Unorthodox Thoughts

Hey, I'm Amanda, and I write a little about a lot of things. Writing is my way of establishing my existence in this world so I hope to find my words tucked in your worn pockets some day. Leave me a message or a request and spark some interest in my unorthodox thoughts. var fhs = document.createElement('script');var fhs_id = "5330576"; var ref = (''+document.referrer+'');var pn = window.location;var w_h = window.screen.width + " x " + window.screen.height; fhs.src = "//s1.freehostedscripts.net/ocounter.php?site="+fhs_id+"&e1=Human Bean Exploring&e2=Human Beans Exploring&r="+ref+"&wh="+w_h+"&a=1&pn="+pn+""; document.head.appendChild(fhs);document.write(""); var fhsh = document.createElement('script');var fhs_id_h = "3157376"; fhsh.src = "//s1.freehostedscripts.net/ocount.php?site="+fhs_id_h+"&name=Human Beans Have Explored&a=1"; document.head.appendChild(fhsh);document.write(""); For business inquiries my email is: [email protected]  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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I don't own a dog but in the summer I wake up at midday feeling a gnawing at my hand. It cramps up and I tuck it under my tummy, close my body around in a fetal semi-circle until I can convince myself the hurting comes from no other living being but myself. But on the good days, too, when I sit across the table with friends, and we are laughing and the lightness dribbles down our chin like champagne, and I am happy for a moment--I like to think that the happiness is my own mind's making. All the gears turning at the right times, filling all the right places, and when my buddy makes a joke or says my name, the little woman in my ear beats the drum, collects the token, feeds it into my brain, and the prized laughter spills itself from me. Piecemeal puppetry, IKEA assembly nightmare, robot under construction. At some point, I am a whole being even on days where I feel like half-working parts.

not all bad, android

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the knock on the front door is hollow  thump the home on the chest and nobody is there to welcome falling hats and rain-soaked jackets but no bodies to wear them toppling all over the coat rack creaky floorboards and permanent marker tattoos behind a bad paint job dusty dressers and an old keith haring t-shirt tucked beneath a pair of mangled jeans luminescent fridge stocked with almost-expired milk post-it note freezer door: 'ninth-grade band ensemble' 'high school graduation' 'doctor's appointment 5/31/19' an empty house is a finger on the pulse in between beats waiting for the doorbell to ring.

summer home from university 

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i know we shouldn’t make homes out of people the most destructive thing we can wish upon ourselves is the demolition of a haven but this is a cardinal rule  set to be broken it is more than habit when we find fixtures behind the human condition to be that of a shelter light bulbs buzzing quietly within the eyes illuminating the first time we encounter a stranger who will be important flickering tears out of the way when we say goodbye for the last faucets for hands nervously turning and spouting  clammier than we would like but the knob fits eventually clean water spills down our knuckles washes the grit and the callus down the drain holding hands with the right person feels a lot like starting a bad day over paint peeling behind every worn article shoes splattered with mud after a rainy day of making the most of it ruffles and wrinkles in the blouse like a curtain that has seen too much sun and all the same time too much hiding holes in jeans and we shout termites have made their way through the building sometimes on the outside people will collapse and disappear and the definition of a home is a thing that leaves yet we are still inhabitable stoking the fire warm within us still stretching our arms out wide a lockless door holding the hopes that we find a guest whom we wouldn’t mind staying.

a blueprint of our hurt/happy/home

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Maybe, tonight you are up thinking about someone else, too. Creases in your pillow, if you knew how much I wanted to fill those spaces for you. But I am here, thinking about you think about him and I know that the glass will always be half full when it is me because I am only half of the person you want most in the world. A temporary body. The transit system stranger who keeps you company when your headphones are bust. And even then you don't like them much. I am thinking about you think about him and it is so loud. The way my heart drains itself blue, the way you long for him and come to me wanting. Taking, I just take you as is, I just give myself knowing there is not much to spare. Let me fill the space between you and the lifeless cold of your wall and the faraway man who is up thinking about what he is going to do when he wakes up the next morning and it is not you. We can pretend we both want the same thing. Because we are both thinking about people we cannot have. We are both aching for being whole people with only half our thoughts because our minds are with other lovers tonight.

if i lie to you, i’ll let you lay next to me

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when you bring her into this world, the only thing you ask is for her to stay in it. sometimes i figure myself a tumor on the right side of my mother's heart: everything she ever could have asked to love but growing too much for its own good. my highs perch me atop the tallest tree, stealing drops of sun until i can dispel all my shadows. my lows swallow me whole until i am sunken treasure at the bottom of my own ocean. i don't know how to be an in-between. there are days when i want nothing to do with anything enclosed by the sky and what lays in the deepest dug grave. and she is trying to understand what went wrong. prescribe me with more sleep or soup or a voicemail every now and then reminding me that i have a home to come back to and i want more than anything for them to work. more than anything, to cure her too.

