in which the things, they come out

ranty ravey writing blog of K, the lady behind lion-blood

[k-think]

I had stopped reading your horoscope, but now I've begun again

[k-think]

Like seriously I am one of those people who wants something so much more when I don’t have it. Like I really love it when I have it, but somehow the attaining of it is like the thing itself.

[k-think]

My mouth tastes like your mouth. I can still taste you when I breathe.

[k-think]

I’m talking to my lawyer this evening and I’ve been waiting for this forever but I also just want to get it over with and I have to do homework but I’m not interested so this is just a really weird day. 

[k-think]

I wanted to know if I had made it all up or if it was there and it was real, so I logged into my old facebook, the one I used when I was at Bates. 

It's funny, the things and the people you forget when there is no reason to remember them. 

I knew I would be opening old wounds, but the overall attempt is to close them, and to let them sit long enough that they will scar over and eventually fade. I found the things we'd written back and forth in 08 and early 09, and dear lord, I was out of my mind back then. I didn't realize just how much until I saw it again - how impatient and controlling I was, how truly just mad - how much I wanted to and apparently believed I could control other peoples' lives to suit my own desires. 

There are reasons that the past is the past and we can only remember so much. I want to compare myself to no one, not even myself, but be a new person every day, and appreciate that I am here. I want to never, ever again inundate anyone, push anyone, and the good thing is that the hard sharp sides of myself have rounded, softened, through experience, age, maturity. Still, I am distracted, because I want to ask you: why did you reach out to me? Of all the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, why am I one of the 113 that have been added to your world after you disappeared for a few years? I disappeared as well, in a different way. Maybe in a way similar - do I really want to know? Do I want to peel back any of these layers and be connected to my past at all, a past that nearly drove me mad, a past that did? Yes, there were great good wonderful things in my youth, but there was a terrible darkness that only one other person seems to know, despite how many people knew me or were close to me, despite the fact that she was not.  

I know that I am a danger to myself - and to others - when I am put into, or agree to put myself into, situations like this. Old friends, who were never really even friends, who were never really even anything. We were jokes that were somehow lost in translation, jokes that made sense in person but never when typed out; we were shared bits of lunches and a shared sense of duty, but unlike me, you were short and to the point, and I thought I had some sort of wisdom to impart when I certainly, certainly did not. 

[sempiternale]

Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don’t know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn’t you. That isn’t you at all.

Leila Sales, This Song Will Save Your Life (via sleeping-boy)

[michellekpoems]

And it has been one hell of a year. I have worn the seasons under my sleeves, on my thighs, running down my cheeks. This is what surviving looks like, my dear.

Michelle K., It Has Been One Hell of a Year. (via hypotheses)

[heartcountry]

I hope she kisses you with the entire universe in her mouth so that you wake up with stars on your lips and a smile that drips constellations.

Y.Z  (via winterkristall)

[n-ooky-deactivated20140910]

i want a long kissing session where i will mostly likely end up topless on top of you

[lbjlibrary]

On their first date—the drive after breakfast at the Driskill that Lady Bird has not planned to attend—LBJ asked Lady Bird to marry him.

"I do believe before the day was over he asked me to marry him, and I thought he was just out of his mind. It was very—-I’m a slow, considered sort of person...

[k-think]

I don't know how to love something halfway, and based on the way that you climb 100-foot pine trees, I suspect you don't, either. 

[k-think]

I am shiva, destroyer of worlds, and sekhmet, devourer. from something new, all can be born - as itself. all already exists. it is here in our hands. it is here in our hands and the music I make is my words. I can't explain to you my poetry but you can call me by my name and I will find that to be a glorious thing. so, so rarely is that a glorious thing. 

