I read your poem last night, quickly. Then I read it again, slowly. But something about the words you chose and my poor attention span worked to quicken the slow, and I ended up not reading it at all. So I tried again, just one more time, and instead of gaining any comprehension, I got a visual of someone like Pocahontas (but smaller, rounder, younger), whose eyes were painted with thick white raccoon stripes (from the feathered arrows), and then I imagined that the wilderness you mentioned in the poem was actually the area at the corners of my eyes that are beginning to show the roots of trees. Suddenly I was the smaller, rounder, younger Pocahontas. I imagined how cool the paint must have felt on my face as the arrows made their pass, and I imagined how itchy it must have been as it cracked when I smiled. And what it would feel like to take one of those warm blades of grass and pick away the cold flakes of paint. I remember wanting to type out a response to you really quickly last night but I didn't. I did but I didn't. Tonight I wanted to write about not writing it to you. But also, I wanted to write about that strange feeling I get when I'm depressed - the feeling that there's an observer inside of me who notices another part of me - one that's grayscale, faded, silent, lying prone, pressed down flat against a white marble pedestal in an empty mausoleum. Who is she? What would she say if she could find the breath to speak? Who is that outsideinside observer? Who's the part of me it's watching? And how did I so quickly become your Pocahontas?
The corners of eyes came into my mind but I didn't say them in that poem, I thought that poem was dumb and generic after I reread it and I just hope we can be honest, I mean who cares? I'm terrified of not being authentic but letting it show scares me. The outside observer is one of the tenants of existentialism, and in the most recent episode of radio lab, it's the feeling of looking through a keyhole at someone and then realizing someone is watching you, it's getting caught being alive. For me I'm worried, I have had such burning connections, but right now I'm retreating, I feel alone but don't respond when people reach out, what is that? It's like I want to foster this isolation, a subterfuge for refuge. I want to throw the world away and try to chase it from me, to see if it comes in some other way, some memory. I keep thinking about Pocahontas and Neil Young, I keep thinking I would love a girl paddling softly in a wooden canoe across a cold lake in some forever morning. I appreciate the part of you pressed against cold marble, I think that is beautiful.
areudirty
vaporwave
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
theartofmadeline