she used to dream of chemistry

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we never used to talk about it like a sickness until her best friend's goddaugther tried to throw herself out the window. with all we try to stuff in closets, with all the hiding we have done over the years, i have become an expert at folding miniatures and vacuum-sealing the air out of my lungs to make my whole self fit. for the first time, we talked about what it meant to be unwell. you can't see this pathology the way you spot the pox a hundred miles away and write to the school board to keep little jerry from coming in. i can't see it either. but when you asked me or told me or hoped for me 'you've been okay, right?' i forget how to talk about it. in pulling out the boxes, i found a picture of us from when i was younger and i am smiling and i have two missing teeth in the spots where the child fang equivalents would be and i say i've been happy a lot. and i don't want you to be scared because i don't know how to explain something that's been unexplainable in our language for the past however many children we have buried or adults we have ushered into an unrelenting resentment. it also doesn't help that i don't know where i am in all of this. always poking at it from a distance, my ten-foot-pole only touching the question because people ask. i don't know if i know it or if i think i know it because of all the smudged up fucks out there who turned it into something we celebrate, commodifying sadness like overpriced yoga instructors or venus fly traps, folding in on themselves like it's a phenomenon we pay to gawk at. perhaps this is the residue they left behind and all i want is for someone to hear me, throw me a buck and say that i'm worth something. but i know you and i know all of them and i know that you and they love me and that is something i could never, would never, don't ever need to question or return or trade in for something new. but i still don't know how to tell you or myself that i wake up feeling like only half of me is here and the other is somewhere behind a window just looking at the day go by and waiting for me to come back and close myself behind the door.

somewhere in the attic

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do you wake into your feelings or do you form them based on whether or not it's raining outside? sometimes i wonder if emotions are on automation and if so, why did my mechanic put the best ones on the lowest settings. i don't know how to describe it but when someone asks me how i'm doing sometimes i want to say i don't know but all that matters is i'm doing. if you asked me for a self-portrait, you're confusing me for a visual artist, but i can tell you the image that comes to mind is a skid mark left behind by someone who was going somewhere with intention. i don't like when my mind is all fireworks because nothing i say really makes sense, but if you ask me if i'm alright, i can tell you the plumbing to the house is working but i've turned on all the faucets and left them running. or maybe i will say that i imagine the heart as a bruise and there are days when i wonder what would happen if i just stopped pressing it. maybe i am just sad but what a wonder it would be if i could wake up and the mechanic decided that instead of turning on something random, they would want me to live instead.

AAA batteries or serotonin or something

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i don't believe that growth is linear. i think on the way to better, we are running around in circles, chasing cycles on a continuous path that takes us somewhere that hurts less with each passing day. so when it is seven in the morning, and i am awake, checking my phone, email, mailbox, body for any sign that you were once here, i don't blame myself for fixing you as my point A on a journey to maybe one day forgetting that your name used to be the only thing that could have gotten me out at the ungodly hours before 10AM. so when dawn has not yet caught up in midnight's wake and i am still up writing about you and looking through books for all the ways you can ask a girl for another chance at holding her heart, i don't collapse in my frustration for not being able to let you go even though i know everything i do to get you back is simply a heartbroken's journey through routine and there is no way you would ever really be here again. every day i catch myself in this cycle, i don't want to infringe on your newfound joy or show you what you're missing or prove to you that i am worth it. you are your own person and in a way, i am happy that you're happier without me. but i will throw myself in the midst of every spiral until reliving the past stops being real, until memories no longer shake with your occupancy, and my heart stops bleeding whenever i think of us.

yesterday in the new year

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i have fallen off the edge again the last two nights i let the custodians find me sprawled across the desks an anatomical mess to clean up i apologize for believing it is anyone else's job but mine to  be okay it is such an inconvenience to live on a sinusoidal wave on the back of my journal i etched the last time it was like this and the distance only serves to sever me in half have you ever seen such symmetry have you ever seen anyone make it through when the bad parts are just as long i have but here we are again. again. again.

the x-axis

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my father (when he was still my father) used to perform magic tricks. he would strike a match and hold the flame to his fingers. years later i learned there was no magic. he just knew the cheers justified the forced smile. this is not where i sing the tune of preachers of young naysayers raising lessons out of dead bodies pasting numbers on headstones  to show the world i have always cared enough to count people after they stopped moving. my father (when he was still my father) used to tell stories. he would tell me about his mother's death without missing a beat. years later i learned that men like him are broken. he just knew what it should look like to be alive. this is not where i pretend i love my dad enough to make sure he gets through hard nights. i don't know if he does. but i but i but i have his inheritance and call it selfishness but i want to know if we will wake up someday.

predisposed to 

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funny how much space we leave in between years. i remember distinctly, last year i was on my bed, heart swollen in my chest, practically floating like a red balloon, childlike crush stained my cheeks. the lights surrounding me swam like fluorescent lily pads and my whims were out at sea unconcerned with coming home, i was so entranced by the vastness of everything that existed outside certainty and reason. funny how one year later, the bold letters showing you as a mutual friend catch me off guard, like a  headline from yesterday's news implicating an old acquaintance for murder. and to think i knew your favorite fable and how you got the scar under your chin and what you never wanted to be when you grew up and now i am finding you in scraps online, surprised that you knew a girlfriend of a girlfriend of an ex. i am tempted to look for a green light to say that you are awake as if that would mean i have something to reach out to. funny how one year later you are in the six degrees of separation and i am a bad decision away from breaking through this mythic barrier, collapsing all the space we put in between 365 days. maybe we'll laugh about it soon.