I could feel your body, next to mine, humming, as I could feel you breathing next to me as we meditated in the dark, the one place I knew I needed to take you before I knew you. the one place my mother loved so deeply as well. the temple in the museum. the history, all around us. I could feel your body and I could feel what was going to happen but the tension is most of the fun. the tension building and needing to be broken is the fun. it's the shocking part, the thing that makes you remember you're alive and here. my hereness with you was profound. my ability to be myself, and yet a better version of myself, was profound. and so it was not until we'd left the tomb to enter the one opposite - but it was full - that I dragged you back into the other: took your hand and asked the entire world: would it ruin everything if I kissed you? 

no. the only thing better than shocking a boy when you kiss him is shocking him every time. it was the deepest, softest form of relief, the finding someone, the something welled up between us and in us and around us, the history and the three thousand year old art. I would kiss you in front of everyone else, in that room, at the train stop, for always. yes, let's stay grounded, yes, let's try. let's take it slow. because we do like where this is going. good god, I like where this is going. you're the best person I've ever been to a museum with before, and that is saying a lot for me. I like to go to them alone. I like to be close to you, to lean back into your chest where I apparently fit perfectly. I like the way you actually look at me when we talk. the way you paid for dinner, because you only have a first date once. as if you knew then, and I knew then, that this was the start of something. 

you only have a first kiss once, too, and it was perfect. you only spin my head around as far as an owl's will go, and make me laugh continually. you're probably one of the very few people I know who know Thich Nhat Hanh, and who could sit in the dark like that, and who would take me to dinner there. and who would say my name like that. and who would look at me the way you did this evening - refreshed. 

if I go into the station with a mad smile on my face and whisper 'oh my god' to myself as I descend the stairs, you know you've done something right. I leaned back against the wall just being, because this feels right, this feels right, this feels right.

[k-think]

I've been thinking lately about taking care of myself, 

which was how this all began, this going-to-school thing, this getting-a-job thing, this coming-back-to-America ordeal. 

about how once should treat oneself with grace and respect and care, and be less slavish to sudden desires, slower in decisions and choices. 

I was terribly impatient as a child, but possibly more patient than I am now. I have learned so much about being kinder, and caring more about certain things, the ones I didn't already feel for - the world on my shoulders so young, that burden of society to protect and to save, somehow - yet I want everything instantaneously, and I am sure the internet and television and all such are to blame for this. this creeping impatience that is in my blood. 

I don't know, yet, what is the balance between taking full care of myself and pampering myself to some extent, and saving for the future, being careful, trying to better my situation . . . to take care of oneself is to buy a nice new dress and ignore all the men, but is it also to not buy the dress and try to save for a car instead? I feel so young sometimes, almost desperately young, in this world where so many other people seem to have it 'figured out'. And I know that they don't because people tell me all the time that everyone else is just blundering into walls in the darkness too, but it feels harder for some of us than others, doesn't it? 

the springtime was supposed to make me happy, the warmer weather much easier on my body and classes ending for a short break and going to visit friends. Instead I have been full of anger, that rage I was born with, lost on every front and unquenchably tired. 

the answer to taking care of oneself is to let go of the past and not look for answers in it, not call it up again at convenience and hope it will once more love you back. the hardest lesson of all to learn is that we cannot change anyone else in this world. I have known that since I was a child and my father left again and again and again, but I thought that with you it was not you, it was only a matter of time and circumstance. I convinced myself of that, after my heart being broken. the fact that it was rent asunder in August, partially of my own doing, was the most brutal thing I have ever been through, but it was clearly necessary. I might have died there. I might have saved myself by coming back. the fact that I chose it at all, that it happened, means that it must have been the right decision. and I dove back into that mess and mire, only to tear my heart apart again. 

I should not have expected any different. I have always wanted someone to fight for me but it turns out the only person who did that was someone I was trying to push away - and managed to, after a short while. it all seems so long at the time and so short afterward. I hope Africa gets out of my body someday, at least most of the way. I try to remember that I barely know it, that it is not my land, that I was not truly born there and my heart is in my body, not buried with the flowers in the ground. nothing done will ever have not happened, but it's over, it's over, it's over, and I wanted closure, and I will have to give it to myself, like all the other wonderful things I will give to myself. 

[k-think]

"all grace and coiled tension"

[k-think]

you don't get to be the one who asked me how I was doing about his death,

even though you were the one who did that. 

so many had asked, 

but you were the only one who meant it. 

and that is a bond we have now, and aren't going to un-have, 

forever. 

and so what if I've wanted to kiss you

since the first time we talked

and so what if you're poems

and silences

and poems some more. 

you might be rivers and forests, 

but I'm blizzards and thunderstorms. 

overflowing the banks

and setting trees afire. 

sure I would never see you again, I had two questions to ask

until I found out we'd have two classes together come autumn.

my throat froze

only to ask you to come out on Friday

and you said yes. 

