crushthewiredways!

poetry writer, lurks in holes

[crushthewiredwaysblog]

omg hi!! welcome 🌿

i'm alba (they/them), 24, from the uk. i mostly write poems about birds, strange houses, grief, love, and whatever odd little thing has attached itself to my nervous system that week.

i don't really have any other social media, but i do keep a blog over at crushthewiresways.blogspot.com where i've been posting into the void for a while.

i thought it might be nice to post somewhere with other people in it.

if you're also interested in birds or ordinary objects behaving strangely, i think we'll probably get along!

thanks for stopping by ♡

[stason-blr]

May the world adore you as you adore it

[decamarks]

[crushthewiredwaysblog]

Spring has never understood moderation. Everything is green in that overcommitted sort of way. The wind keeps borrowing the washing from the line and handing it back. Some afternoons are like that. They don't want anything from you except your attention. Every patch of grass greener than the one beside it. Blossom arriving all at once, as though somebody had shouted "now." Impossible to look at any one thing for very long.

The world had become terribly eager to be noticed. I found myself noticing it back.

[crushthewiredwaysblog]

Through puddles of afternoon light. The air humming like a low secret. Rain caught in the grass. Wet earth. The kind of morning that smells as though it's already forgiven you.

A robin's egg sort of blue. So tender it felt borrowed. I woke up softer. Strange, how sometimes the world changes colour first and only afterwards do you realise it has been changing you.

Your voice somewhere inside all of it. Not louder than the birds. Just another reason to believe something beautiful might still happen.

[vampurrring]

I’ve got that neglected dog stare

[stason-blr]

i don’t know, dragonfly

i don’t know where i’m headed

the months have passed me by

and i dream about us wedded

i don’t know, dragonfly

i don’t know, but i dread it

the day you start flying high

and i’m left where we ended

[crushthewiredwaysblog]

The house forgot me kindly:

Some rooms forgave you for being in them. The kitchen was one of them. After midnight, it forgot who it belonged to.

I never turned the big light on. The hallway was enough. I learned how little noise a body could make: a glass of water. a phone charger. sometimes nothing at all, just the excuse to stand barefoot where no one expected me to be. The fridge clicked to itself, louder than it did during the day. I drank water straight from the tap until I felt full of something. Scratched the cat between the ears. Borrowed a few more minutes. The cupboards never told on me.

There wasn't much to do once everything had been borrowed. I looked out of the back window. Walked upstairs again. Sat on the landing. Looked out of the window again. Counted the red lights drifting along the motorway. Counted them again. The same fox crossed the same patch of grass often enough that I began to wonder whether it was waiting too. By three in the morning, repetition starts looking like company.

Waiting has a way of making everything rehearse itself. The night never missed its cue. By morning, I could have directed it.

After midnight, nothing asked to be returned. Daytime was mostly waiting for this. Waiting for the house to loosen around the edges. Waiting for doors to become ordinary again. By morning, the house remembered who it belonged to.

The windowsill knew my shape. The curtain bought me a second. Outside, the motorway never slept. Foxes argued somewhere beyond the trees. Birds rehearsed morning before it arrived. Sometimes someone walked a dog through the empty street as though they had misplaced the rest of the world.

Sometimes I opened the window just enough for the smell of wet pavement and rust. Somewhere, a dog answers another dog and the sound stitches the dark closed again.

I remember how the body knows, how it keeps going even when the mind ensnares itself. How it keeps its own evidence. Heart steady, blood warm. My feet learning which stairs forgave their weight. I put my hand on my chest and feel the small animal there, patient, agreeing softly to the next minute.

[crushthewiredwaysblog]

The etiquette of quiet:

after she got ill, it became easier to pretend my mother was asleep than to ask if she was awake.

we never called it pretending, but i found reasons to pass through her bedroom. looking for the cat. offering tea. counting blister packs like rosary beads. i became very good at opening doors quietly.

sometimes she'd be asleep. sometimes she'd only look asleep. sometimes the television was already on, with the volume so low it sounded like another room remembering itself. some distances don't require leaving the room.

i stopped asking, "how are you?"

instead: "do you need anything?". am i in trouble?

i didn't know then that peace wasn't supposed to require so much checking

I apologised so often that eventually "sorry" became less of a word and more of a way of entering a room. like wiping your feet on the doormat before stepping inside. like already holding your breath. I still open doors as though someone might be sleeping on the other side

[crushthewiredwaysblog]

Explaining grief to a child who thinks the moon follows the car:

You know how the moon follows us home sometimes?

Yeah. I see it. Right there.

No, not really really. I mean, it's not chasing the car. It just looks that way because we keep moving and it stays where we can still see it.

