Ne'er-do-wells and Vagabonds

I feel, therefore I am.

[neredowell]

To the Cicada-People

If you backed my kickstarter and decided you'd check out more of my writing, I am both flattered and terrified. I started writing in the blog when I was 20 years old. Some of it is great, some it is abysmal. This blog was my emotional dumping ground, be it structured or ugly it's all here. Tread lightly.

[neredowell]

Now I am 26

When I move I feel the sticking in my knee unoiled, and the weight that comes crashing down with every step isn't influenced by gravity. Sleep does not take the weariness from me and when I run I am not free. I am beseeched by images of her, she appears before me striding barefoot, sharp chinned and oval eyed. She looks back and smiles and laughs in slow motion and if I could just keep up. I just want to take her hand and hope she chooses to take mine back and if not let me die because I am so tired. Sleep does not take the weariness from me and when I run I am not free. I run after a ghost and with no counterpart of flesh the ghost is the closest image I have, and I'll look upon it again and again, recraft from superfluous memory again and again, transmute her from girl to cosmos strand by strand because the dream is Sunday morning and the waking world stiff as a soldier's bullet. Though I don courage of amber and gold and extend fearlessly the deepest desires I hold, I know steel and blood is the only taste I can remember. So fuck everything. Sleep does not take the weariness from me and when I run I am not free.

[neredowell]

When I was 20

The sky, pure blue at the horizon, was hazy towards the sun as if Apollo stretched the great canvas of heaven the thinnest at his apex so none could deny how brightly he shone. The sidewalks were still white and gleamed at noon when I set upon them, running the full measure my lithe body would allow. Pumping out mile after mile on shelterless trail, bearing the full weight of sun upon my bare shoulders and back like my people always have. As the grass drew tall around me only the tops of cars were visible. Dark, soft shapes gliding over the crown of golden grass like sprinting cats. I imagined myself a hunter, spotted and light, leaping as I ran, stretching out with my very toes, carried forward by a force eons older than I but alive within me. And I felt free.

[neredowell]

If you sharpened a blade of steel, fine as the dew sprinkled web of a spider on a crisp morning, and set to open me with it, shaving me off in slices thin as pickled ginger, you would find nothing more than a man who smiles when he's nervous. If you were able to, like an assertive woman or a vulnerable woman or a woman walking to or toward or away or any which way, peel away his lips clamped sealed to each other in an dreary visage, and draw them into a smile that made him forget his clockwork anatomy and want to kiss you or scream because he can't or dance because that's what he does when he wants to feel happy, you could draw out the ethers of his personage. All the anger and self-pity and resolve. The bottomless seas of desire and apathy and dread, would open to you wet and wanting and if you could penetrate the labyrinth of stacked stone and touch the soft thing behind the whirring noises and steam and liquid being pumped this way and that and gears spinning fast as if to outpace the rotation of the earth, that thing may turn to sand as if it were never there at all.

[neredowell]

I feel through my eyes, so I can't handle you in white and lace, your back, broad as the wingspan of a swan with your neck rising like a fountain of water up and out from between clavicles as sharp as the crest of a wave.

[neredowell]

1/8/18 2am

I want her to make me nervous. I want to stare at her but not mean to, like a child stares. I want to tremble when she touches me, like I'm standing, naked, knee deep in alabaster snow. Under her eyes I want to be made hot as bright sunfire and pressed by the gravity of our first kiss into wet, black, igneous stone. I want to be made to feel fear and joy, torturous longing and boundless elation. I want her smile to make me cry. I want her to remind of what it is to feel that way.

[neredowell]

Saturnalia

I am a fog monster obfuscating my own view. I can't see my success. I want someone to tell me that it's alright, that I'm alright. And what's more is that I want to believe them.

[neredowell]

Storm clouds

I'm as moody as a Florida winter. I know that sometimes when I'm talking or singing or walking down the street I feel light as sunshine, and maybe they can see that and maybe that's enough for them to think I'm okay. I've always been this way. Sad me, grumpy me, bitter me. It's like they see nothing. They don't feel how sometimes it rolls onto me like a stone I'm too weak to lift. For days, weeks it can sit on my sternum and I feel it there with every breath. That I'm not good enough to have what I want, that it doesn't matter how hard I work. I'm made of lesser stuff.

[neredowell]

In the gallery

In the space, vacant yet warm, lit so the paintings seem to exist out of time and in a place where color was a language deeper than love, she stood. Straight as an arrow and casting no shadow, she, like me, did not move idily here, consuming art as if it had no value. Sometimes one of us stared at a painting until we began to cry, grateful for the drop of life the artist had shared with us and yet saddened in a way that stuck us to floor. And then the other would come over and place a hand on a shoulder and we'd realize where we are. Sometimes I stared at her wandering about in black with waves of red curls wrapped about her face like the sun. And I'd forget that I was dreaming.