I'm going to remember these noon-times

and the boys who took me to lunch, 

the boys who treated me like a human being

like a brother, like a sister, 

like a person who was one of them, 

one of all of us. 

I'm going to remember how JD always held doors

open for me, 

and how you never remember to. 

there are things I want to show you at the museum,

things he loved

and I know exactly 

where I want to kiss you. 

you are more and less a fragile thing

than I know. 

I wonder sometimes

what it is about your family

and how you got so old

when you're still so young. 

I wonder if you see it in me too

or if that's wishful thinking. 

I wonder how terrible it is 

to want a gin and tonic

at 10.30 in the morning

in the bathroom at school

and if,

given the right circumstances,

you would dance. 

[k-think]

I was thinking the other night on the way to the train (as I so often constantly do) 

that there are so few people who call me my name, and are even allowed to. 

J did, and JD, and you; and N from class who wanted to kiss me and I unfortunately ran into again Monday night, well, he has no right to, and D doesn't either. If it doesn't sound right coming out of your mouth, I don't like it: I know your intentions. 

The people who call me K are even fewer, perhaps: B and M and J, again, did in those days. S did as well. My mother likes to sometimes and I have tried to break her of the habit, because that doesn't sound right either: I can be dear or goose or even my full name, but not something less than that, something fun and young. At home, I am ancient. I have been from the start. 

today D told me about the geese being mean and I so almost desperately wanted to tell him that it was my nickname as a child, and to see him laugh at that. he makes me laugh, but he makes me unhappy. anyone who can use words like that at his age makes me unhappy. DV is the greatest girl and always the best advice-giver (on the walk on the way home, on the train on the way home, or at our gigantic shared desk at work). the thing is, you know the answer before you let yourself know it. 

RG sat with me and we talked about art those three or four hours that day, when JD was still alive, and I wonder now if I'm not mad to want to kiss him. DV is right - all our crushes these days are so very high school. but when my tights rip at work, caught on my ring, I want someone to touch my legs and dance with me. 

because that is the bottom of it, isn't it? that I am so often thought of as something that I'm not. that I am more comfortable on the streets in the night-time than L is, that no one at the bars was impressed by me because I was one of them, that no one at school knows where I'm really from because I can wear the clothes and carry myself properly, but just ask me for the stories, just ask. your house with your yard and your fence will seem so quaint, after that, and not quaint in the way that makes you tired and want to rebel. 

I never know how angry I still am until I go out with other human beings, emerge from the world where I can read books and walk around the block and that's it. I never know how to say, I'm angry, but I can't fully explain what about, it will become a headache for you all. 

today at work I made a difference, for myself and possibly for others, probably for future-others at least. and that was all I ever wanted, with P, with Z, and I got one and not the other and institutions will do anything to save their own face. but I am going to make a difference, because there comes a time when standing up for yourself? it isn't even that difficult. 

especially when people at work all call you by your name and it's not theirs to call you; when patrons all call you by your first and last names because that's how you're listed on the website; it's not that difficult to say who you are and what you want and need when you can take back your name in the process. it's who you are. it's who you are. and I might not have asked for it, but it's what I got, and the funny thing is, if I had to choose to hear my name said again by only one person, I know who I would choose, and it's not who you're expecting. 

[k-think]

I feel as though the question 'how are you' 

would be better put 

'what are you:'

a disaster waiting to happen?

a storm in a teacup?

a kissing fiend?

 a girl who might be ready, finally, to let go and move on?

how am I?

I am fire in the depths of winter and 

fire in this heat and humidity. 

I am running in the rain in the night-time 

and your favourite song as you're falling asleep. 

I am more like a blizzard than a hurricane, 

more like a street girl than one wearing pearls; 

and if you ask me how I am again, 

I will either tell you that Jamie is dead,

that Luke has broken my heart, 

or I will kiss you, 

to make you stop. 

and begin again.