trading branches for bones... @annabellydancer - Tumblr Blog

Breakfast

Because I watched a movie last night where a woman cooked breakfast for her controlling, abusive boyfriend. Girls, don't cook breakfast for your love if he/she aint appreciate you. And don't cook breakfast for your love if you don't know how to cook breakfast and you hate cooking. Just do whatever it is that you want to do for breakfast today. Like French Toast Crunch is back on the shelves, so go get a box of that if you want. Just be really independent today and let your headspace fill with thoughts of what you want to think about. And if you just happened to show up to your love's apartment to make him/her breakfast this morning but he/she wasn't there, then make the damn breakfast and eat it by yourself and bask in all of it's glory, because your hands made it and your hands are worth more than any man/woman's presence at hypothetically-said breakfast.

http://youtu.be/AYYGyJ3KyFQ

**I'm not actually mad at any boyfriend or girlfriend I may or may not have, I'm just really upset at the female status in our country right now. Be a woman and stand up for what is yours. Don't hurt others, don't kiss other girl's boyfriends/girlfriends, don't wear that skirt with no tights and high heels because it is 0 degrees and icy, don't corner yourself into the kitchen. Be strong and independent and remember that your sex has been birthing life and continuing the human race since the beginning of time. Men are just pissed that they can't carry a fetus or produce their own food or orgasm multiple times.

Heavy Quilts

I sleep under the quilt that my great-great grandmother made. My mom kept this quilt safely in our hallway linen closet, and I placed it in the laundry basket that I packed into my car as I drove to Pennsylvania for my junior year of college.

This quilt looks like home and feels like southern comfort, heavy on my tired, exhausted body or my lazy saturday mornings. Heavy on my restless legs in the middle of the night. Heavy on the dreams I have about you and me, or dreams about when I spent three months in Italy and natives asked me for directions that I could not respond to.

Heavy is not mournful. It is a grounding, a weight that brings sense to chaos. When my great-great grandmother quilted this blanket that rests on my bed, she did so knowing that all of the airiness that keeps her loved ones up at night would be captured by small squares of purpose. Each worry I have fits into these patterns and is contained for my sake.

A blanket does not provide warmth, but it holds in what is already warm. When I remember that my great-great grandmother's quilt is useless without my own toes between the sheets, I am reminded that we, all of us, are useless without each other. I am thankful for those heavy weights who ground me in my flight, who show me how warm I really am, how much potential energy I possess.

I sleep under the quilt that my great-great grandmother made. And as the fabric slowly loosens with each passing year, I cherish the heaviness that it offers me now. I feel the cotton on my face, and think of the hands that touched every single part of this blanket. Hands that never held me directly, but have kept me warm since birth.

I sleep under the quilt that my great-great grandmother made. And every morning she wishes me well.

Poem Interrupted

Let me preface this with saying that it's been so long since I've written my thoughts on a computer screen that I'm afraid the space in between will be too great to cover. I'm not covering anything, just laying down my thoughts, which in this medium seem so much more real than the pages of my notebook. Maybe it's because I'm better at lying to myself than to other people.

I just walked into the end of your poem. On accident or by fate. I hear poems often, but faces are so far away from the words that usually I couldn't care less. Your face was right in front of me, and your words were perfectly falling out of your mouth. I even thought to myself "She must have read this poem a few times."

I'm walking into the end of every poem like I missed the detailed instructions on how to begin to understand. Right now, I don't even know where to begin to understand. Maybe right now is the rest of my life.

My friend Shannon thinks that people are all bored, and that's why we do things. That's why we have country clubs and dance classes and YMCAs and wine tastings. We're a bored race. I'm a bored person and maybe I chose the wrong distractions. I'd rather do necessary things. Like pick up trash and love people.

Daily I replay the scene in my unlit kitchen, how you fried perogies in my mom's biggest skillet, and in the dark we mirrored each other's dance moves and stifled our laughter because my parents were asleep. We were dancing in the kitchen. We looked up the date of your sister's friend's mom's funeral because we needed to know when we first kissed. I don't ever want you to die. But now that I'm thinking about it, we probably kissed after midnight, after you finally stole a seat next to me, after all of your friends left, while the dvd menu played on repeat. You're gonna keep my soul, it was yours to have long ago. I like you. You don't make me feel bored.

Maybe I get upset too easily, but I'd much rather stay sensitive. Maybe this keeps me from blindly getting lost in my art. But maybe my purpose in this life is to be the one person who doesn't get lost. Maybe I'm supposed to repeat this lie to myself so I don't drown in my own unlostness. There's nothing wrong with me.

Never you mind, it's sure to be alright.

