prettyness is the key to happiness

this is the truth. sorry.

[thoughtcascades]

every time i get close to someone i feel like a stray dog trying to live in a house. like i don’t know where to put my body or how loud i’m allowed to be.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

Texted you a meet up spot,

Our usual parking lot.

You showed up a few minutes until

Right on time,

While I was at the bar down the street,

With a glass of wine.

I did it to myself,

A woman scored,

I know.

But in the dark, in the empty lot,

I hoped,

That you’d never felt more alone.

- a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

I’m sitting in my bathtub in the dark,

with noise cancelling headphones on

and nothings playing—

They just wrap around my head in a hug,

like the tub

Pressing into my knees,

A safe place when things get dark.

I live in my dream apartment,

I’m working a very reasonable and comfortable job,

I have the best dog in the world,

I live in a free and democratic nation—

I’m so lucky.

Luck doesn’t change brain chemistry though, does it.

Does it?

Mental illness on both sides of the family,

Childhood trauma making me feel like a scared kid

At 26,

I’m desperate for love like it’ll fix me,

Like it’ll stop the tears after the mandatory

family dinner,

Because god forbid I put my own feelings first.

Whenever I can’t attend something because of my mental illness,

I have to come up with a physical lie.

Today, it was bending my ankle

while chasing my dog around the yard.

Today, it was depression.

A few weeks ago, it was my GERD flaring up again.

A few weeks ago, it was a day long panic attack.

One day, I accepted mental health wasn’t enough for sympathy points,

And adjusted accordingly.

My childhood made me good at adjusting.

The thing is, one day, you’re going to wake up,

And realize you’re nothing.

You have no sense of self, because you’ve spent

As long as you can remember,

Being play dough for everybody else.

All I want to do is know my favourite colour,

All I want is to stop crying in the bathtub.

All I ever wanted was to love.

- a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

it happened. i wasn’t prepared for it, wasn’t expecting it, but it had been a little birdie singing just after midnight at my grocery stocking job. they fly around in the back storage room. i turn my music up just a little louder, and pretend i never hear it. but i do.

i think about those birds all the time, how they never see the sun once. how they somehow survive off of scraps from the floor or food meant for waste that they break into. i’ve felt like one of those birds, my whole life. i can’t describe why, but the way i was loved by my parents felt like warehouse love instead of sunshine love. i’m not making sense, i know, but i never make sense in my writing. i just write because the wound is bleeding and this is how it bleeds.

for the first time, i cried violently as i drove away from my mothers house. i knew the cord had been cut from her, from the last remaining parent that i felt connected to, on Christmas Eve. a night i’ve put in the back of my closet with my mismatched socks.

at my aunts house once, watching her do her laundry, confused at how she just throws random socks together and doesn’t worry about them not being in matching pairs. why was that always such a concern in my house, our socks matching? when you really think about it, it’s silly. it doesn’t matter the way my mother made it matter. and sometimes, the mixed patters can bring whimsy that adulthood tries to snatch away from wherever it can.

ive lived on my own for 3 years and always wear matching socks. the mismatched ones live in a corner and i pull them out on laundry folding day, see if their companions have been found. it’s always a happy surprise for me, to see two socks come back together after a time apart. my mother made me this way.

and she unmade me today.

we ate sushi. i was social and polite. my sister didn’t look at me and her boyfriend was nice. my step dad and i make awkward conversation because we don’t know how to have a relationship. i don’t remember anything that could’ve triggered the great divide between myself and my step dad when i was 10, i just remember it stung. and my mother, the one parent who has always stayed. the one parent i truly had, eating small bites from the plate beside mine.

my dad and i haven’t spoken in a couple months, what’s new. my step mom is still pretending like he’s not using again, like they’re not buried in debt, like he hasn’t broken her down into a shell of a woman. he still pretends he’s a man.

and the daughter in the middle of it all. they never stopped to wonder how she’s coping with the drama and the dysfunction, just assumed she was good because she was…good. to her teachers, in school, to

her friends, to her family, and to strangers. she was always impeccably polite and sweet, the girl next door; cheeks too chubby for the slim frame she’d develop later.

i’m finding that girl again, the girl who is kind. now that my nervous system isn’t on fire for the first time in 16 years, and the relationship i romanticized until i forgot myself is over, i’m finding my girlhood again. i’m sleeping under a floral duvet i bought. i’m dancing in front of the mirror and it feels like the dance classes i was in when i was a kid are coming to fruition—my body still moves like it has a learned rhythm.

and this is all happening, of course, when i’ve finally been relieved of the last puppet string that was tied to me. my mother. the most difficult to rid myself of, the most painful to crawl away from, and the hardest to stay true to losing. i will always stay, but it will be polite and distant, like i am when i visit my dad and step mother. safe topics, easy conversations, separate inner worlds and emotions and daily experiences. she is not my mother anymore, and i cried the whole way home so unexpectedly i was confused through the tears.

i had just sat in my car, started my music and reversed from the driveway like any other visit, and then suddenly i was sobbing. i hadn’t cried since my breakup, and crying isn’t something i normally do. it’s rare, considering my circumstances would call for more crying. my mental illness is a ravaging demon intent to destroy me all the time, after all.

