[weltenwellen]

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

[coralsheart]

i can’t stop thinking of jude st francis

[coralsheart]

give someone a compliment today. i’m serious.

i sat next to the most gorgeous woman on the bus and right before i got off, i blurted, “i really like your hair. i don’t know, i just wanted to tell you that.”

and oh, you will not believe the way she lit up. thanked me profusely and wished me a wonderful night. my own day to this moment had been a dark ocean i’d barely waded through; she pulled me from the water. as i walked off, i saw the beginnings of a smile swell in her, a hand reaching up to her hair.

today, give someone a compliment. i’m serious. you won’t ever want to stop.

[coralsheart]

Tell me again how you want me ‘cause I’m not sure if i miss you or i miss being wanted.

I search for a cocoon to wrap myself into, will you hold me and take the edge off.

I am colder now than I was in that biting December. A fire to fuel on the inside keeps a person occupied,

keeps them warm.

Perpetual motion of a treadmill leading nowhere is easy, is fun little number games, is growing the flame.

An empty stomach is a greenhouse. Ugly things are born. All life burns down, eventually.

The ashes remain on my fingertips still; I bite my nails and I taste everything that has happened to me.

Maybe this time they will paint a pretty picture. Perhaps I will find good things to touch.

I have had to learn again that this life is for me, even if first it must slap me in the face.

Stop running, come back down to earth, there is a beyond waiting here,

there are multitudes.

Every time I cry I make up a god and thank it. To run is to have something to run from.

Is a home waiting for you that you never gave a chance; shut the door upon first look; closet of shameful things locked up inside.

When it bursts open and you spill over the bounds of what you are allowed to be, it will take a long time to meet the space you occupy and become its friend. Dig up what you’ve sacrificed and bury all the selves you have been for somebody else.

And so I will be LIGHT AND I WILL BE HAPPY AND I WILL EAT BREAKFAST LUNCH AND DINNER AND OTHER THINGS IN BETWEEN AND I WILL NOT FEEL BAD ABOUT IT EITHER AND I WILL LIGHT UP THE ROOM AND I WILL SPEAK MY MIND WITHOUT TRYING TO MAKE ANYBODY LAUGH AND I WILL FEEL MY HEART IMPLODE WITH JOY AND I WILL FEEL IT CRACK STRAIGHT THROUGH THE MIDDLE TOO AND IT WILL BE BEAUTIFUL AND I WILL MEET SO MANY GODS AND THEY WILL BE PROUD OF MY TEARS. I WILL STOP TALKING TO MY MOTHER AND I WILL THROW AWAY MY SCALE AND I WILL PUT MY BARE FEET IN GRASS AND THE OCEAN INSTEAD AND I WILL WATCH THE EARTH CHANGE UNDERNEATH ME INSTEAD OF EVER REPEATING, A CAROUSEL RIDE, ELLIPTICAL MOTION, SAME THING COMING ROUND AND ROUND AGAIN. AND SO I WILL OCCUPY MY BODY, I WILL SCREAM AND NOT INTO PILLOWS ANYMORE, MY VOCAL CORDS WILL DO WHAT THEY WERE MEANT TO; I WILL DO WHAT I WAS MEANT TO, I WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE SMALL. AND I WILL COME HOME TO MYSELF AND I WILL DECORATE THAT HOME TOO.

[coralsheart]

tell me again how you love me in that biting december cold and we’ll do it all over again

if you ever fell asleep on my shoulder on the car ride home again i’d be yours, i promise

did you know i kept my hands in your hair til we got back that night?

it was still long, then

when did we turn down the wrong street?

do you know how to get back?

i’ve gone over and over it and i don’t know what i did wrong

my dear, i’m so lonely

now

you were the only one who called me by my nickname and i remember it, i swear

i remember the last time we held hands

on the chairlift

when you asked me if we were friends or more

i never meant to tell you no

you dragged me up a mountain to ski and i told you i’d take you to the orchestra

in exchange

i got scared and said the wrong thing

we never made it to the show

after that

and music has never sounded the same

tell me again how you wanted me

cus i’m not sure if i miss you or i miss being wanted

i don’t like who you are anymore but

it was so easy, with you

i remember holding you in my lap on new year’s eve

wondering after the countdown if you wanted to kiss me too

we went out and walked your dog in the muddy sidewalk snow instead

now you don’t look at me and i try not to look either

but it was never as easy as that

i get sad again whenever i do,

though.