Just enough dark to see how you're the light over me.

An imagined moment.

I stared at the water-stained tips of your brown shoes because I didn't know where else to look. Not that there weren't other places to look, but I needed your frame to be in my eyesight, and to focus anywhere else but on your water-stained shoes would give me away.

I imagined you'd been wearing them all day.

And then later I tried talking to you, but I was too nervous to say much of anything.

Except I kept returning to that table you were at, so that I could steal your gaze before I left. I said one more goodbye, and then you said one more goodbye, and before I turned around our eyes met. And I liked it, because it was kind of dramatic.

But that's all that happened. And I made it all up. To avoid writing that paper that we both have to write.

A love song.

My heart is aching with words right now. An unsatisfiable ache.

I don't know what it is about this particular time of year that makes you drift, but you drift away from me. My laughter isn't funny to you. Maybe I drift away from you, too, but my insecurities plainly give me away as trying too hard to stop the drift.

Death fills the season. I told you I loved you, and you refused to say it back to me, you refused to lie to me. I died a little. Truth kills you slowly. We enter this world so oblivious to truth, and we are young and vibrant until we face unrequited love.

It's good to know that you won't lie about your love for me, and yet the aching only worsens with each ending phone call. Maybe it's not that you don't love me, but rather you're afraid to mess up again. Maybe I'm scared of that, too.

It's been a year for more than just you. And your friends. It's been a year for me, also. What an incredibly small amount of time that is. So short is a year that my scars have not yet formed. Still sore to the touch, especially on Saturday nights spent sober or drunk or days that I'm not busy.

It's been months since I've been able to write. Mostly because my sub conscience isn't yet aligned with what I want the outside world to see. I have these wild dreams in which I have fallen trap to this all over again. Or worse, dreams where the opposite happens. Never really do I dream of perfectness. In the morning my doubts are reinstated by events that never really happened. And if I thought you'd be unintimidated to respond ineloquently, I would tell you these things. Instead, you don't inquire, and so I don't explain.

All I want is to explain. All I need is your response.

I know it's not that you don't care, or that you don't love me, but because you are patient, and I am not.

"So cheered he his fair spouse and she was cheered/But silently a gentle tear let fall/From either eye and wiped them with her hair." -Paradise Lost, Book V 129-131

http://youtu.be/u4iseF_FBn8

Pancakes

I can't sleep, because my mind is too full of ideas that I need to get out before the day ends. I think some of these ideas need a new day, though. So to soothe my weary thoughts, I'll write a little.

Tomorrow I'm going to wake up early and take my sweet cousin to school. But before I do that, I'm going to drink a green smoothie. Making this the first full week of a green smoothie a day. Plant-based diets are the new aspartame. amazinggrass.com.

This summer, well especially since last Thursday, I've lost a lot of clarity in humanity. I heard the phrase "that's unforgivable" tonight. What's unforgivable? What has another person done that is so much worse than every wrong I've ever committed? Unforgivable? Why is that a word? And at what point in my life will I understand what it means?

I'm going to make some pancakes in the morning. And I'm going to coat them in real butter. I probably won't eat them all, but I'm going to eat a lot of them. And take the rest of them to an early bird. Or maybe to that cute kitten that's been living in my back yard. Do kittens like pancakes? If you give a kitten a pancake...

Workaholics? Where have I been...this show is classic.

I've been checking out the pool next door since the bank started treating it. The tadpoles are gone, and what's left is a clear but slightly leafy funtub. I'm afraid to jump in on account of the water might actually mutate the genes of my future tadpole babies, but OH MAN I WANT TO SKINNY DIP THE BEST SKINNY DIP IN THE WORLD over there before summer ends. Which is in t-minus four days. I just feel like I haven't grabbed summer by the horns like I thought I would. And I want to make up for that before I'm back in Allentown.

I've been thinking about time a lot this week. The 1990 version of Total Recall is probably responsible for these thoughts. Nevertheless, what is life? Is it the present? Or are we paying for memories? Is life simply memory? Remembering that great time in Cabo last summer. Is that life? Remembering how happy that used to make me feel. Is that life? I think we are quite often unaware of present. And if you take the time to count those moments where you're like "OMG THIS IS THE PRESENT AND IT'S REAL AND I'M SO HAPPY DON'T LEAVE ME MOMENT, DON'T LEAVE ME" I'm sure they're few. And short. I can think of a some. So those moments are the ones I'm living to recreate, to either reproduce or top.

What happens when you're memory fails you? When thinking about how happy you used to be just doesn't satisfy you. What happens when thinking about how happy you might be eventually just gets too tiring? I'll be happy when....the stars align. They've literally been aligned all week. Not metaphorically, but cosmically, they're aligned this week...and I'm not any happier right now. Just really craving some pancakes. And for distance to evaporate.