but all of this other stuff: the family trauma, the split parents, the sister who won’t talk to me and looks annoyed at the sight of me in a room, the brother i can’t visit, the dad i wonder when i’ll wake up from a call from the hospital about, the step dad i always painted as cold and evil because he never let me know anything else, the friendships i lost, the breakup of my first love…it’s all just debris.

reminds me of a scene of Percy Jackson visiting Hell in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, a movie i watched as a kid because i was a fan of the book series. they ride in a boat in the air to the Devil’s palace, and along the way they find a trail of old trinkets—pocket watches, pictures, pieces of importance to someone’s life. the remnants of lost souls. i think about that trail of trinkets as the story of my life, my trauma and my blessings. see, it is only a trail of things that exists in the Hell itself. all of those pieces of me that float in an endless path of nowhere, are surrounded by the hellfire of my mental illness, of my scarred nervous system, of the lines on my wrists and the hair loss on my scalp. i used to eat my hair when i was little. my mother didn’t understand what that meant.

she didn’t understand what any of it meant. the depression, the anxiety, the eventual bipolar diagnosis, the A student failing all her classes, the good friend sitting behind the stairs alone for lunch, the good girl letting her laundry pile up and sneaking food into her room so she didn’t have to eat around her family. those years are mostly just bits and pieces in my head. it’s locked away, too painful to remember. and because i can’t remember the exact details, my mother can mount herself a considerable defence.

i used to fight it, but now i let her. let them. let them believe what they want about you, let them see a monster in a 14 year old girl. let them scream. let them berate you, and terrorize you, tease you and lecture you until they’re blue in the face. remain stoic, and let them. let them criticize your life choices, let them be cruel about how they speak of you. i wish i could have learned all this years ago. i understand it now.

and my mother, i truly love a little less now. i speak to her less now, i visit her less now. is that sad? is that pitying? is it depressing? is it disturbing, concerning? possibly, from the outside.

but not on the inside.

on the inside, it feels like freedom.

on the inside, i finally feel clean.

undone // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

i haven’t gone grocery shopping in over a month and it would be simple to just, order online like i always do, but for some reason i refuse to. is this a new form of self harm rising from the ashes of the skin picking. i don’t actually erase the habit it just morphs into another shape. i wish every day was the same; but im sinking on Monday and floating on Wednesday; im crying on Saturday morning and numb on Sunday night. im blabbering, wasted and fucked up in the basement of the house, secrets my mother needed me to keep. i’m staying away from everyone because the voice telling me i’m a grenade is too loud these days. i don’t want to hurt anyone, i don’t want to fight, i don’t want to be angry. all i’ve ever wanted was to be happy. but that’s a loaded word, a word i apparently am far from understanding. it’s a state of mind, people say, not a state of life. anyone can be happy, anyone can be sad; you have to wake up every day and choose to be happy.

in the meantime, can these philosophers tell me how to choose to shower. that’s one struggle that’s getting real old, real tired. it’s wearing me down and out and people still don’t believe in mood disorders, not really. my mother says she believes it now, she understands it now, but the words are airy with a lack of conviction, because that’s how they sound when she lies. instead of heavy and sharp, just like her, they’re weak and fluttery, they’re a house of cards, they’re small and fragile. like i was, when this all started.

for gods sake, i was 14. not a criminal, not a cartoon villain, not evil, not vindictive. i wonder some days if they remember. do they remember? the little girl with big, bright green eyes that sank to her knees in front of her bed every single night for a year praying to God for a little sister. she and i don’t speak now. do they remember? the girl who read miles ahead of her age group because she couldn’t get enough of novels where two young kids found a magic treehouse in the woods and it took them to exciting adventures around the world. do they remember? the girl who dressed up as sleeping beauty to attend the tea party with the princesses at Disney World. the girl who had a chest of dress up clothes, who loved Hannah Montana and Wizards of Waverly Place. the girl who journaled with little pictures like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Whose favourite time of the school year was the book fair. The girl who loved her family dogs over the years, who cried burying her hamsters, who buried her fish in the winter under the only place she could get it under the soil, where the air conditioner sat. the girl who danced, rode horses, played soccer, painted her room blue, taught her little sister math, cut her sandwiches with a slicer that made them look like a unicorn. do they remember? the girl who dreamed. i hardly do, and she disappears more and more every day. who replaced her, stocks groceries on midnight shifts and has to play the same songs over and over again to settle her unsettled nervous system.

that little girl was too soft for this world, too romantic, too hopeful, too loving. it broke her like a twig.

and here’s the woman who emerged from the bruised chrysalis—the woman they claim a destroyer, angry, bitter, intolerable, unwanted, unseen, claiming to prefer isolation over company because her Dad couldn’t get his shit together enough to ever show up on time.