[coralsheart]

I. you are a tree in the forest, so you are told,

nobody can hear you.

the body is a cage you keep all the sad in,

buried deep in your chest.

the heart, faulting and treasonous,

pumps it e v e r y w h e r e .

this cage inside this prison of these four walls

wasting away for hours, crying the same tears over the same things.

throwing away these years in search for better ones,

living for a future that doesn’t exist.

now exists, and now you are five hundred twenty-eight days clean,

and now you wish you could still break your skin without breaking so many other

things:

so many promises, too.

but that’s not what we do anymore.

the body is something you are stuck with forever

you cannot run from your own feet

you cannot reach past your own hands

you cannot outsmart the body.

the body remembers what has been done to it.

i could go anywhere in the world and it will still be me i have to live with.

i breathe and try to make peace with this fact.

II. i watch the songbird fly to its feeder out in the heavy smoke

the bird takes more frequent breaths than does the human

almost ten times as much

and i realize it can’t take shelter like we can

i wonder where it goes,

then.

i think the songbird tries to outrun the smoke like i do the chaos living and multiplying in my mind

spreading from their origin and infecting without a care

everyone in its radius.

with nowhere to go,

i wonder if it, too, wants to crawl out of its skin.

III. i am becoming the songbird and the darkness around me

— (it is sweet, almost; and i am eager) —

fills up my chest as i gulp it in

one hundred times a minute.

one hundred times a minute my lungs grow toxic and i lose my voice

one hundred times i am in one of those dreams where i am being chased and my legs won’t move

i am screaming and nothing will come out.

i am a tree in the forest and nobody can hear me

IV. like a funhouse mirror, i observe the life that’s been placed around me

unrecognizable to my own

i look at my face and i see someone i’ve never met

a blanket of smoke is placed between me and the world

like smothering a great glowing fire

there is a blindly trusting sisterhood that must keep us all alive.

V. some animals have no sense of object permanence,

so they don’t recognize their reflection in the mirror as themself.

i think how lovely that must be.

VI. the body is innocent.

the body begs to occupy a space;

its inhabitant refuses.

the body, in self defense, grows larger.

the body doesn’t know that that is a crime.

the body bears one’s burdens.

for it, the body often burns.

the body is a siren; the soul denies that there is something in it to come home to.

the body pleads for forgiveness.

tree in the forest; burnt lungs;

ashes of a call for help once fortified by hope

now gone silent.

[coralsheart]

cigarette smoke and the smell of weed

reading books by philosophers and pretending i know what they mean

fake it til you make it:

i am good, i am great, i am coping;

i love myself, i am hot shit,

i

am doing better.

staring daggers down at my body too much for that to be true

as if there is something of value to be found there

if they are sharp enough and my hate is vicious enough

i can mold myself into something better

going over all the places i have been

trying to justify

how i can get drunk and be loud and kiss people i shouldn’t

i am never, ever loud

it’s the same every time, really:

poorly stuffed couch i never know quite how to sit in

tissue box i’ll never dare use, motel art i’ve memorized instead of looking her in the eye.

the first time i saw a therapist i was eleven years old

after my father had thrown a plate across the room and smashed a mirror to pieces

i forgot about this the moment i left the building and remembered it today

my mother never left, not once

when i am twelve my therapist tells me that girls in abusive homes go on to mirror their mothers’ choices in partners

so i wonder what kind of legacy i am carrying

already i am starving myself just like momma

i wonder what else becomes of a little girl from a broken home

there are certain things that haunt me

“sickest of the sick” is who gets help

i don’t want recovery and i don’t want my eating disorder

to stay stagnant is to say fuck all possibility , fuck all hope

i try to understand that the universe depends on my existence

try to make that okay

to stay, anyway.

looking so hard for a moment of peace

trying to justify

that moment of peace

UNABLE TO JUSTIFY

that nothing i can ever say will be perfect

diagnostic manuals and notches on tape measures pulling me in with magnetic force,

the sun i have revolved around for too long.

i am sitting under the sun and i am not warm. i need to find something new to worship.