Life shouldn't be "I can't wait to do this so I can write about it in my blog, post it on facebook, instagram this shitttt". I just want to be satisfied with things as they happen. I don't want to look for approval from my followers. That's sick. That I have followers. I, Annie, who could lead us all off a cliff and would only cry for an apology on the way down. I'm no leader of anything.

I have learned this about myself, though. I like to make things. Usually pies or construction paper cards. And I like to give those things away. It feels purposeful.

So who wants pancakes tomorrow morning? Real butter. Greatly accepting all smiles.

“Hilbert: Hell Harold, you could just eat nothing but pancakes if you wanted. Harold: What is wrong with you? Hey, I don't want to eat nothing but pancakes, I want to live! I mean, who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes and living chooses pancakes? Hilbert: Harold, if you pause to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes. ”

thecommunes

I can't love them enough.

Horizontal Blues

This local number that I don't know will often text me long winded requests about becoming a better friend due to my inability to admit that I've stolen something...That I have truly hurt him/her, I "talk trash" and that I better "watch my mouth." Anyway...these texts go on and on and on with no reply from me. A few times I have texted back, "wrong number." And yet, I still am called "Drew" and then chewed out by this mystery person.

Last night around one o'clock in the morning, I hear my phone. And excitedly thinking that a sweet soul had decided to late-night text me, I realize that, again, my masked texter was trying to get my attention. Well, not mine...Drew's. "Are you there" was the text. I was disappointed a bit, but also so curious. The last response between the two of us was me firmly saying that my number was the wrong number, to please stop texting me. And yet, the person messaged me anyway. I'm guessing my number is similar to Drew's. Maybe not, though.

Twenty minutes later, I receive another notification that jolted me awake.

"Wake up text me"

I read it over and over again.

"Wake up text me"

My first thought was that this text was meant for me. Someone out there in the universe is shaking me by the shoulders and asking me to wake up. An angel, a messenger. Be awake. Be present. Pray.

There are times in my life where I imagine a catastrophic event happening so that everything I'm dealing with (which is close to nothing) can be brushed under the table while I grieve my loss. Everyone will feel sorry for me, and I can blame this event on all my bad behavior. When did I become that person that is terrified to answer the phone? Too lazy to say yes to anyone.

"Wake up text me"

My second thought was that I could have counted about twelve different people I wanted to send that same text to. Lately when I lie down to sleep, I don't know how to start doing it. I don't know at what time it's appropriate to put my phone down, to stop refreshing my twitter feed. It's weird...I'm this hollow shell of a person right before I fall asleep. And it's not that I can't close my eyes. It's not that I'm not tired as hell. It's just that I can never decide when to take the plunge. Mornings are about the same. The horizontal blues.

I've been listening to love song after love song. And making playlists, Never burned to discs, Mind you. But not deleted, either. Neither of these options making much sense. But both allowing me to fence Myself into a mason jar kind of trip. The kind that makes the room spin, The stars align, The moonshine. I bought mason jars to grow my basil in Because I realized we don't own any. Many glasses filled with molasses, and Mugs used for filling bubbles to the brim. But mason jars, stretch a limb, Since finding one here means digging through our Great-grandparents things. Tucked away with old film and washer rings.

What else do you grow basil in? A mason jar I bought. Though your old basement was lined with them, I'll probably never see them again. I'm sure they're at the farm, too. Filled with jams and diced tomatoes. Rows and rows and rows Of every sized glass jar. Waiting to be held by fingertips, palms. Worn and calloused from playing love songs All day long. And now I have my own. To reuse in new homes. To drink and can and grow. To store in rows and rows. To hold in one hand and play love songs with the other. For your brother, my mother, our lovers. To ease my worried mind. To make the sweet moon shine.

Today hurts.

boniverotica

‘What are you thinking about, Bon Iver?’ I ask, because he has been smiling quietly. ‘Strawberries!’ he answers immediately.

This week I have...

Pitched a tent by myself.

Watched all 4 Scream movies.

Visited my cousins.

Exercised every day.

Sushi lunch.

Got my hair trimmed.

Purchased some Salt Water Sandals.

Entered a 5k for August.

Homemade pizza.

Drank smoothies by the pool.

Started OC season 2 for the millionth time.

Played a wiffle ball game.

Baked a blackberry pie.

Ate my blackberry pie.

Scored free passport photos from Kinkos.

Renewed my passport for springtime Italia.

Blogged, read, wrote, napped, listened, played.

Next stop, Bonnaroo. I'm pumped.