There’s still hope, though. Underneath all that lies on this landfill. The proof is that im here, im waking up every day despite the fact that my mood disorder might decide to punch me in the face, it might rip my heart in two, it might make me a blabbermouth, it might make me spiral. i still get back up for the next round, bleeding and disoriented, but the referee lets me fight to keep going, keep pushing, keep dodging the hits because i dont know how to hit back. im too gentle. i just spit out my blood on the mat while saying i deserve it. maybe im just an annoying martyr, maybe im not brave. maybe im insane. maybe this all ends the way it almost did when i was 15, in the bottom of a pill bottle. except i’ll be 30, or 40, or 70, and all the fighting will have been for nothing because i was going to give up anyway.

but my dreams are so small, they could fit in my hands. stability. home. family. marriage. love. no fast cars or jets, no fancy vacations or SUV’s the size of my apartment. just the lives i always read about in the books i don’t touch anymore, the ones i can’t read because they create yearning, and i can’t yearn anymore. i can’t dream.

so every night is the same—i fall asleep, i wake up, and remember nothing, absolutely nothing, in between.

oblivion // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

and when i lay in bed at night

staring at the ceiling

it was our future laid out like

a vision

in front of me.

and when you climbed into

the bed i made

there was nothing,

absolutely nothing

on your ceiling

but white paint,

and my white face,

blood drained—

2am locked

in our bathroom

with your phone,

and texts you didn’t erase.

realizing i had always been on my own—

cause they’re not plans

with somebody

if you’re planning them alone.

- the end. // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

the people who have the most to say against psychiatric medications are those who can function without them.

some of us couldn’t hold a job otherwise. some of us couldn’t get out of bed otherwise. some of us would stop eating, stop sleeping, only sleep, never shower; rot into something soulless, bleed under their sleeves, end up an addict on the streets, lie under the ground before we’re 30.

it’s always the same statements, always the same side effects, always the same stigma. hey, i wouldn’t be alive without these medications. hey, take it easy on me. hey, i had to make a choice to grab the only hand that could keep me from falling off the cliff, and i think this is better than dying, don’t you?

if you had to choose, you’d understand. but when you say “you just gotta toughen up, kid,” i know you’ve never had a mental illness, or one that has been debilitating and all-consuming. every illness is a sliding scale, and mental illness’ scale, well, it literally slides. down. some can stay balanced at their spot on the see-saw, and not because they’re stronger than the rest of us, but because that’s where they’re standing. some of us are standing right near the end, where the ground beneath us is almost parallel, where we couldn’t stay onto sanity no matter how badly we want to.

because boy, do i want to. my want to be free of this is an ache that could crumble mountains, create a fissure into the earth so deep you can’t see the bottom, melt the sun, freeze hell, burn heaven.

my bootstraps were picked up years ago, but i’m just picking up pieces of myself in the parking lot again, pretending like i have it all under control, pretending it’s all good, pretending i can handle the kiln when im covered in cracks.

why is it so hard to understand im just saving my life, day after day, pill after pill. that the long term effects of my untreated mental illness don’t exist, because they’re all buried. they’re corpses, and the long term effects of my medications are a chance at a halfway normal life.

and the worst part is, most of us on these medications know more than the naysayers spouting the same tired talking points, because we’ve researched and discussed our options with our psychiatrists over many, many years. for me—it’s been almost two decades. and my psychiatrist didn’t go to school for that same amount of time just to be told about his own fucking specialty by Dr. Facebook.

but this is a letter and the people i’m writing it to wouldn’t read anything this long, so maybe it’s time to tell them to go fuck themselves. i’m walking my dog whose wearing little booties to protect his paws from the snow, i can feel the sunlight of the afternoon on my skin, one of my coworkers made me laugh so hard yesterday i snorted, i watched a really interesting movie about the Deepwater Horizon disaster, i reconnected with my big sister, i bought a cute lounge set last week; the world didn’t end when i was 15.

i’m done being nice, staying quiet, being polite—about the shame you cloak over the very treatment that saved my life.

a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

I am a tantrum. that’s bipolar disorder in four words or less, isn’t it. the brain on fire. having a tantrum.

i’m so angry these days, i can taste it in the roof of my mouth. i think it’s the gummies—legal where I live—that i’ve been popping like candy, pun intended. even in my worst episodes i’ve never felt like i want to throw a fit in the middle of a dollar store, one for the books, just scream and scream and scream until the cops put me in a vest and take me to a very small white room with scratches all over the door and don’t let me out until i feel like a human being again, for christ’s sake.

i lost private insurance today and now have to figure out how im going to get my stomach medication covered so that i can, you know, eat. i think my body is getting too old for depression. i can’t lay in bed for 16 hours anymore without getting sick or pulling something or having to take something for the nerves.

a couple months ago i was celebrating my iron levels being normal after my infusion. for the first time in my life, i am no longer anemic. now i just beg to be tired, so the day goes by faster. my awake hours are one long undercover panic attack—it’s the heartbreak. my heart is racing, the dread sinks like an anvil down my throat, burns like it’s been tossed in the fire first. burns like the sunlight is hot coals, too much.

everything is too much now. i don’t remember the last time i showered. depression is so ugly. i spent over a year in a long term relationship that kept me busy enough that i forgot its grip on my throat for a while, that the depression was a little bit easier with someone who i thought actually loved me in the room.

he was too good at pretending. at lying. i wonder if i threw up because of my stomach condition, or because of him.

both. it’s always both, isn’t it. it’s always the cocktail of suffering, it’s always downpour instead of just rain. don’t they understand by now. chemically, my emotions are stronger. what would feel to them like a wave to jump in the ocean, giggling as the salt water bites the back of your throat, is a tsunami that levelled my home with me in it.

we’ve all got problems, but i’m tired of saying that. i’m tired of not having the privledge to complain about mine—or would it be having the privilege? because that’s what it is; i’m too lucky to cry about how much i want to die right now.