it has been the search for something greater to lean on

that has made me a stranger

to myself

i search endlessly for something to take

or take away

to make it all feel okay

i have longed for somebody to hug me

be a home to me

i never thought to lean on myself

wrap my hands around myself

make a home for myself and come back to it everyday

to find god not in the bottom of a beer bottle or empty stomach or proclamations of sickness,

no trophies reside at rock bottom;

to say,

this is not the hill upon which i will let myself die,

i don’t know where to find it next, something better, but to say,

i will keep searching.

as a child i looked out at the world insatiable and now everything is collapsing inwards,

a masochistic slippery slope that spirals,

smaller smaller small alone in the eye of the needle

i watch my body shrink and grow

i am acutely aware of the workings of my physical being

i forget what has happened to me

nothing outside me is real

i am in the eye of the hurricane and i do not even notice all that i have ever loved flying over my head, expanding, ever outward as i shrink farther and lose them all.

to say I AM GLAD TO BE ALIVE

or, I DON’T WANT TO DIE, NOT NOW, at least,

is to bring your gaze back out,

is to hell with all the times i sat on the bathroom floor and accepted this is the end.

is to flush all your razor blades down the toilet and all the promises they gave.

to justify

all that has happened to you as what has brought you here

to make peace with what is so terrifying:

that you are here

that you are not toilet bowls and bathroom scales

that the sun is hitting my own face and i am allowed to thaw and be warm

to accept the embrace instead of curling away, retreating from all that is good

to hold onto myself,

tight.

[coralsheart]

every landmark of how my brokenness sunk its claws in, differently, every year,

leaves another taste in my mouth

the scraggly notebook i wrote all my food in the summer after second grade before i knew what a calorie was, when i decided enough was enough

is probably still laying in a moving box.

collecting dust but ever present in my mind’s eye, metallic blue cover and shiny smiling star stickers promising something better

than this

clunky oldschool scale reading a number i didn’t know the meaning of

til i read my mother’s face

hula hoop, rubber ball, and four-by-ten-foot terrace

decorated with laps to and fro

the rosary i bought when i was a catholic for one year

but never made me feel as pure as the scale sitting at the corner of my bathroom, still,

or as guilty

with each bead repenting for the sin i commit everyday by existing

hail mary, full of grace, make me void of shame

heavenly father who art in heaven, forgive me for i have sinned

i forgot to be small and danced in a great big field

a yellow monarch broke its wings between my hands and i am still young

i am permanently stained with shame

i grew up and my hands broke my own skin

with pencil sharpener blades i stole off one aisle over

from the pretty marble bathroom scale i saved up for with lunch money

pretty, delicate, turns delusion, turns misery, turns pretty.

i am scared to be happy because i am scared to not be happy

i feel a grief for something i never lost

maybe,

something i never had

i watch faces around me turn away

until i am less lonely when i am alone

less afraid when i am scaring myself

hurting myself

shrinking myself

that’s when, for a few moments, my heart stops beating so damn hard out of my chest

until it starts again

these days all my notebooks are spiral and floral and things are no longer smiling

as if all my earthly possessions carry the bitterness of my touch

i am trying, this time, to do better

count the beats of my heart and take big breaths and take up space and write words that make no sense really but sometimes that little girl with the floppy notebook and rosaries gets it and maybe if she were to go back she’d do it all differently

maybe not now but maybe soon

that is what i am trying to believe.

[coralsheart]

i suck in my stomach when me and all the girls are looking ourselves in the bathroom mirror and I suck in my stomach alone in the backseat of the car when no one’s looking

i was always too big for the ballet barre, for the group photo, for the lunch table.

i am trying to say,

hey,

i can shape myself into something better,

i can fit myself into a kinder tomorrow,

byt if my body is round and overflowing i’m afraid i’ll hit something sharp

and what if i can’t take it?

i have a dream that i am in a burning building and i don’t remember if i drop to my knees or if i smile and inhale the smoke

i dream of my dad hitting my mom in the other room, I hear the echoes through the walls,

i stand over the bed and watch her breathe just to be sure

i dream that i am eating a big bowl of pasta

i dream of razor blades

i learned to make myself small when i learned to dapple the grease off my pizza and keep my tummy in, just like mum, and that day i stopped raising my hand and smiling with my teeth out cus it looked bad in pictures

my joy was too big, had to be policed,

bent into cookie-cutter shapes,

easy to swallow, easy to digest

when you stare at your shoes to avoid everyone’s gaze for long enough, you start to see other things.

