Hazel

Trauma dumping but make it like, ✨poetic✨ 24F/she/her/OG Sadgirl

[manicpixiepoetry]

These days I’m convinced that the road is only as hard as it is long because it is so insufferably just that. The path ahead of you is infinitely uncertain and you’re relentlessly polarized by the fact that everything you’ve ever loved is staring at you from the rear view.

Lately, I am certain that I’m driving on the edge of a cliff, the brink of a tragedy unnamed, but all I can see are the perpetually stretching miles of the things I am constantly leaving behind.

[manicpixiepoetry]

To young women and teenage girls, I want you to know that you’re screaming at a beast that’s hellbent on swallowing you. And I fear that we’ll be kicking our feet and roaring in its belly for years.

This entire world was built off of backs like yours, and mine, and all of the women who came before us and it’s time we un-break them. Straighten our spines and sharpen our nails. I want you to know that yes, it is so terribly dark in here and increasingly hard to shake the feeling of being devoured and digested but that cannot mean that we stop shouting, stop clawing up the throat of tyranny until our boots are pressed to its neck.

I want to tell you that sometimes swimming feels a lot like sinking and maybe that’s all it is anyway isn’t it? A continuous fight to keep breathing. I hope you never stop moving forward, even if what’s ahead of you is nothing but darker horizons and stormier skies.

Women have never been afforded the luxury of standing still or simply treading water. Never permitted a seat at the table without moving mountains and crossing oceans to get there. But we have gotten there before and we’ll get there again.

In my dreams, we pull out our chairs together and sit with our shoulders held back. All of us mothers, daughters, nieces, aunts and grandmothers. All of us entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers, doctors, politicians, scientists, writers, lawyers, blue collar workers, little girls with big dreams, and everything in between. All of us, women.

All of us hungry and insatiable, ravaged and livid and hellbent on swallowing every last bite of what they’ve starved us of.

[manicpixiepoetry]

Somewhere in some other universe that I have to believe exists, I can tell you that there are parts of me still full of benevolence. I wasn’t always this resentful, my fists weren’t always clenched, my jaw didn’t always ache. I was just a girl once.

But here and now I sit on the floor of my room at the foot of my bed with my knees pulled to my chest in the same way that I did when I was 19, 15, 12 and 7 years old and I remember that I was angry then too.

So instead I tell you that I’m sorry, for my white knuckles and gritted teeth. Nevertheless, is there any world in which you could love me anyways?

[manicpixiepoetry]

I’ve always been hurrying to find something that I can’t even remember the name of, but I think i’ll know it when I see it. The windows are wide open and I can smell the pine trees, my bones no longer splinter when I step into the sun. Everything is lighter, and I breathe easier. I’d recognize it anywhere.

[manicpixiepoetry]

my mother tells me I have nerves of steel and I wonder if she means that I am all break and no bend. The axe chopping through the rings of an old oak tree. Cold. And capable of leaving chaos in my wake.

I wonder if she meant that I’m just sharp edges and nicked fingers. Forged haphazardly by the men who saw my refusal to yield and thought “weapon”.

[manicpixiepoetry]

I take my medicine a couple days out of the week, wash my hair once every two. It’s me and the soft glow of a screen against the weight of the world and I can feel it breaking my shoulder blades. Everything is dark and there’s still too much light coming in through the windows.

[manicpixiepoetry]

I see my mother’s dreams behind my eyelids, watch it all play out like an underfunded film every time I close them. I wonder if she can see it too, if she looks at me and sees my father’s eyes staring back at her and I wonder which one of us she regrets more.

[manicpixiepoetry]

On my worst days, nostalgia hangs over my body like dead weight. I carry it with me everywhere, close my eyes when it whispers in my ear and I think this must be what rotting feels like.

Nothing will ever feel like home the way that it did back then. There are pieces of you buried in your childhood, things you did not- could not carry with you into adulthood. And you can’t ever go back.

Sometimes I feel the first warm, unsteady breath of spring and I’m staring at the promise of new flowers through the eyes of a pre-teen girl who so easily forgets the bite of winter. Who can’t fathom that there are entire years of frost ahead of her. And I can’t ever go back.

What is nostalgia, if not the quiet grieving over the loss of something you did not know you could lose?

[manicpixiepoetry]

Reasons You Didn’t Understand Dogs.

1. I dropped a dead bird on your doorstep and was branded a murderer. I’m sorry that my love looks so much more brutal than yours, I just wanted to offer you something more beautiful than myself.

2. Three months ago, we fought about folk music. You told me I talk about my trauma too much. Said ‘not everything is that deep’ and I thought of all the holes I wanted to dig in my backyard, each one cavernous enough to fit a casket, to bury bones inside them.

3. You call me aggressive and I promise I don’t mean to be. I’m no wolf in sheep’s clothing, but I have been bruised and beaten for years and was only ever labeled as vicious after the first time I snapped at you. Maybe, what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry I’ve bitten you. I don’t know why I can’t stop showing you my teeth.

4. There are still pieces of me that would beg my legs to run to you at the sound of my name leaving your lips, long after we’ve left our love behind us.

[iamasthepoetssaydepressedaf]

[astriloquum]

[dionysian-mystery]

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

[astriloquum]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[wedarkacademia]

“His arm fell lifelessly to his side. He looked away and said, “Oliver, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want to hurt the whole world.” ― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

[thoughtkick]

“I’ve had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can’t quite make out what it is. It takes time.”

— Charles Bukowski

[thoughtkick]

“I want to talk about what happened without mentioning how much it hurt. There has to be a way. To care for the wounds without reopening them. To name the pain without inviting it back into me.”

— Lora Mathis, If There’s A Way Out I’ll Take It

[manicpixiepoetry]

~ Olivia Gatwood. “Girl” (life of the party)