how fucking disgusting is that.

if i win the lottery tomorrow i’d book a brain scan by friday. one of those pay out of pocket ones, the ones rich people get. then id show it to my mom, my family, see? this is my brain, and its not normal and thats proof, right there.

i’d pin it on the fridge, and then they’d take it down, and id tear it up and eat it.

god, i’m going crazy. i needed a life raft two nights ago. now i’m just waiting to die in my life vest in the freezing water. i called for help but the helicopters called their accountants. they didn’t find me worth the cost of the trip. we’ve all got a price, don’t we.

mine is a quarter of a million dollars.

if i die tomorrow, that’s what my family gets. they’re betting on me like a lottery ticket, and we all like the odds. the psych ward would roll those dice. my parents didn’t ask me for my blessing on this policy, just said that’s what they were doing, and i support it completely. don’t get me wrong, i really do.

my disease is fatal. it is what it is. they’re just suing my ghost for emotional distress, and the courts all agree unanimously. the lawyers won’t take my case. bipolar disorder isn’t mean to just its host, it’s an evil bitch to everything.

it’ll blow up your life and then laugh in your face, and you’ll wake up still hearing the cackling at 4am, your dog kissing all over your face because you feel like your heart is beating so fast you might die and he noticed, he always notices. my boy is all over me lately, we’re so bonded we move around my tiny apartment together.

i think losing him is going to be what kills me no matter what.

this account has been my diary for over 15 years. i wanted something that i could carry around, and i guess sharing my pain makes it something more real, doesn’t it? can anyone hear it? or is it a distant echo because it’s mental.

i was a shooting star; i wasn’t a comet destined for earth, you know. i wasn’t always a destroyer. there was a time once where i helped my grandma plant and care for her garden and all the flowers flourished in the spring. now they die around me like I’m a walking winter.

my dad texted me for the first time in 3 weeks to ask me to watch my little brother on a Saturday night. guess he thinks he’s entitled to doing that because he knows the obligation i have dressed myself in since i was a child. i always feel obligated to do something. every second, of every day. there’s always something to be done, someone new to be, goals to start implementing and money to be made.

i just wish my grandma accepted my offer to live with them in their wooded property so i could have been sitting by the pond and writing in a journal and leaving the world behind for a while. a place to land. to rest. i don’t want to conquer the world i just want the world to stop trying to conquer me.

is it okay if i stay here for a while, between these lines, and pretend i don’t have to work later. is it okay to take a few breaths without wondering if im good enough for the air. is it okay to give myself a little bit of fucking grace now and then.

why do i feel like i still need my permission slip signed for the field trip. i don’t know what this is. this is suffocating.

- (don’t have a name for this one, so i decided on ‘nameless’.) Nameless // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

the only person i had ever been in love with never read my poetry—and some of the poems were for him. i loved a man to the point of invention, but more imperatively, he only loved me to the point of erasure.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

my first love betrayed me and it feels like a death more than a breakup, like a bubble popped on the story I wrote for my life. where my first love is my last, where we have that picket fence house and a couple of kids. we have fights but they’re not big enough for a seismic shift; just like, what kind of candles i wanted for our daughters first birthday versus the ones he bought. i’m already seeing someone else but that’s the point. isn’t it. stay busy, don’t let yourself fall apart, he doesn’t deserve that.

i called my ex a few days after i kicked him out, begging for some connection to get through the closure, and he shut the door on me. “i need to heal,” he said. but what about me? what about all the trust he betrayed, the promises he broke, the girl he knew was already ruined by men when he found her.

i’ve never been given permission to be the victim of anything. my family is too middle class, my apartment is too nice, my dog is too amazing, everything is too polished to complain. watched a scene of a movie where an adopted daughter said she felt her whole life all she had been allowed to be is grateful, that anything else is shameful.

i don’t just feel shame.

i wear it. like another skin.

and when i pick myself apart in the bathroom, its the shame under my skin yelling at me to be let out, its rattling in there and driving me crazy, could drive me to the psych ward if I didn’t take my meds on time.

sometimes i think about people as balloons, and we’re all supposed to have strings, but some of us don’t. i know im one of them—floating aimlessly, tied to nothing but so easily hurt by everything. this life is a hazard. the fairytale they told us as kids is a lie. i just need to figure out how to survive now, walk the tightrope.

i’ve been gardening more lately. it’s legal here. we all know what that really means. I garden in Eddie town, because I can’t handle the idea of some other part of me being poisoned. i’m poisoned enough, we all are.

but these days, the plant doesn’t make anything go away, it just feels different. but i can’t just sit here with it—i don’t care enough anymore to properly cope with anything. i just want to make it to the state where it all feels a little less real, and the next day it’s easier to wake up in the morning when the darkness feels out of focus.

the depression episode in the moment, well, you’re just expected to live with it, so might as well put it in front of one of those warped mirrors, laugh at the way the demon changes shape.

my dog is 2 and he will live until around 15, so i only need to make it 14 more years really. the picket fence, the RRSP match and stock options, the mom SUV and wrapping gifts under the tree until 2am in a cute suburban 2 story with a hockey net in the driveway, that’s all for someone else now, someone in the past. i split away from her when i left him.