i just turned sixteen and my mother is forty-six

i want to know if in thirty years i’ll still be staring down the scale, too,

like the barrel of a gun

i cry, everywhere, all the time, and i don’t know how to make it sound pretty

i pick myself up even if i’m not done, even if i’m not sure the ground will hold me up

if it’s all beautiful is it even real?

i think the people that are harder to love are also more worth it

my mother’s father was quiet and kind and played the violin,

just like me

maybe one day i will be worth it

[coralsheart]

i materialized from raised voices and fists shattering mirrors, biting remarks and eyes bulging out of heads and tension thick as honey, wading through it to throw myself in front of heavy hands that could hurt me if they wanted to. childhood tasted like salt water and the blood my dad drew from my mum in my nightmares. one morning heard me decide “I’M NOT COMING HOME TONIGHT” too young still to know i could not run from myself but not too young for the anger to have settled into me already, like dust, clinging, learning eventually i could never stick my fingers down my throat enough to tear away what a girl inherits from an angry man and a dyspeptic woman.

[coralsheart]

in which it all exists alone and together:

these musings rattle

my mind ad nauseam. i am

an unfortunate collection of the miseries i have

bore. i do not know how to be anything else.

daughter of slammings together of innumerable worldly cacophonies that sear

my lungs. they saw me and they never stopped singing.

shame and her children beat steadily across my veins.

you can see the

cracks. my nails have grown grey

of conformity. if i do it well enough, will i disappear?

the truth of it is this: i have tried many times.

there is not a beautiful way to put it.

[coralsheart]

butterflies always remind me of you. those honey-stained-sweet summers we’d chase after them as if our lives depended on it. i remember crushing one between my hands on accident. you were a slip of thing and i was always catching up; always chubby. it seemed as though you could fly up + become one of them. i was afraid you would leave me, floundering.

we’re all grown up now.

to me you’re still thin wings and golden hair. have you come down yet?

are we the same?

[coralsheart]

places where i search for love:

a hollow and pleading stomach; my mother’s arms (it’s been long since they comforted me. they cannot hold a thing); between ticks on the tape measure; at the top of trees and on hospital beds; in people who no longer love me; in this notebook (if i just know the right words); what happy once was (i am beginning to forget).

i look for love in empty places. i don’t know how to let it fill me up. i curl up inside them and wait to step into a kind tomorrow. i want to swallow all the warm i’ve never felt. i have to believe it is waiting for me somewhere.

[coralsheart]

ii. i am learning to pull the silver linings out of the sky and hold them in my hands. i am hearing tunes that i was too stubborn to pay attention to before. i don’t look for things, i see them. bodies of rain pool inside me and i let them. i am allowed to make up words. maybe i can make up endings. i want to step into a kind tomorrow. there is a universe where hope doesn’t exist and aren’t you so glad it isn’t this one? yeah the world’s effed up. and isn’t it beautiful? the earth doesn’t give up turning. mornings exist again and again. in each one there is more loss. in each one there are more soft people, more smiles. distance means caring and we all say: remember that you are loved. don’t forget. when this is all over, i will come dance with you. leave a spot for hope.

[coralsheart]

i. a stubborn bitterness sits in my teeth and when my world is shaken up it flails in a hurricane of prose until the debris crawls to find a new home in my ribs. torrents descend into my bloodstream; i forget quite where i breathed them in. somewhere, white hot mountains bubble below the skin of my wrists. my veins scream with the knowledge - bodies of shame accumulated with things we should not know so intimately. we are too young. my fingers sing cliches. melancholy music. hymns that bury hope into the ground. in a reclused round we commemorate the fading glamour of dependence. this roadblock and the driver who can’t find the brake. i’m sick of playing solitaire. i want the future to come dance with me.

[coralsheart]

when florence welch said ‘at least i understood then the hunger i felt / and i didn’t have to call it loneliness’ and when marya hornbacher said ‘hungry was the same as lonely, and not-hungry was the same as scared’

[coralsheart]

oh you and the flutter of your eyelashes that make me believe in a god. the curve of your lips brings me to heaven. i wanna cup the endless valleys of your cheeks. i wanna braid your hair and cook you breakfast