Yeah. Like hide and seek a little.

No, I don't think the moon gets lonely. I think it's too big for that.

Um.

Do you remember when you lost your tooth and keep touching the gap with your tongue? Even after it stopped hurting? Yeah. Like that maybe. Your mouth still remembering something used to be there.

No, no, the moon isn't gone. That's not what I mean.

I mean sometimes people can still be there and not... there.

Like when the porch light stays on after everyone's gone to bed. Or when the radio keeps talking in an empty room.

No, nobody forgot to turn it off.

I think some things just don't know how to stop being.

Yeah, it is a little sad.

But not always bad-sad. Sometimes just... big-sad. Like when you finish a really good snack and your hands still expect to be holding it.

No, I don't think the moon knows we're looking at it specifically.

I know. It feels like it does.

That's the hard part.

...

No, people don't only grieve when someone dies.

Sometimes they grieve because someone is still alive somewhere, but not safe to love up close anymore.

Like how the stray cat used to eat from our porch but hisses when you try to pet it now.

No, it's not the cat's fault for being frightened.

But it still hurts.

...

Do I miss them?

Um.

Sometimes I miss the idea of being followed home. I guess.

...

Yeah, the moon's still there tonight.

I know.

I see it too.

[crushthewiredwaysblog]

My mother has BPD:

My mother holds a grudge like fine china. Carefully. Close to the heart. Never letting it drop, even when it cuts. She loved with her teeth clenched. Kindness tucked into corners like little mothballs. Her tenderness lacquered over until it gleamed hard as enamel. The house learned her moods before I did. Doors swelling shut in the summer. Glasses sweating pale rings into wood. The hallways holding their breath.

She, the first bruise pressed into my skin. Bloodless blue fingerprints. How can blood make a claim, when her hand taught fear its posture? Even now, my love arrives skittish and thin-necked, all ribs and rabbit-heart. Waiting to be startled.

Sometimes, I see it all at once. Like a flashlight catching dust in the dark. The strange cold panic of her. The way she stumbled through every relationship like a child with a knife. Something in me shudders, because I recognise the shape: the awful inheritance. The little porcelain violence of it all.

The first honest thing she ever gave me was learning to loosen my hands. set the china down before it cuts.

[crushthewiredwaysblog]

CW: suicidal ideation

All there:

To wake up and count yourself

all there. Wrists intact, throat quiet

Nothing taken, nothing opened

and still something missing.

Something has passed through in the night

not god

or, maybe god, but careless

brushing the inside of you like a hand reaching

for something else.

How can you go on

knowing the body can be entered

by absence like that?

How do you not press your fingers

to every soft place

wrist, mouth, the thin skin of the hip—

waiting for it to answer back?

Thinking:

if there is a door in me

I did not make,

if there is a place that can be opened

without my asking,

then what is stopping me from finishing the work?

But morning comes bluntly

light like a refusal.

The worst part is not

that something almost took you—

it's that it didn't

And you are left here

Untouched,

Holding yourself closed.

[crushthewiredwaysblog]

The pigeons on my windowsill:

I never meant to make an altar out of my windowsill.

But there I was, every morning, spreading seed

like a prayer I didn't know I was saying.

Ten small bodies lining up—

quiet, soft,

the world's most fragile choir.

White like fallen clouds, red like warm clay, grey mottled like

thunderstorms that haven't learned how to break.

And him—

My favourite—

the runt, the tremble, the crooked-beaked little heartbeat

who looked like he'd been assembled in a hurry

by hands too gentle to finish the job.

He was never afraid of me.

Today,

I came home to a scatter of feathers

to a stillness that didn't belong

and a red kite—

a hunger—

kneeling over a body that should have been a sky.

And all I could think

was that I did this.

And that I lined them up

like soft offerings

taught them that

waiting was safe, that

hunger could be answered by a human hand

reaching through a window.

I made them easy

I made them sweet

And now the garden is too quiet.

And he has not come to tell me that he is alive.

And I don't know if the feathers were his.

And I don't know if he slipped free

on the last syllable of the wind.

God, I hope he did.

I hope he flew away—

wings bright with terror,

beating the air into a promise:

not today, not today

not today.

And still—

My hands shake with guilt.

And, somehow,

love feels like this:

soft seed on a windowsill,

a heartbeat trusting yours,

and the sudden, awful knowledge

that you cannot keep anything safe,

no matter how gently you hold it.

But if he lives—

if he returns—

I will still put out seed.

Because my love is not a cage.

And my kindness is not a trap.

And even in this unforgiving city

something beautiful might still happen.

I will wait for him.

I will wait

the way the morning waits for light

to remember how to rise