i could’ve stayed. like my mother did, and her mother did. i could have forgave. but i think all the anger they were supposed to feel landed in the bottom of my heart and now i won’t forgive anything that crosses a certain line.

we could’ve worked it out, but i was raised by women who would’ve set their houses on fire with their husbands in them with good riddance. i wasn’t built to be anything but a bonfire.

my spirituality has been at a distance from me and i understand why; i have lost faith. i have lost hope. i’m just looking for the best place to put my reading chair in my one bedroom apartment, and hate myself for never reading in it. it’s just self hatred on repeat, a cycle of internal violence. there’s too much i want to do, but for some reason can’t, but im not allowed to say the word ‘can’t’ because my life is too privileged, so i get so used to lying about how well im doing that my nose doesn’t grow anymore—i believe my own fucked up gospel now.

i won’t amount to anything. i won’t find that love and family. but this is also just depression, and in a few hours i’ll shape shift again and feel like somebody else.

walked through a maze of mirrors last night and it felt like a physical representation of my mind—everywhere you turn you see yourself, but it’s not the same version you saw in the mirror past. things have shifted. the guy i’m seeing led us and a big group of lost girls out because he figured out the ‘trick’.

my maze doesn’t have a trick, or maybe it does. silencing it. until it’s nothing. until i’m nothing.

but tomorrow i’ll be dancing to pop songs down my apartment hallway, and tonight i’ll take a gummy when i said i would stay off them this week.

i didn’t break a promise to myself technically—it was a promise made by the girl in the mirror a few paces back.

she still believes, just a little.

but she’s not me.

bipolar maze // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

to get you back i’d show all my cards, baby

you’re the dream man

of my nightmares lately

true fan,

let’s spin on the sparks baby,

i wanna tell my ex i won

i wanna be with a man who knows

what it takes to be a man

gets the job done when we’re having fun,

washes my car by hand.

speaking of those hands,

make them useful baby,

remind me why i’m done

drive me in the herby

down the road less travelled by,

because my kind are rare,

you’ll never be loved like me

in your lifetime

you’re trained to catch a liar,

you work car has sirens on,

make it easier to ignore

the ones in your head, baby,

when i’m around,

and they turn right on

and i know my love’s a red flag baby,

but i’m holding up my white one

you could’ve come with a red tag, baby

and i still would’ve put you right on

i may be nothing but bad, baby

but aren’t we all bad for someone?

white flag // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

this is such an old story. the girl who loved too much, who gave too much, who sacrificed too much.

who noticed the sheets on his bed were old quilts, and bought him a mattress cover, new sheets, and a duvet for christmas. his bedroom is in the basement. i didn’t want him to be cold.

I pushed him every day to drink water when I found out he never drank any before, and he found it annoying. I helped him shop for new clothes because the ones he had were the clothes of a teenager, a young man, not someone grown, who wants to look sharp or clean. I saw a poster in his bedroom from his grandparents that meant a lot to him, needed some serious TLC, fixed it for him and set it up on my wall. I got him flowers for valentine’s day so he wouldn’t get his first roses at his funeral. I went on vacation and all I brought back was a card for him, reminding him how much I love him. That was a random Tuesday. he kept losing his passport, so I gave him a case with an airtag slot, and bought him the airtag. i did the same with his airpods.

guess i should’ve done the same with me. maybe he wouldn’t have lost me too.

look at me, listing off things i’ve done for him like it matters now. the money i lent. the patience, time and love i had for the most shameful, upsetting parts of him. the confidence i gave him, being his biggest cheerleader.

cleaning out his bedroom, organizing, throwing out food wrappers stuck in his couch that had solidified for months, while he sat on his other couch before we left it so he could move in with me.

emptying my closet, purging my apartment to make room for him all on my own. putting up couple pictures of us on the walls to make it feel like his home. insisting he take multivitamins and supplements and push himself at the gym. insist he find a new job so he doesn’t have to live paycheque to paycheque, so he can pay off his debt, so that he can keep the promises me made to me: “a house in 3-5 years. that’s what i want for us.”

but there was never a house. never kids. never family or financial stability. just an hourglass i couldn’t see, sand falling i couldn’t hear, a whisper of the end in nightmares i woke up from at 2am, a week before the great collapse of my heart.

his mother just paid off all his debt.

he just wasn’t ready to grow up. not at 27, and not for me.

i shouldn’t have let myself shine for the future he painted. it was hope i shouldn’t have let myself have. trust i never should’ve gave, when all he did was break it.

when someone blames you for screaming after they set you on fire, does your pain even make a sound? or is it lost in the abyss of “she’s crazy”, “she’s not who i thought she was”, “she hurt me too much in the aftermath”, “her reaction was unwarranted.”

i sent him hours of videos, long texts, even after i asked for space. even after i pushed him away. all because of one word:

why?

did he believe moving in with a long term partner would just be playing house, would be like dating? did he not see the ways I needed him become a man to live independently, take care of himself and us, move forward in his career and financial stability? He called it lectures and nagging and I called it standards. He called it me forcing him to become someone he’s not, not loving him unconditionally, when I cried over the phone begging him to show some semblance of change.

Not 10 pound weight gain. Not graduated with an undergraduate degree 5 years ago and still working a call center job for 19 dollars an hour. Not 3 different microwave junk boxes as his meal when I’m not there to make dinner. Not me cooking for him after he took another dinner out of the freezer, insisting he needed something healthy. He sat on the couch until I brought him his plate.

