@angelsgew - Tumblr Blog

“I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away.”

— Shauna Niequist

inkskinned

today i am thinking about what we leave behind. in the store, on all of the bath mats, someone has drawn a heart or left a handprint. in the pen aisle, each page of the test paper is covered in names and little drawings and fuck covid and over and over again - hello hello hello hi hello. on the street i live, three houses have perfect hopscotch lanes carefully transcribed with rules and everything - jump here! now do a spin! graffiti of a deer on the side of a building, names scrawled into setting concrete. initials carved into park bench seats. In the bathroom, in silver sharpie - i hope you’re okay out there. i love you, you’re beautiful, keep trying. geocached tubes of trinkets, jackets left out in case somebody needs it. a note on my windshield - closed your door it was a little open have a great day and stay safe! my friends and i, fully grown adults, build a sandcastle on the edge of the ocean.

inside of returned schoolbooks. inside of little secret pockets. hi hello hello hello. what a beautiful calling. you and i are in different times, and will never meet, but here is the greeting i’d owe you. if you never get to see this person, what do you say? hello! i love you. be good out there. be safe.

inkskinned

oh, i am finally old enough to know why my parents took so long to grab their coats. why they would ask us to get ready to go only to sit down for another round of coffee. what would i tell myself, at 10 years old? it’s okay. sit down with them too. take in the extra hour with your friend and her family. when you get home, write down every moment in your diary. one day you will be older and you will be waving goodbye to your best friend, and you will turn the key to start your beat up little car engine, and you will look back over your shoulder. her hair will be blowing in the wind and she will be beautiful and you will be, for a moment, struck by all of it. what you will feel is so wide and nameless that it will engulf you. and you will think of being 14 and kicking her under the table in math every time you wanted to whisper something behind the teacher’s back. you will think about how long the days felt, and how you could hold her hand whenever you wished, but you didn’t. and you will think about all of the people you could have lingered with. and you will wish, more than you have ever felt a wish, that the universe just gave you that - more time to linger. more time to say - i love you. i know i need to leave, but i don’t want to leave you. and when i go, i am leaving a piece of my heart that lingers too.

one more round of coffee. the days are so short, and you are so lovely.

inkskinned

i will find, one day, the words that are correct. and i will sew them perfectly into my skin and they will sink into the past and they will stitch together a little broken girl and i will be healed altogether.

what would i say to her? 16 and shivering. i’d tell her the truth - we missed the ten year anniversary of our attempt because we were too busy and too full of life and so happy that we no longer count hours in crescents. there will be a lot of people who tell you it is worth it, that it gets better, but you will not believe them. little mouse, it is not easy. you will break down so many times you will have a fondness for rock bottom. you will become soul tethered to sisyphus, feeling yourself push the burden of your baggage up-and-up-and-up, over and over, each season like a metronome.

i would like to tell you do your homework or make more friends or try laughter instead. but we are older now, my love, and the world is different. tiny things seem silly now. instead, if there’s anything - just, while you’re there, look around. you do not have to like where you are. you do not have to squeeze juice out of the rotten core of your weeks. instead, take note of the changing of leaves. of how many clouds were worth noting. of bees and butterflies and hands that hold. one day you will miss just-being-home. one day your memories will flatten like a well-worn stone. keep a few, if you can, of the smell of baking and of loam.

people will tell you just live for right now, but you will not be able to do that, because your life is a wound and it needs to bleed. live, instead, if you can, just for me. for being 27 and loving green tea and a job worth doing and people in your phone you can call at any minute and having a dog you rescued and two tattoos and friends you can lay in bed with while all three of you read. for being in love with birds and having beaten another pokemon game and for learning your new favorite joke. we end up living only so our mother won’t be sad - and she’s doing great. she’s happy. they live up in maine now, isn’t that funny. but live, a little, just for me.

i sometimes, weakly, regret all the things that have been taken from me. i could have been a doctor! i could have a steady job! I could have gone to so many things! instead i was panicked or hungry or sobbing or so numb i could have been an ice rink.

but we never regret being here. we never regret what we gained in the bargain. you get to go to weddings (you’ll love her, i promise) and carnivals and graduations and halloween parties and you will love, wholeheartedly, all of it. one by one each emotion will come crawling back and one day you’ll realize you laugh without faking it. you just laugh. you experience movie-like joy so easily. can you believe that people call you bubbly? it’s lovely, what you’re waiting for. we have access to art supplies and good food and ice cream (it’s diary free - while you’re young, eat as much you can, just trust me).

when you’re 22, a friend will tell you - tomorrow might be the best day of my life. people’s luck changes all the time. maybe tomorrow i will make friends with bill gates. maybe tomorrow i’ll rescue a tiger from a cage. maybe today i make a small change, and by three weeks from now, i’m running the city under a new name.

the truth is that, at 27, you don’t live for tomorrow anymore. you don’t white-knuckle brace-for-it, hope-it-gets-better-somehow. you just wake up, and grab a coffee, and laugh about dumb things, and listen to your music too loudly. the world in 10 years will taste like honey.

keep living. keep going. just trust me.

