The Mind Palace

Welcome to my Mind Palace—a quiet place for my original writing, characters, and ideas.

[henleyriata-blog]

please love me

i strain for a connection when i don’t know if i have the depth to give and receive such intimacy that my soul craves when my body rejects it. my hands push it away, my stomach revolts it, my legs run from it.

i’m so afraid to let someone in every sensible peace of me is at war constantly never a moment’s respite release

mercy

i don’t trust or love anything about me and they say you need to love yourself before you can love someone else and i know i don’t have the capacity

to love or trust anything about me.

and so I know the most intimate of truths, i am not broken or damaged i am simply aware that i---

i’ll never be loved

by

any

one

else

[henleyriata-blog]

Cosmos

this crater in my chest is full of consuming black holes a pathway of burning cosmos and super novas swallowing me whole. amongst rings of Saturn and the moons of Mars, I beg the stars to take me back into their open, willing arms. I want to leave this place when I don’t know how, an alien on my own planet I’m trapped, I’ve run aground. I struggle to communicate in my own language and find connection to my faraway questions I know I am ethereal and infinite from the gold on my fingertips and yet I feel average and small from the tears consuming my eyelids I fall apart as I wait to be reacquainted with the stars which made me knowing I will never hear their

answer

[henleyriata-blog]

reeds

i collapse into the reeds and let them entomb my brittle bones, in a garden of thistles planted in my rib cage as the worms tunnel through my veins and the earth reclaims me as Eden. my tears water barren thorns when I cry for flowers that my body will never bare.

you make me feel wrong inside

i don’t know what i did wrong

when will the silence stop hurting?

when will the reeds release me?

[henleyriata-blog]

enough

I think I haven’t said enough.

when the sun survives the storm clouds, I transpire in the twilight as a shadow inching through the dark, inky black and trying to hide am I too little, or too much in your eyes?

I think I’ve said too much.

[henleyriata-blog]

The Art of Monsters (P.II)

authentic beauty and nature falsified by knife and needle to tear apart then sew together, the pieces of several shattered beings. birthed from an ignorant man of science did he see his fruit to be horrid, and a sin amongst Nature's perfect men that God would certainly strike him for. but is it the creature upon the table with broken face and deformed body— with childish eyes and uneducated tongue— that is to be condemned as a monster? or is it the ignorant man of science, that wielded the knife and needle in creation of his sinful fruit, who holds such a beastly soul that is to be condemned as a saintly scholar? nay, for the scholar is no saint! and it is here where this one mortal did decide to learn the secrets of God's hand and naively bestow upon himself such an ethereal practice— the art of monsters!

[henleyriata-blog]

The Art of Monsters (P.I)

one should not have the ambition to find the "cure" to death, because playing God is a treacherous solitude that no mortal should have to know and that no mortal should have to bear.

[henleyriata-blog]

21:26

|                                                         | | (I’m in love with you) |                                                         | |                                                         | |                                                         | |                                                         | |                                                         | |                                                         | |                                                         | |                                                         | |                                                         |                                        read 21:26  |

[henleyriata-blog]

Sink

I feel a pull toward the ocean I’ve never known before; a hand of wind leading me to roiling, briny waters, a crown of sea salt crystals, broken coral, and inhabited seashells grace my fragile brow in familiar halo. My sea sisters call me forth, beckoning me home with their song wailing, mournful, loud and mythic to man’s ear and yet I know their words and sob in reprise. Is it the crashing upon golden shores that bring me peace? Or is it in the answer that’s carried on by the waves?

let me come home