[neredowell]

12/11/2017

When I opened my eyes this morning I exhaled heavily and my frost-bitten breath escaped my lungs in plumes. I filled myself with cold air, my diaphragm expanded, pushing against the muscles of my abdomen, my stomach suddenly mountainous. As I continued this, filling my blue room with respiratory refuse, I slowly removed the double layer of blankets. Cold settled back into my bed like an estranged lover, and I stretched out so it could fill my crevices and gently raise the hair on my legs. I flipped my pillow over and let cold hold my cheek so softly in it's hand. That morning I wasn't alone in my bed.

[neredowell]

Resolution

Be curious and fearless, be honest and kind. With myself and everybody.

[neredowell]

New Year, Last Post

Anyone can talk to me. I’m a sad person but my face is soft, people like talking to me. My years of retail and clubbing turned this introvert into a closet extrovert. If I possessed more confidence I’d have kissed someone last night. I dont, so I didn’t.

I don’t have any resolutions, I’m not an optimistic person. But I know what I want to do and I know how I’m going to do it. If I’m not in school in a year that’s fine. If I’m still single in a year that’s fine. I don’t expect life to give me anything. I do expect to work hard and hope for the best. I don’t expect to meet a red-haired zoologist or that I’ll make a ton a cash through my ebooks. The only thing I want from 2016 is that it’s better. I want to remember what not worrying was like. I want to recall happiness. That’s all.

[neredowell]

Closing Time

We've been open for business for over three years, serving up personal prose and fiction supercharged with youth and emotion, but alas our time with you here is done. But we're writers. And as such we hope you continue to read. @pixelscribe is a thoughtful gaming blog on wordpress run by the co-writer Jackson Smith. He's a lovely soul, I higly recommend you check him out. I'm writing a trilogy of short stories I am going to debut through Kickstarter. That project will launch June 1st. It's a fantasy with a female protag and a dastardly villain. If you'd like to hear more or want access to the rewards I'm only going to provide to my fellow tumblr compatriots, message me your email and you'll be the first to receive my monthly newsletter where I'll keep you up to date on the process. Thanks for the years of support guys. Our lives are written here and we pulled no punches. I hope you enjoyed reading as much as we did writing.

[mingdliu-deactivated20210422]

We passed old photographs around the table the other day and someone said my laughter was so genuine when caught on lens. I let out a quiet laugh because in those old images, they were. I used to smile differently. I think my left side curved higher, my right eyes creased a bit more. My nose would scrunch a little and I would bite my bottom lip whenever I paused for a second to show my happiness. I loved every moment of everything. Life wasn’t bad at all, just difficult at times, but it was a good life after all. It’s midnight and I’m thinking about these photos I used to take - the ones of me and the ones of everything else. They seem distant, like another time and place, and I can’t seem to place my finger on what it is. Maybe it’s the person behind the lens, or maybe it’s the person in front of it. She and I are different people now, and I wish, I still had her with me. I wish I still knew her.

Stories I’ll tell one day #55 – Ming D. Liu (via mingdliu)

[neredowell]

The worth of a man

I recall reading years ago that when stripped away of its neurological decorum, every interaction we have with everyone we have ever met or will meet is an exchange of power, and less menacingly, energy. Recently that has made me ponder the different ways in which men and women are taught to seek power. The playing field has leveled significantly in the past few decades yet our biology persists. We seek to control others perceptions of us, men through strength and the things money can buy. Men are expected to pay and therefore are led to believe that women are to reciprocate someway in equal measure, though it is also often an act of good will. Money being the great power of this world, amass enough of it and anything you desire can be acquired. Through it we can shape our very destinies. Men are expected to be strong. When we think of a man’s man, a certain Norse God comes to mind. Rugged, emotionally disconnected, muscular, are all traits that we are taught since birth make up a man and through those traits and the power they demand, a level of control is achieved, in the workplace and leisurely. Soft bodied emotional types have no chance of commanding the same level of control over their environment and thus are doomed to be overlooked by it. To turn the lens inward, that’s why I’m training to lift this 178 pound boulder, and that’s why I’m going to work so hard to drop 10 pounds before summer. I feel powerless. I was strapped into a simple machine, one that required me to work and make it work, struggling for the bare minimum my family needed. I’ve sacrificed both body and mind in order to hold on to the mere inkling of control over my life, lest I became windswept into a dark sea. I’ve lost what I’ve been shown my whole life makes a man.

[whiskey-and-poetry]

lessons

using someone to replace another isn’t really forward progression

it’s patchwork healing -

a disguise of feelings and poor treatment for an aching heart

love is not meant to be solely observed through a rearview mirror

[racoonmen-deactivated20160203]

I don’t plan on stopping. I don’t plan on giving up. I’m going to keep writing even if they’re only stories I read to my children. This is who I am. I need these stories. I need to feel like I’m working towards something. I am not as kind as I used to be. It’s a terrible excuse but it feels like I’m too busy, writing and worrying. At times I feel like an exposed nerve and at others, like solid rock. Fortunately neither state changes the fact that if I stop, if I slow, if I break, if I’m not reading, playing, learning, writing, or making then I’m not myself. I take in so I can put that much out.