Stardust

[weltenwellen]

May Sarton, "Of Grief", Selected Poems

[inkskinned]

not 2 be that person who reads 2 much into things but unpopular opinion is that it’s okay to dislike silence. i usually get made to feel like i’m some kind of thoughtless idiot who can’t keep her mouth shut. but like. it’s actually that i was taught to constantly monitor other people’s emotions. my trauma has taught me that a person’s silence = anger. i was taught silence was a threat. i was taught to be constantly on the lookout for incoming rage and to be constantly trying to dispel that rage through conversation. & if i can survive that u can survive me asking you about your day. probably. love u though

[inkskinned]

when you were younger, you were often told off for being too sensitive. as if you could control it. as if you, taking your own pain seriously, as if that was the problem. it didn't matter that you were being bullied - and it never mattered if the bully was your parent. it just mattered that you reacted to it.

the other day someone asked why you always seem to take things in stride. you don't know how to say - i don't, i am just not allowed to be a human where others could see it happen.

you watch other people have emotions in public and are often stunned by them. you are always walking carefully around your own, knowing that at some point you could slip and start weeping through your sunday evening apropos of nothing. you're not allowed to feel big things. when you feel big things, you're a messy, annoying person. it's ugly when you cry. it's uncomfortable for everyone.

the other day, you were relating another story to your therapist. you paused for a moment and then let out that little bark of laughter - it shouldn't have hurt, but i guess it did!

you promise that you're not upset about it. you're never upset about anything. you just pass through this world - ghostlike. numb. promising others - oh! i've changed a lot since i was a kid.

[nosebleedclub]

How much more can you withstand?

[inkskinned]

i. what is the measurement associated with this. what is much. what unit of matter is a lifespan.

ii. in the last month i have spent so much time up-and-down that my therapist is on a backlog - i run out of time to tell her things, so we’re a few weeks behind what is currently happening. she keeps threatening to spray me with a hose every time i start apologizing. sorry this is so much, i keep saying. i don’t want to burden her overly.

iii. when you are raised in a house where the peace is rare, you find peace to be stressful. i sense silence as a warning - it means something is coming, but i don’t know enough about it yet to actually get prepared. it’s easier once the storm hits; i know how to go heatless. i know how to shore up. i know how to breathe through it.

iv. at some point, the reality will hit, and i’ll no longer be able to compartmentalize any of this.

v. there is this term: resilience child. in the world of psychology, those are the kids that made-it-out. we bounce-back. we have this elastic quality where the time we spent under pressure has turned us beautiful, glittering. we are held up as wonderful examples of success. our grades, our laughter, all of it. we are in despite, always. there is a shape of a grave right behind us, in our shadow. it bends the light around us. we are always saying - well, it could have been…

vi. the breaking never happens where you expect it to happen. not the sick dog not the overdue rent not the flat tire. the breaking comes up slowly, when you are starting to relax. she puts her cold hands around your mouth and bites the lobe of your ear so tenderly. the thing about this isn’t that she surprises you - it’s that she’s gentle to you. and that being gentle is entirely alien to you.

vii. but yeah i mean, physically? i can squat 220 :) viii. oh, i will withstand this, because i am expected to withstand everything. there’s got to be more coming. there is always more coming. this morning i woke up and i thought - i am a beast of burden. i am boiling over on the stovetop. i am going to find-a-way, because i always do, because i have to, because if i don’t, the whole world slides away from me like soap. i will evaporate.

ix. my friends all laugh and say i remind them of a shark. if i stop moving i die. if i stop moving, it will catch up with me. if i stop moving, someone will notice the shape of the hole i’ve been steadily digging. someone will notice - it’s bloody, whatever it is i’m so intent on burying.

[inkskinned]

you wanted to be a good friend, because you loved your friends, but the truth was that everyone else somehow had a pamphlet on being normal that you never received. most of the time you learn by trial-and-error. you are terrified of the next big mistake you make, because it seems like the rules are completely arbitrary.

you've learned to keep the prickly parts of your personality in a stormcloud under your bed - as if they're a second version of you; one that will make your friends hate you. it feels feral, burning, ugly.

instead, you have assembled habits based on the statistical likelihood of pleasing others. you're a good listener, which is to say - if you do speak up, you might end up saying the wrong thing and scaring off someone, but people tend to like someone-who-listens. or you've got no true desires or goals, because people like it when you're passive, mutable. you're "not easy to fluster" which is to say - your emotions are fundamentally uninteresting to others around you; so you've learned to control them to a degree that you can no longer really feel them happening.