I am not denying or lacking appreciation for the love he brought, the gifts he gave, and memories we made, the places I got to see, the things I got to experience. He introduced me to amazing people, his friends, and I will never forget our social gatherings together that I never got to have before I met him. The thoughtful gifts, the kindness during my episodes, the affection I’d never gotten, the hugs he gave I didn’t have to ask for. I’ll never forget the valentine’s day flowers, being called beautiful out of the blue, laughing together as we walk the dog. The money he gave me to get my nails done. The understand he held for my depressive episodes. The patience when my mental illness became ugly. The encouragement and love for all my darkest places. There was so much love he gave; every door open, a cute cushion in my passenger seat, the gas tank he filled for me. The drive in movie we watched. The Harry Potter series he read for me. The skiing trip he took me on even though skiing scared him. Every dinner he insisted on paying for. Every souvenir he bought me when we travelled. The day he made mine, where we did everything I loved. The cup he filled for me. And everything I won’t mention here, the list long and beautiful.

He was a good man, an amazing partner; he is a good man, an amazing partner. And nothing will ever change that, not even this.

But all of the gestures and first love moments, the sweet dates and ‘I love you’s’ and moments from a romance movie came with an asterisk all along, didn’t it. It was a movie, and I didn’t look at the watch on my wrist, to notice it was a timer, as we sat in the theatre enjoying the show of our love. This idea that we were were moving forward, it was an illusion by a brilliant magician. I was so busy watching the rabbit, I didn’t notice it hadn’t come out of the hat. It was somewhere else, running through the woods with a pocket watch, leading me to the tunnel out of the theatre, and back into the real world.

Where love is not enough.

We were meant to stay the same all along until the movie was over. Until the sunset fell and he took me home. When I called him and Aspen my Ohana, when I wasn’t his. I was meant to be a figure, a place to put his loneliness, a trophy to walk around with, an experience he begged for but never had. He was a teenager living his first love, and it died when the grown woman tried to water the flowers when he didn’t want a garden to tend to.

He wanted a woman to stand next to.

This is my first heartbreak, and all that exists now is the voice saying “I told you so,” reminding me of all the reasons I should be alone, that I was meant to be alone. I ask for too much, I am too sick, too difficult to deal with, too erratic and crazy. I trimmed and groomed his beard for him a couple times a week, and I trimmed myself down to accept a boy cosplaying a man.

But I should’ve known, right? This is such an old story. I was born with this story in my blood—born from a relationship where my mother forgave and forgave until she couldn’t anymore, until she was drowning in the betrayals. Born from a grandmother who forgave and forgave until she couldn’t anymore, until she died with nothing but empty forgiveness. Watching the marriages I grew up with leaving the women begging for change that would never come, degraded because they were there, left alone because they could be.

Men have always taken from me, men have always broken my heart. That is the nature of the world, of taking the risk of loving someone, of making a new friend, of sharing your life and your secrets. Humans are mean, and messy, and make big mistakes that you have to stop yourself from crying in the middle of class about. I am one of those humans, I am one of those who has made more mistakes than I can count.

But I gave him so much, because I thought he was giving the same. And maybe, once, he was. But he decided not to give anymore, and isn’t that what always happens? They decide to go. They walk away, and leave you broken.

No one has ever not left me broken. They have only punished me for being broken.

He told me he didn’t want to be in a relationship right now, that I had hurt him too much shrouded in the cloak of betrayal, loss, pain and a mental breakdown.

I’m not mourning the relationship I just lost, I realized in that moment, I’m mourning the one that disappeared months ago, when I picked through the growing weeds desperate to find the flowers he stopped buying me.

I’m better off alone.

Life can be beautiful alone. My dog is my beautiful, pure companion, my shadow, and he will never hurt me. He will always love me unconditionally. When I told him I was alone now, he gently rested his paw on my face. Not now, not then, and not anymore.

I suppose I am just too soft, too delicate, for this life. I suppose I demand too much, I love too hard, I hope too easy.

This world never claimed not to be cruel, this world never claimed it wouldn’t hide mean behind kind. I thought I had found an exception, a man brighter than the sun, a man with enough love in his heart for me I would still feel it years later, standing in front of the fireplace, our children laughing in the next room.

The truth, they say, is I’m still so young, so much life and experience ahead of me, so many people to meet. I will fall in love again and again. The world will turn, and I will find my place, and he will be a first love I look upon as a lesson, not a tragedy. One day, I won’t cry in bathroom stalls because a song reminded me of us. The same song I listened to the acoustic version of, closing my eyes and picturing our first dance at our wedding.

I suppose I need to grow up, too. Thinking after a year and 3 months, that the man I was with would start doing the work to build a future for himself, and us. I wasn’t worth the sacrifice, the effort, the building. That going back to school to finish my degree against all odds, so I can pursue a career of my own with what I believed were shared goals of a future—was only cosplaying progress, I guess. Fighting my mental illness to do the best I could to succeed, wasn’t enough. I wasn’t worth trying for. History tells I never had been. It was a pipe dream, the naive hopes of a disappointed child whose father left her before he could love her. The step-father who was too cold to approach, too distant to be reachable.