And it's raining...

Which I love. Because it's romantic. And all romantic things happen in the rain. That's a white lie; but taking the long way home in the rain is as romantic as it gets, and I need a tin roof in at least one room of where I live.

If my blogging playlist is over before I finish this post, I lose. But I'll post the tracks.

Today, I looked through every old photo in our laundry basket we keep upstairs over the garage. I laughed, more than anything. I have been Annie since age three. There wasn't one picture after that age that I wasn't overly posing for. Smile as wide as a mile. And tons of just me. I'm an absolute hog. Which disgusts me, sometimes. I realize that my life is a continuous refresh of social networking. Except I'm not networking so much as scrap booking. Picking out the favorite parts of my day and plastering them for the public to gawk over. How gross of me to assume anyone in this whole wide world would ever want to gawk over anything I upload? But when my limbs are constantly stretched in all four directions, how am I supposed to manage what I love? How am I supposed to share my world with someone if I'm not near that someone?

And then little angels text me in the middle of the night and remind me of how lucky I am. Dancers really are my favorite species of this world.

Another thing I realized while browsing through our laundry basket albums is that I have always been held. By so many wonderful people. Photo after photo of me being held, even when I was clearly too big to be held. My favorite still of this was of my lanky body sleeping on top of my great-grandmother. She's holding onto my blue keds to keep me in her lap. Her house. Her hidden rocks with the names of the states she visited. Her quilts that keep me warm now.

I have been held by my great-grandparents. I have been held by all of my grandparents. Both of my parents. All of my aunts and uncles. All of my dad's friends and all of my mom's friends. My sister. My soul mates. My friend Katelyn at my first real funeral. My friends Sam and Hilary and Alexis at my last Ballet Arts performance. My girl Sari when my heart was first shattered. My love has been held by all of you. And you did that so freely.

I know that right now I don't deserve any of the holds I've been given. Or any that I will receive. I have hurt others. And that hurts me. I'm sorry. I don't know if I'll ever stop being sorry.

But I'm eternally grateful for what I've been given. Whatever comes next. Which also leads me to my next realization--that, God willing, I will one day not be the center of my world. That every lens I aim will be towards someone else. Looking through my million and two family photos, I noticed my mom was in one of every ten prints. Her eye was behind the view finder, she snapped every moment of my now Facebook album. Was she ever as selfish as me?

Here's to another selfish post about my life. But trust me when I say I'm working on it.

"Free is not the right to choose, it's answering what's asked of you, to give the love you find until it's gone" -The Avetts

Take down my walls.

"Behold, I have engraved you in the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me." Isaiah 49:16

My toothbrush

Pinky is safe. Safe and sound.

I wear my boots of Spanish leather while I'm tightening my crown."

Tallest Man on Earth

A Little Nervous.

About life. When did I become so unmotivated? I can't decide if I'm freaking out because society is telling me to freak out or if I actually have reason to freak out.

Yesterday was graduation for a lot of people that mean the world to me. I realized I'm completely oblivious to the future. Even now, I watch my friends spend hours researching for internships and intensives and so on. I don't know why I just don't care. Is there, like...a magazine I can read to get motivated? Or a smoothie program to drink? All I want to do is ride the surf. For as long as I possibly can.

My life is so spread out. I guess that's the way it's going to be. The people I love are in all different directions. I am never with them at the same time. And I used to justify this through faith and trust. I have to let myself do that again. But sometimes my stomach drops so suddenly, and my thoughts spin faster than I can control. I just tell myself to breathe. It goes away. I don't want to be the asshole again. But I don't want to be the idiot, either.

The number one rule of improv is to say "yes, and". I think I'm going to live my life by this rule for a little while. Two nights ago in the hotel in Montgomery, Dad made us turn off all the lights and gather around our window's view which looked out over the waterfront. We waited for a few minutes, annoyed at him for squishing us on top of our suitcases, and then the lights shot into the sky. For fifteen minutes,my family was completely silent, staring, mesmerized at the night sky. Every color you could imagine burst across the water. I've never seen such beautiful explosions. Swirling, expanding, raining stars. Though we are together often, this moment is one I won't pass off as ordinary.

That moment you realize that your parents are people just like you, with feelings and problems and aches and pains. That moment you realize that your sister isn't only that, but your best friend. And when all of you together are sharing fireworks in a hotel in Montgomery.

I want to invest my time in people. Not paper. Not business cards and resumes. Just love. Because we all have that in common. Let me hold you. That's all I want.

"Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery. Make me a poster of an old rodeo. Just give me one thing that I can hold on to. To believe in this living is a hard way to go." -John Prine

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