PGC

[delicate-and-dark]

One day I will feel lighter again.

The ache won’t be so constant.

I won’t wake up feeling worn.

My hands will not hurt from holding on so hard.

My eyes will not ache with pain, my jaw will not clench in rage.

Instead I will tire my eyes and my lips from smiles and laughs.

From joy and from peace.

I will breathe in and not hold it.

I will not hold onto all of this forever.

I will not be held by this pain forever.

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

Concept:

The years of anger have left my body. The sadness has seeped out of me. The resentment no longer leaves a fire burning in my stomach. The guilt no longer lingers like a bullet in my side. I do not live my life afraid anymore. I haven’t flinched in years. I have finally unclenched my jaw and relaxed my body, I feel safe. I am safe. Everything is quiet now, including my mind. I have made space for what all of it truly was: grief. I pour her a cup of tea each morning and evening alongside my own. She was never the enemy. Neither was I. I look back on all of the past versions of myself that have died with empathy, gratitude, and respect. I thank them for everything they did to keep me alive, I tell them that I am beginning to understand. I bring flowers to their graves often, and hug each of them in my dreams. I ask them to forgive themselves, as I’ve finally forgiven myself. I found a peace I never thought was possible. And I love how it feels to be alive.

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

What a tender wound it is to grow up and wish you could have been the one to mother your mother instead.

-adolescent grief

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

Maybe this heart of mine is no more broken than Mother Earth’s.

Maybe I should not be ashamed to crumble, because She is no more immune to the raging than I am.

I am not the only one who cannot hold it all inside,

even She breaks when the rain becomes too heavy to hold.

The aching is a feeling only She proves to fully understand,

and the storm becomes me no less than it becomes Her.

So maybe I have shattered time and time again, but if what I’ve become is just a complex of what I’ve felt,

am I really any different from Her?

Maybe storms have always been Her way of telling us She feels everything in it’s entirety too.

You are not alone in the burning, She tells me.

And how comforting it is to know that the raging outside of me can compare to the raging inside of me.

So death may have Her hands around my throat,

but I am not the only one war ravaged.

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

I wonder when the grief became me.

I recall closing my eyes,

holding my own hands,

lying in the grass, letting the leaves fall and the vines grow around me,

over me,

through me.

But I remember nothing beyond my body in the forest.

-this grief that I hold.

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

I do not notice what is changing until long after it is done.

But I am so different than I was, even just a year ago.

I now see my body for the tree that it is, I touch my hands to all of the growth rings that mark my soul, and I wonder if other people see them too.

Or if they are just mine to hold.

I have peeled my skin, layer for layer, season after season. All on my own.

My body has been remade more times than years it has been mine.

Yet still,

year after year, I grow more than I ever thought I could.

I grow and I grow and I keep growing,

long after the grief has become me.

-seedling

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

Savor your softness.

And do not be ashamed of how deeply you still feel the things that have haunted you.

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

I am no more damaged than the ravaged sea.

No more unfathomable than the trees who lay to rest in the forest.

No angrier than this storm against my skin.

No darker than this starless sky.

I am not alone in the vastness of it all.

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

There are nights that my body is on fire with the thought of you.

Your name is the flick of a lighter,

and I find that my body is not made up of 60% water, but 60% gasoline.

And I just keep burning,

burning,

burning.

I am no longer in control.

-fire starter

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

The warmth of the sun.

The flowers and trees.

The air in my lungs.

Maybe that’s all it is to be alive.

Maybe its simpler than they tell us it is.

Because when the birds sing, I feel everything I’ve ever needed to all at once.

-when the water calls me by name.

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

I am well acquainted with the beauty of the world, but I will never be able to feel it in the way that I wish too.

The way that I used to. Before you.

Before your calculated words turned cold enough to cut me like glass, before your careless hands left marks on my skin.

Before I had to be afraid of you.

Before every shadowed corner I walked past was all it took for my heart to race, my breath to catch, my limbs to go numb.

When the monsters under my bed and in my closet really were just a figment of my mind.

But you’re still there, in the darkest corners with a knife in your hand.

I’m afraid that you always will be.

-collateral

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

I don’t think about you anymore.

At least not in the way that I used to.

You no longer haunt my thoughts, I’ve freed my mind of you.

I never thought I’d be able to feel that way.

Never thought I’d allow myself to.

But I’ve decided that I am more than my thoughts of you.

I am more than what you did to me.

There is nothing left you can take from me.

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

This world has taken so much more than it’s given.

Looking back it all feels like it happened to someone else.

I never believed it could feel like that one day.

And maybe the world has had nothing to give me,

but it has had everything to teach me.

-in between pages

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

It holds a knife to my throat, this pain. It looks me in my eyes, it dares me to feel. It asks me if I’m afraid.

I am,

I am,

I am.

-The things we can only admit after dark.

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

I held you like water in my hands.

So tenderly and soft.

But in the end you’d still evaporate from the warmth of me.

Was I the start or the end of your demise?

-(un)whole

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

Smoke and laughter shouldn’t remind me of you.

But neither should the scar in my side, the knife in my back.

Yet all I see is your head tipped back, smoke in my eyes, water under my feet.

Cold.

Cold.

Cold.

We don’t get to choose who we love.

We don’t get to choose who we lose.

-the cost of living.

P.G.C

[delicate-and-dark]

Wrapped in starlight, the moon knows my name.

They whisper to me, I don’t have to be afraid.

The trees keep singing, the world has not stopped spinning.

There is more to me than the pain I hold inside.

-holding the hands of hope.

P.G.C