceilings and exposed brick walls. Fat, irregular snowflakes fell and melancholy set itself deep in my ribcage, pulsing in time to his heartbeat. I gathered my things and slipped out the door, a shadow.

[agnosthesiasti]

I don't even know what to write anymore. Am I in love? Am I falling apart? Maybe both, maybe neither. The days are slipping by, lazily. I think I may love him but the heat is sticky on my skin and it feels like.... it feels like last summer, feels like another place, feels like he's an echo. I just want that cinnamon sugar feeling, want to feel like these moments aren't wasted. I want to stop living in moments that don't last.

Journal fragments

[agnosthesiasti]

We spoke of faith when night air cooled my burning lungs. We spoke of reverence our voices loud and dissonant, wine bottle between us on the ground. We ruminated on the sanctity of stone, on cold cathedral walls lifted high for gods glory. It lapsed as we watched headlights flash by on a distant highway, their journey so different from our own flight up the stairs to look out at the scattered stars. Each light a life we cannot will not touch. In the haze that follows, though, I am drawn back, past nights with wine-stained lips and fingers tangled through my wild hair, past golden afternoons, light hazy and thick in my mouth, smoke curling up into nothing. Drawn back to Soaring, Bodies bared to this city in all it’s quiet surety, saying, “I have seen you.” Back to sacrilege, holy ground defiled by hedonist prayers, the only thing falling from your lips, my name.

Muse (or a blessing and a curse)

[agnosthesiasti]

I don’t write often anymore. I’ve lost that portion of myself, that childish wonder in creation that captured my every thought. I wanted it to be perfect, you know? I was obsessed with finding the perfect words, with finding that phrase that fit just so. I will never be a great writer. I will never have the phrasing of Sylvia Plath, never convey the same sort of melancholy that evokes dark days, an ache in my soul so deep I could weep. I will never have the same.... poignancy of Rupi Kaur, my words will never touch someone with that profoundness. 

This then, I suppose, is a memoir of mediocrity. 

The only thing I have to offer, it seems.

[agnosthesiasti]

My mother is a dancer. My mother is strong. My mother is the kind of mother with wide hips and a warm smile, you know, the one that you want to talk to after a long day, just because you know she cares? She's that kind. But before she was my mother, she learned to dance. My mother learned to dance young- a poor girl from bum-fuck nowhere - little town with a dirt road - no walls in her house, just studs. My mother took that and made it into her rolling walk, into the sway of her hips, into the quickness of her feet and the grace in her limbs. My mother took that and made it an opportunity. Made it dance partners from Europe, made it beautiful jeweled gowns, made it hidden smiles and sultry eyes and ballrooms in London's smoky haze. My mother took that and made a life. She met my father while she was dancing, and he never looked away again, and really, why would he need to? My mother is a dancer. She gets this look in her eyes and starts shaking her hips and tapping her feet and her energy could light up the room. She can jive and salsa and polka and cha-cha and samba and rhumba, and everyone's eyes are on her.  Everyone wants to be her. My mother is a dancer. It comes to her as naturally as walking does, now. It's in the curve of her wrists and in the shape of her mouth and in the tap tap tap of her feet down the stairs in the morning.  It's pervasive. My mother is a dancer, and all I've ever wanted  is to learn how to dance.  Because, you see, my mother is a dancer, and I don't speak her language. I don't have the same sway in my hips. I don't have a quickness in my feet, I don't have an energy that lights up a room. I have long, curvy legs and wide, mother-earth hips. I have strong, weight bearing shoulders, and arms that can lift a child up as easy as breathing. But I don't have grace. Never have, never will. My mother is a dancer.  And the one thing I can't do is dance.

Like mother, like daughter? || v.a.f. || 28 August 2016

[agnosthesiasti]

Hope is a dove with razors spaced out in its downy, white plumage. It beats and beats and beats in my chest and when it finally escapes (Unscathed, still pure) the prison of my rib cage, I am flayed open. Ribbons of flesh pouring lifeblood onto the ground.

God Made Me a Masochist || v.a.f. || 31 July 2016

[agnosthesiasti]

I felt it, when you broke the glass, shattered it against the baseboard in my pastel living room - the mark from my teeth on your collarbone, blackberry wine stains where there should be softness. I felt the crack in between my breath, dove soft and dying in my throat, wings not strong enough to withstand - it is not a raging force I cannot say - but the darkness of your eyes is the yawning of an abyss and I do not see - This is what sin feels like, blood on my finger tips, hazy summer nights and the harsh breath from the other room and it will not pass for I am - Heathen. Ruined. Harlot. Whore. Condemned to the fires of Gehenna - and when you wrap your arms around my willow ribs and slide those ruby lips up the column of my neck I remember that Lucifer was an angel once - They say I am a fool to stay. I was a fool to go in the first place. Once I tasted the fruit of eden how was I to resist? Lucifer was an angel once… does that make me the devil too?

Cycle || v.a.f. || 3 June 2016

[agnosthesiasti]

I wish that the words weren't stuck in my throat - or maybe stuck in my fingertips - or in the curve of my wrist - or under my tongue - or or or.  I wish that I knew where it went. Where passion was. What happened.

What’s a writer without a muse