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Meeting

I have nothing to give, I insisted.

You shook your head slightly.

You don’t need to. You’re already here.

August

Gathered as much beauty in blossom-form to combat the growing ugliness inside. Every single time it threatened to draw blood, I forced myself to put on my walking shoes and mutilate plants instead. Bring in the best pieces and combine them, then tie a string firmly like I knew I had to do with errant thoughts. It was a matter of survival, sitting there making posies.

“You have to fight these feelings of helplessness...Stop the cycle before it even starts.”

This will be the video I would have shown myself last year.

#emotional health #guy winch #TED

You were never there. I realize that now. I kept imagining you’d always be what you told me before I went through that valley. I never expected for you to be a ghost that I would haunt instead of being haunted by.

It was you all along, my dear, that had to leave. Not me. I went through the valley and came out still flesh and bones and blood. You were fog and mist and feather-light cloud. The sun burnt you away even as I chose to turn my face towards you and not on the path before me.

The place before the valley begun was only where you could come along and be beside me. Beyond it, you never could exist. You could only see me walk into the darkness. But you did not recognize me when I came to you held only by stitches and will and grit of teeth. I grinned. You stared.

Fade away. Return to the shadows that I run to when the sun burns too hot overhead. I shall remember you and never forget your phantom limbs - limp by your side as I embraced you that night.

#words words words #mine #blah #how i deal with grief #prose #on old friends and lovers

The Winter Gardens, Auckland Domain

#winter gardens #auckland #garden #floral #flowers #chrysanthemums

Phone Lines

We meet halfway over the space

above the ocean that separates

our windows, where we look up

at the same sky and the same stars.

I sigh and you catch it with a why?

What’s wrong? Are you sad? Tell me.

I smile and you feel the waves change

and the lines begin to vibrate, shake and blur.

You meet me when I come seeking out

a fix, a temporary blindness, a blackhole

you can make with my resurging addiction

you can feed with your undivided attention.

This third space - we built it with strings attached

to rusting cans, over invisible paths that let voices

travel from across your desert, over my ocean,

through the half-decade silence of our hesitant hearts.

This third space, I sigh, will it last long enough?

Rust eats and strings fray, voices become mute,

memories become stale and I, oh I, may forget

everything, like it was all a waking dream when I sleep.

#poem #poetry #how I deal with grief #personal #mine #reconnection #of old friends and lovers

Because the stars are fire that we can’t reach out and take.

#time lapse #stars #universe #Vincent Brady

Meals

#food #phone pics #dealing with stress #food makes everything okay

Closer

You bound your hands

with the rest of the ripped sheets

and we punched a hole in the sky

Because the stars weren’t enough.

We weren’t content with the

twinkle, twinkle little stars

So we kept punching till the

indigo canopy gave way, cracked,

and lightning veins took root

Around our fists buried in the night,

in the mess of my secrets and your betrayals,

Your fists bound with the sheets I ripped.

#poem #how I deal with grief #short poem #mine #dealing with stress

I spend a lot of time looking up. Tripping over is a risk I’m willing to take.

#sky #trees #silhouetted #plants #looking up #dealing with stress #phone pics #photo series

Fuck the assignment. I’m going for a walk.

#photo series #boots #brown boots #dealing with stress #bashing uni blues #phone pics

No, srsly.

I want to believe in many things.

Things like not being afraid, or angry, or bitter, or just...hungry. Things like the smell of fresh rain on ferns will somehow bring a semblance of life back into a tired mind, or how a written letter to certain someones, becoming a stack growing on the bookshelf, will eventually be burned or maybe torn up or even...actually posted, or more simply how painting in watercolours can help with the storm that's been brewing within but never truly unleashed. Afterall, so much thunder and lightning cannot be that healthy.

I want to believe in many, many, many things.

Mainly, I want to believe in others. I want to believe that the fire and the grit, the vitriol and the buffer, the sand, mud, gravel and heavy rocks that were and are my words - all of these words that I had given away or pushed onto, threw like fiery spears or offered like laurel crowns, typed up or written or said in the universal tongue of body heat and being present for others, I want to believe that it was somehow enough.

Enough to cover distances, to fill up the silences and banish the static. The noise.

I hope it would be enough to stitch the edges of figuratively open chests, mend the ripped seams of skin, muscle and bone that were torn in the process of being honest and true to myself. Whatever that self was at that time, I want to believe that I was true to the broken, to the half-mad, to the floating and the grounded selves. True to the amorphous and the body-trapped, to the uncertain and the wide-eyed curious, to the hallucinating and the sensible, to the silent beast and the raging beauty. Even to the fucked up and the girl-you-got-this self, and to all the other selves that I can no longer name because they came and went between the healing of my mind and the breaking of my heart.

I want to believe that my words, words, words were true and honest to these selves, despite these words, words, words bringing back the sharp, harsh reality that others - with all their own good intentions and unintended silences, all their ignorance and beautiful perspectives - can and will tear these new stitches apart. But I still want to believe in others. No matter how many stitches I have to stitch back on the fraying edges of heart and mind. I want to believe.

Because believing means, despite everything, I'm proving that you can take so much more than you gave away.

#Personal #believing #how I deal with grief