Maybe it’s time to stop hurting. Stop risking the hurt. Stop risking the pain that could come from human connection. I want to feel the warmth of the sun alone, travel to places and hear the safety in the silence, talk to myself around the apartment because she can say good things and keep my secrets. I want to walk my dog alone, and feel the unconditional love like a bubble between us. I want to study without the blurring of questioning why they said something so mean, why they left, why they didn’t want me anymore.

Why I was never, ever, enough.

I don’t remember a life where I wasn’t coping with the pain people have caused me. He was supposed to be healing, but he just became another person to break me. There is nothing left to break now. There is nothing left of me but to be alone. And maybe I deserve it.

And maybe, one day, I will be lonely and desperate enough to reach for the world again.

but that’s such an old story—when you always know how it will end.

where hope dies // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

you tell yourself a story, picture a future without uncertainty, “he’ll grow up and mature”, “he’ll change”; and then you wonder to yourself on the bench at the park if your mother thought the same. if her fears proved right, than what are you? lucky or insane?

i can’t half love him, but i half leave him sometimes // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

walking through the prairies looking for bones

stark white against the grass

a morbid contrast;

a recollection of a life,

something that doesn’t get eaten

like the rest of the body—

doesn’t decay,

not for centuries;

and they say all we leave behind

are memories.

the dog is sniffing in gopher holes

that cows break their ankles in;

they call the gophers pests out here

but aren’t we?

bones tell so many stories,

traumas, diet, gender, past diseases;

reconstructing the past

to understand the future.

reading a scrapbook made by

my grandmother and

her classmates in a small schoolhouse

about the ‘founding’ of these prairies

only 50 years before.

they killed the defenceless

women and children

while the strongest were out hunting.

it was easier

to kill them after that;

they no longer had a reason to fight.

“the importance of the indian can not be understated;

their ability to hunt, to build off

the land, to make pelts and tools, to survive

in the conditions, was essential to the trade

and settlement of the Europeans.”

I bet, on our hikes, we walked over

a lot of their bones;

Buried under decades of colonization

Touted as progress

The murder of a misunderstood culture

Touted as Darwinism

The irony of it all:

the modernization of weaponry

has been the degradation of humanity.

“We need weapons to protect our society from the

worst of us,” is the purpose, I suppose.

But their spears worked just fine to take down

thousand pound buffalo.

There used to be tens of millions of wild herds

in these prairies;

They were hunted for sport into extinction.

People hunt from helicopters now.

They built churches near the

native settlements;

Priests trying to teach them about God,

Catholicism,

‘The true religion.’

If there is a God, he was not in those churches;

He was not in the white men that shot, and killed,

and enslaved;

He was in the wild fields where the land

had yet to be touched by those that craved to

own it.

God—

among the grazing buffalo;

considering a flood,

Before realizing

that would be mercy

compared to the suffering

our own idea of

evolution

would cause.

On a plane home and

wondering how it felt

to watch a bird fly,

and believe it is magic.

just another existential crisis // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

I hope,

this doesn’t haunt me

in the next life.

I picture how warm the sun would feel on my skin,

him waking beside me every day—

confident we’d go the distance;

not just another statistic marked

two to three times

more likely to end.

I picture books in one arm,

a coffee in the other, headed to seminar class;

a doctoral student chasing pages

between writing my own.

I picture a job in a library, or a coffee shop—

soft work, kind coworkers, short sleeves;

no scars etched in skin,

no breakdowns in bathroom stalls

or to management.

No zombie days of

dragging my feet

through hours.

I picture Saturdays spent shopping with the girls and,

charcuterie and wine on Monday nights;

a friend group I never lost

to silence or instability,

to disappearing for days;

to missing the graduation

they all attended.

I picture staying awake on the couch

with my boyfriend—laughing freely;

unshadowed by the bad nights,

the tears,

the fights illness picked for us.

My dog curled up beside a whole person,

not a shell of one.

No debt I don’t remember making.

No car wrecks I couldn’t stop.

No dominoes

falling

because illness

tipped

the first.

I picture a career I built.

A house I earned.

An SUV and children

who run to me full of light

I would be able to return.

I try to picture a simple life—

potential blooming,

hard work meaning something;

a mind that doesn’t split itself

under the weight of the world and,

under the weight of just another Tuesday.

I try to picture a life without knowing

that they install plastic bubbles

instead of windows in that ward.

I grieve it.

I scream into pillows,

Cry rivers,

Curl up into myself,

chest burning,

unable to breathe past the sob.

I picture the family photo above the fireplace.

I put myself in the moment

of the shutter click—

I feel some cheap imitation of that light.