you have long suspected something is wrong with you, but most of the time, googling doesn't help. you are so-used to helping-yourself, alone and with no handbook. the reek of your real self feels more like a horrible joke - you wake up, and, despite all your preparations, suddenly the whole house is full of smoke. the real you is someone waiting to ruin your other-life, the one where you're normal and happy. the real-self is unpredictable, angry.

your real self snarls when people infantilize the whole situation. because if you were really suffering, everyone seems to think you'd be completely unable to cope. but you already learned the rules, so you do know how to cope, and you have fucking been coping. it's not black-and-white. it's not that you are healed during the other times - it's just that you're able to fucking try. and honestly, whenever you show symptoms, it's a really fucking bad sign.

because the symptoms you have are ugly and unmanageable for others. your symptoms aren't waifish white girl things. they're annoying and complicated. they will be the subject of so many pretentious instagram reels. if they cared about you, they'd just show up on time. you care, a lot, so deeply it burns you. you like to picture a world where the comments read if they loved you, they'd never need glasses to see. but since that's a rule you've seen repeated - "one must never be late or you are a bad friend" - you constantly worry about being late and leave agonizingly early. there are no words for how you feel when you're still late; no matter how hard you were trying.

so you have to make up for it. you have to make up for that little horrible real you that you keep locked in a cabinet. you are bad at answering emails so every project you make has to be perfect. you are weird and sensitive so you have to learn to be funny and interesting. you are an inconvenience to others, so you become as smooth as possible, buffing out all the rough parts.

all this. all this. so people can pass their hands over you and just tell you just the once -how good you are. you're a good friend. you're loveable.

[nosebleedclub]

What does your regret taste like?

[inkskinned]

i cheerfully tell people i'd rather regret saying yes than regret saying no.

this is a good rule of thumb when you have dug the grave. when you have shoveled entire years of your life into the mouth of mental illness. when you have watched your future dissolve, cotton candy in water, fizzling into mist. is there a way to quantify what exactly it took from me? the true amount (in pounds? ounces?) of what i missed.

so far from the earth, i saw my own body warping in this hideous fashion. how is it that someone can wear all that numb like an anvil and still go about their day? i would have let a tusk rip me hollow and still called myself stable. i wasn't an emergency, i was a fracture. the way ice cracks beneath snow. i deleted myself, turned my spirit into granules.

wayside child. standing by the side of the road, almost killed by the oncoming blow. mouth full of road rash and sand and bacitracin. mouth full of what never made it home. mouth full; body plucked chickenbone empty. like if you close your eyes you start feeling like you're falling.

someone asked me recently - would you rather live with your depression or your anxiety and without hesitating i said oh absolutely my anxiety. i know her, and she absolutely tries to kill me. she tears my hair out, rips all my nails off, makes me panicky and sick.

but depression stood there, her jaw so open, sticking her tongue out for the rain. she watched me, in the gutter, begging her for a hint of my life back. around me, splintered, were the other wonders i had gathered, gathering dust and gravedirt. she turned those yellow eyes at me so soberly and yet i still knew she was laughing. she toed them over into oblivion. mine, she said. mine, before they're yours.

to be sitting there, watching the world spiral so gloriously out ahead of me, the carrot before the donkey. to have it within my reach. to let it slip out of my fingers, almost happily. gently. to touch it without taking. nothing technically stopped me. if i had just gotten up, i could have eaten my fill. i sat at a banquet and starved and still felt like - ah. oh well.

blistering on the tarmac. never been hit, but already roadkill.

[the-haiku-bot]

blistering on the

tarmac. never been hit, but

already roadkill.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[candlesanddew]

more love and warmth

[resimsizhikaye]

[obskewrial]

[wutheringheights78]

when they're remodeling houses on those HGTV shows and they rip out the most amazing seafoam green or baby blue or blush pink 70s tile....why do you hate style and fun

[wutheringheights78]

this. we NEED this. now more than ever

[inkskinned]

there's an end to the loneliness, right? it ends, eventually? and i'll be finally whole inside?

[inkskinned]

this horrible screaming thing, this being alive for right-now, flooded over your lines, poured out all over the floor and through the cannisters. they love you when you are smaller than this, and controlled, and perfect, unspeaking and gentle in their pools and with your clothes off and with their hands around your throat. they love you when you dance pretty and suck their fingers and say yes and sit up straight and get the grade.

but you became needy again, didn't you, little bug. swatting at the ripcords around you. swinging your arms and watching the city fall. the path behind you is all smoke and ash and overturned cars. you were supposed to be good, good! good, after all. after the heat and the noise of it. you were supposed to be less, to want nothing, to hold all of your desires in a shoe box, to burn them in the summer of your 16th year, to bury yourself in chintz at the foot of their rosebush and come out without the smell of blood.

but you burned-sugar aberration. howling all that sorrow out from your bellybutton up into the green sky, yearning. they don't need you to feel better, they need you to shut up. they don't need you to heal, they need you to stop hurting so loudly. they don't need you to feel good, they need you to kneel down and accept the suffering. you don't get to do this. other people in your life get to lash out and be cruel, but you? you were good, and now when you are sobbing yourself raw on the floor of your bedroom, the first thing they tell you is this isn't like you. as if there is anything like you. you don't even know what you are, because you have wounded your desires and killed off your future so you are just a hungry animal, loping alone in the dark.

come on now, monster. turn your head around. you know better than to leak like this, when they need you. they need you. they need you, so shut up and take it.