inkskinned

what would i say to you, lightless? i know i promised you a poem about recovery, about the finding of green, about how before i was happy i didn’t have anything. even my favorite color was “nothing” - how cliche, how depressing. no singular moment stood out from the rest. the days were all shadows of themselves, skeletons all politely dressed. i remember thinking - shouldn’t i feel something? should’t i feel something? wrote wake up on the inside of my wrist for a month and it never shook me into breathing.

the work is worth it, i tell my kids. the practice makes perfect. the climbing makes your legs strong. each mountain gets a little bit less uphill.

this is not a poem about recovery. it is a poem about this morning. there were 14 wasps in my bathroom and i had to fight them with bleach. holy shit! i sent sixteen snapchats. i fend the wasps off and don’t cry about it even though i want to cry about it. tell my kids i’m a wasp god and unkillable. this poem is about last night when i cleaned my room and watched a documentary. this poem is about my dog’s broken leg and olive branches and kissing girls and sunflowers and softer edges. this poem is about the bag of popcorn i am eating for lunch and the workout i am avoiding and the meticulous notes i am writing.

this poem is about being awake. it’s worth waiting for. the world is so soft and so sharp and so lovely and so tasty. the world is so full of surprises and patterns and the faces of your loved ones and the phases of the moon and new opportunities. the world is so full of lanterns and harpoons.

one day the glass breaks, and you do not cry. you go and get a broom.

inkskinned

how lucky. for a while i’ve been so happy i haven’t been writing. my old anxiety comes up - that my sorrow made me a better poet.

but here i am, writing. and it is about new things. and it is with a different tone. i haven’t met the poet i am, just yet. she is someone different; focused on different things, thinking about different people, living with her nose tucked under different wings. for a while i thought that meant no words, but that was because i was trying to harvest from the corpse of the girl-i-was, who has been burnt out and rotted onto the pyre of now-i-am.

it would be easier, of course. i could rehash what feels stale. i could stick to hunger and horror. i could keep the stain and call it fashionable. but i kind of like this; the overcoming of what-was. it is okay i do not recognize myself. it is okay it still feels clunky and odd. it is okay that my process is new, because i am new, too. it is good to be raw like this, sunbaked, when before i was raw like roadkill.

i remember being fourteen and so excited to start practicing. that one day i could really be good at writing. and i was good at writing, because i was practicing - that’s how the circle works, when it’s working. she wasn’t worried when things didn’t feel right. she wasn’t worried when she didn’t nail the ending. she knew one day she’d be better, so she kept working.

so i’ll figure out how the controls work. operating without mulching my own sorrow as a sealing coat; creating without collapsing my own skin. it’s sort of nice. i am not very good, just yet. i am going to get it very wrong. i am going to backtrack. i am going to rely on cliche and old excuses. but i am going to keep moving. even after all this time, the act of creation still feels good. so who cares what it looks like.

i created a better life. that alone can be my masterpiece. everything else i make afterwards - why, it’s just the icing.

inkskinned

i would have learned, you know. i know violence teaches, and it teaches well. but i would have learned without it.

ipoetried

“When I was 9 years old, my mother was the first one to tell me to yell FIRE if someone touched me. She said fire gets people to listen. Otherwise people will think you are just joking. Otherwise people will say that you are just lying. I was 9 years old. I nodded. I understood. It made sense. That’s the thing - you never know you need to yell FIRE until you’re already starting to burn. I was 13 years old the first time someone lit a flame on my body. My mother’s words were in the back of my head. But there was a voice that was stronger closer to my heart, whispering, ‘you didn’t even need a skin graft, your lungs still work despite the smoke, so getting firefighters involved would take them away from the houses that need it more.’ I was 17 years old the first time I really knew I was on fire. Every single cell in my skin was in ashes. I was surrounded by rubble. But something my mother never told me was that sometimes there are wrong people to yell FIRE to. He sat in apparent thought, and told me it wasn’t that bad, that it hadn’t been his intention to bring matches to my bedroom, that a few singed sheets wasn’t the end of the world. I nodded. I understood. It made sense. You don’t tell an arsonist about a fire. They already know. I was 23 years old the first time I became angry that I had to scream FIRE instead of telling people what actually happened. I was furious that imaginary buildings were more important than my body. That it was necessary to bring water to fake brick before bringing others back to their senses. That a lie people like matters more than the truth they don’t. I refuse to go up in smoke - but, if I must, I will burn the world with me.”

— FIRE (k.p.k) || instagram: @karyspk

brbjellyfishing

fuck it up Cathleen!!!!!!!

mimikyyuu

doctors in tweets be like

i-hate-chick-fil-a

This is heartbreaking.

Meanwhile, your chances of becoming a citizen are 3 times more likely if you’re white and from Europe. It’s racism.

ka039

ATTENTION ALL GIRLS AND LADIES: if you walk from home, school, office or anywhere and you are alone and you come across a little boy crying holding a piece of paper with an address on it, DO NOT TAKE HIM THERE! take him straight to the police station for this is the new 'gang' way of rape. The incident is getting worse. Warn your families. Reblog this so this message can get accross to everyone.