And I hope,

this doesn’t haunt me

in the next life.

a grateful ghost // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

trying to learn how to write about good things instead of just bad. and dark. so here goes nothing, i guess.

my dog loves to sit on my lap on benches. every time we are near one, he’ll climb on and wait for me. a dog that’s favourite thing is just to sit and listen to the breeze, smell the world go by. what a beautiful, simple thing. it’s so calming to me now.

but then, on the bench next to us, an older couple and their granddaughter sit down, and the man walks over to the trees with a volleyball, starts throwing it upwards. it took me a minute to realize he was trying to hit a squirrel scampering up a tree. and here i was, trying to write about good things. the young granddaughter ran to take the ball from him, scolding him in their language. sometimes fluency isn’t needed.

the sun is reflecting beautifully on the grass, it’s so quiet here you can hear the leaves shifting in the wind, the birds chirping, the bugs buzzing. the person you must be, to start throwing a ball at a squirrel in the middle of all that, hoping to injure it.

but i have to write positively right now, so i suppose that’s a metaphor for still seeing the beauty in the inevitable stain of darkness on the world. none of us know where it started, none of us know where it ends, its just part of the fabric of it all. as sure as the tree standing tall next to me, strengthened by decades, wrongdoings will assume their roles around us, try to ruin the beauty.

when i asked if i could put a few items up for sale with sticky notes in the front lobby of my apartment building, i was told i could only do so in the laundry room. the assistant manager warned me to just put a note up, instead of leaving the items there. “they’ll get stolen,” he said. i told him i’m going to put them there anyway so people can see what they’re buying before they buy it. everything is in great condition. just because there are people who will take advantage of goodness, does not mean you stop being good. i’m selling a mini projector. i suppose it would bring a thief’s daughter magic. everything is still there, of course, but in any moment it could be gone. so could my car. or the most expensive items in my apartment. there will always be bad people, doing bad things, but if we all decided to give up on being good, wouldn’t that mean everything’s stained by the bad? wouldn’t that mean there’s no beauty anymore, nothing innocent.

i lost my innocence when i was far too young to know it, to realize what was gone. and when i attempted to end my life at 15 years old, i met death, and that ages you too. by the time you’re in your twenties, you ache for that feeling again and it feels like a cavity. but to find good in this too, i think that innocence lives everywhere. it lives on the bench with my dog, if i practice mindfulness, and look at the simple park around us for the miracle it is. to be a child, and look up at a tree for the first time—well, many of us adults don’t do much of that anyway. it feels brand new to me.

when i finally got glasses long after i needed them, the first thing i noticed was that i could see the leaves in the trees around me. we were driving by a carnival and the lights were so much more magical and bright and real than they’d been in years. i have a terrible memory, but i remember that.

maybe that’s all it comes down to: forgetting. the world starts getting too busy, too much, and we forget the beauty and simplicity that lives around us. there’s always a man somewhere throwing volleyballs at squirrels, but there’s also a dog getting adopted, too, or a baby being born. there are many people who have no good in their lives, and that could be argued, but what prize do you win if you’ve convinced yourself that’s true?

there’s no medal for suffering, just the pain. isn’t it better to find the seeds of good and water them so they bloom, instead of trying to be the one the universe has shit on the most? i’ve been there so many times, focusing so intently on the bad that has happened to me, seeing the faces of those shocked by haunting stories of my life. why couldn’t i just have talked about the good, the joy, the luxuries. wouldn’t the person on the other side start to see their blessings, too.

we all talk and think about the bad too much. i believe what we think is energy that ripples around us, touches others, and shifts the tides of fate. there’s always going to be more bad, there’s always going to be some news story to cry about, some war to fear, some chemical in our food that could kill us or a recall of lettuce or a kidnapping at Disneyland.

And all of those things could as easily happen to you, to me, to the nice man that lives a few doors down. and one day, i will have to say goodbye to the little dog that has become a piece of my soul, and there will be a first time i sit on a park bench without him. the pain will be thunderous.

but the leaves will still be shifting in the trees. the birds will still be chirping to the sky. the sun will cast along the grass like a warm blanket. i’ll still have his beautiful energy with me, because it’ll never die.

and the choice to feel the good, will still be mine.

everything in the laundry room got stolen, but when i lost my purse a few days later in a dollar store, someone turned it in // a.d.

[prettynessisthekeytohappiness]

depression got into the vents again.

i breathed it in my sleep. it tasted like tar when i woke up, and burned like whiskey.

but i manically cleaned for an hour with lysol spray to mask it, and pretended i couldn’t feel what always comes next.

yesterday, i was the warmth in every room. today, i am the coldest corner of the house, the one you avoid because you get the sense it’s haunted, it’s barren, it’s a rocking chair that moves by itself. it creaks when it goes backwards.

it’s not moving by itself though.

i’m there, but i’m so small, so empty, it’s just bones rubbing against each other like the kindling for a fire im attempting to light under myself again. i’m so cold. but it’s pouring rain.

i’m waiting on the weather to change.

im staring down the thermostat like i have any control.

at my last job, you could only move the dial a couple degrees, but it never made a difference. it was a false sense of control. the main panel, only accessible by building management, is the only real game changer. i don’t know who is managing me. i don’t know whose office to go into with my resignation letter.

i don’t know whose keys to steal in the night, open the control panel, turn the dial until it won’t move higher anymore, and then break the dial so it can’t change.

so i can’t change.

i’d like to feel the same all the time.

but not this sameness, not this lameness.

i’ve locked myself away but this isn’t goodbye, i’ve just abandoned myself for a while. the rocking chair is empty.

i looked out the window and there’s a woman dancing on the grass barefoot, in a white dress, singing that song that doesn’t exist again. i’m just sitting on the floor outside a maintenance room where the control panel isn’t, dammit.

i’ve searched for too long. i’m too tired, but i’d run a thousand miles right now if i’d outrun me, wearing a mask too heavy under the bright lights of the stage—

waiting on the weather to change.

the art of the hypomanic crash // a.d.