[inkskinned]

Okay. Come on, then. I love you, get up, we are going to keep going. Repeat this to yourself in a mirror or in a whisper or in the shower or in a shout. I love you, get up, keep going.

I am tired too. It's okay. We will sleep in the car ride over. We will sleep on each other's shoulders. We will sleep upside down and in the laps of new friends and on the bellies of our lovers and in the hands of better tomorrows. We will sleep and we will wake up rested and we will wake up happy and we will wake up home again.

I love you, get up. It's time to write "maybe next time" on our gravesite. It's time to write: it could not kill me, I would not die. It's time to write a love letter to the sun and our one-act play and the history of our keychains. It is time to write a future where despite everything, we are finally warm and safe.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Get up. Keep going. We are going to be okay.

[inkskinned]

oh, i love that we decorate things! i love when we make our homes a little picture of ourselves! i love how you can step into a house and sometimes know - oh, you made this yours! i love looking up to a window and seeing the hopeful little green heads of potted plants! i love the cheery bright fairy lights in your childhood bedroom! i love that we paint our nails, i love that we dye our hair, i love that my house's front door changes color every year! i love finding little chalk pictures and little hearts in the pen aisle of art stores and little stickers on the outside of waterbottles! i love the clip-on earrings and the little tassels on the end of new bike handles and the bird on my favorite plate! i love that in the darkest part of the year, when things are scary and sparse, we put up cheesy snowmen and flamingos in scarves and big, tinseled hope - hi, there! we say, i'm in here! this is what my light wants to look like! come see! come see me!

[raeiyyn]

when kaveh akbar said "i don't remember how to say home in my first language" and when fatimah asghar said "home is the first grave" and when katie maria said "my head spins and I am back in my childhood home where love doesn't exist" and when @inkskinned wrote "my hands hurt all of the time but in this family you don't show weakness" and when clementine von radics said "what is home if not the first place you learn to run from" and when

[inkskinned]

sad like unwriteable, all sounds cheesy. sad like november is the erasing month. sad like. i write poetry that slips into everyone's teeth and i stare out of the windows and my personality is a whirling, horrible mess. i'll star in a one act play like this. i will be the nightmare queen like this.

sad like don't know if i like you because you hurt me and i like being hurt or - if i hurt because i like you, and that means i have something to lose for once. sad like please don't leave, i can't provide for myself. sad like will hold my hand on the razorwire of your body because at least the burning is a solid boundary. sad like i can be thrown across the room and the sensation will be mistaken for an abrupt flying. sad like would marry the sawblade because it serves its function and isn't better the devil you know. sad like i don't know how sick im being right now.

sad like googling am i codependent because i picture better futures with you. sad like googling how much sleep is too much sleep. sad like confetti; a burst heart in an open room. sad like will get under your fingernails. sad like it's painting the walls, can you clean up a little in here? sad like. it's 630 and i'm undefining myself. it's not even a poetic time and im wondering if i can get out of the way of my own life. sad like yesterday i thought i want to go home and had no idea where the fuck i would want to be going.

sad like :) hi!! lol. yeah!!!!! sorry i haven't been responding.

[inkskinned]

it would have been okay, if it weren't for the loneliness. i liked to be alone - i liked the summer sun peeking her head over the lily-thin wings of dragonflies. i liked the shifting of a quiet woods, and the stirring matter of wildlife. the thin little bodies of crocus flowers; the silent knowledge of trees. i could spend hours in silence, listening. stirring my tea. knowing myself and the language of the world, in that way that being alone allows - as if nature says i'm showing only you this, are you watching?

but i was lonely. not in the places i expected, but in private, horrible moments. a snatched in-between state that would scream up inside of me, bristling - unannounced, the lonely just simply arrived, full and hungry. it saw me come out of the shower and said no one would know if you hit your head, my love. it saw the browning tops of perfect cupcakes and said you can never eat enough to fill this. it scooped me up in one giant arm and hung me over otherwise-peaceful moments and said see? where are you going? will anyone notice if you're gone?

a shifting, horrible thing - loneliness without escape. loneliness without shape. loneliness, swallowing me in a yawn.