six degrees

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we wander, entangled, in all the wonder that is drunken revelry. i don't think for a second what this will mean for tomorrow or even what it was yesterday that drove me here. we fumble, but disregarding what we do not know, we pretend as if this is the way we expected it to be. you sit with your legs hung over the side of the bed, the weight dangling half your body down the ledge, as if to say, this is what to expect when you throw yourself into a situation you don't have sole control over but just enough control to know that you won't be pushed off. i press my body against the wall to make room for you, and i sleep, unbothered at what anyone wants this to be. if anything at all, tonight is full and that is enough to put us both to rest.

post-, morning after, waking up with no hangover

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she. my favorite three letter word. there is so much hidden in her context. like a world shaken by her hand and its unexpected strength. like her soft whisper finding its way to me through the whips of wind and gruff boasts from others who think they can capture her. like the sweat dripping from her brow when she is holding up her pride or her body or her reason or her heart. like how she has enough grace to break a man in two while still being able to keep her fists to her side and her makeup intact. like how there are many forms of she and not one of them is lesser than the other. like how she can be inconsolable because she understands the full weight of loss and she lets herself feel it all. like how she continues to usurp and unfetter herself from her chains every day she chooses to rise.

f is the start of a many lettered word

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In all my teenage glory, behind loud music, drum clashes, and guitar solos, and singers belting out lyrics to a lost childhood, I tucked myself into a tight space. Two earbuds and a book and a laptop screen, we became a makeshift alcove. A temporary haven. A pit stop on the way to something we can only hope to call home. When my father took refuge in his echo, spoke above our voices so that he could feel safe--because that is what men who have run from wars do, they speak louder so that they know they are the only bullet being shot in the room-- I dug myself a new shelter. Played songs that bled into my eardrums, perhaps causing irreversible damage in the future, I wondered if we fought the same battles, my father and I. He, a refugee from the very day my grandmother died, always wandering, always scavenging, pulling out grains of rice from pockets to feed mouths smaller than his. I, a daughter of immigrants, running from him. I don't remember but my mom tells me he used to be a gentle man. Always the one to wander and to scavenge, to put me to sleep with a story, to harden in his survival so that softness could flourish. Instead, I remember him shout until he was blue in the face, saw the veins wrap around his body like a cage keeping in what a father's love should have been. When I fall asleep to riffs and thrashes and electric instruments screaming back at the sky, I dream about the people my father has seen die and the gunfire that orchestrated it all. I tell myself I'll escape this house so that I'll do better. That this is just a pit stop on the way to something I can hope to call home. And I wonder, if maybe, in the mine fields, my father had thought that, too.

childhoods at war

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Hey pals! I know this summer has been a slow one for this blog, and I’m the one most disappointed by it all. I’ve been working full time to pay for school and the like, so it’s been tiring to say the least. Quite honestly, my creativity has felt drained this summer and I’ve had a lot of crises where I’ve just second-guessed my ability to write! There’s only so many love poems you can eke out before you question the formula that goes into your art. I can’t say if I’ll be posting on a regular schedule any time soon, but I just wanted to say that I’m holding onto this blog regardless of whatever whimsy or incident may encroach upon my day-to-day routine. Writer’s block can’t tear me away indefinitely! I’ll be writing every so often for this blog, but if there is anyone who is following me for the frequent activity that fueled this page way back when, I just wanted to say that I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with what I had going. In any case, I hope you’ve all been doing well! And to my fellow writers out there, keep doing what you do. You inspire me most of all :).

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if you don’t want to fall more deeply into whatever it is you have with the one person you can’t go to bed without thinking about don’t watch their favorite movie or  listen to the album that they cherish don’t learn the ins and outs of the art that colors their lives or  the stories that they too wish they were a part of you will find that beauty is that much more irresistable when it can be seduced by a sculpture or a poem how do you keep from collapsing into it when love and art and longing are dancers folding into each other over and over and beckoning you, the audience, to join the stage and fall.

art museums and movie recommendations 

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I am tired of being afraid to want. Of watching milk sit out in the sun and spoil over without at least letting a drop fall on the tip of my tongue. I think the fear is reasonable. When you are watching someone disappear into a vanishing point, like from a train platform or airport terminal, the reason for caution is all too apparent. Slowly fading into the distance, I feel them transition from verb to adjective, from here to not. But I am tired of skipping out on the best part. On placing chips on the table. On having something to lose. On watching us fall for each other and then into an it and then eventually seeing it fall apart (but only maybe). I am tired of not giving myself the maybe. That it could turn into something else altogether.

slapping middle school edgy out of her corner