sad writers collective

notes app, moody poems, and things we're too embarassed to share elsewhere. xo, L. A. N. ✩☽ ᓚᘏᗢ 𖤓 ⋆⁺₊⋆

[sad-writers]

[just picture my nails, long as i like them, in that shade of red from urban outfitters, just see them and see them sinking into my face. see them digging, past the tissue and muscle and hitting my skull and hear the sound the muffled sound of my nails clacking against the bone and then watch me just tear my face out and Oh the sigh of relief! thank god thank god thank god!]

today i came home and cried for a long time and then i laid there for even longer

[sad-writers]

to these somedays that you keep saying you're patient for

I have not yet called you a home because I have not yet told you that I love you.

[sad-writers]

moving past the spirits

I woke up in the near year and found you as a ghost.

I half smile because it's much easier, when you're gone, to confess how your spirit has moved me.

I start to write again.

I blow through three books and sing myself a song on a long walk

with pockets full of rocks

I feel closer to you in the absence. I can breathe and it's refreshing

I can write without the pressure of your permanence

I feel a little lighter but grounded in your memory

I haven't felt like this since someone died.

I hope I don't see you for a long, long time.

[sad-writers]

[finally] a man reads me [his] poetry

so I have this new friend.

(oh boy, I know you're already rolling your eyes)

and he makes me feel like I am the smartest person in the room

we lock eyes and I find myself dragging away from the intensity

or the sun-kissed, beach waves from splashing in the sea together

I have this new friend

who reads me poetry with a sharp inhale and searches my face desperately for approval

who I ask quiet questions to about grandparents in the hollow of an empty museum

and crawl into the spaces left in the silence of our looks from down the hall

with the loudness of contagious laughter

and the brushing of knees pressed into the narrow desks in class

that go unnoticed by everyone else,

just like the secrets we know of each other's childhood

I have this friend

who truly, truly is only a friend

but I can't help noticing how seen I feel by him

and how I look for him in the rooms I command

I know he'd read this and have something wise to say about it.

I know I only write this because it's something he can't reach.

[sad-writers]

agape (in the greek sense, in the mythos books we once read in the same room at night)

you told me you're almost thirty

i got so sick i almsot threw up on my keyboard. time eats away at everything and it chews and chews and its swallowing us now

if i am being dramatic, i would say we have been together for forty five years.

if i am being honest, i think every prevailing theory about the world is true and that we have been everything and together every time.

we are waves taking form and crashing into sand and returning once more and we have been dogs and we have been monsters and we have been microscopic and we have been forces of nature and we were twin dying stars imploding at the start of it all and the fall out of our perfect death has forced me to you and i think god put a shackle on my wrist and on your ankle and invoked heavens will because i dont know how else to explain the way i will always be dragged around by you and i dont know how else to explain the way i see fire in your eyes and hear thunder when you speak and the way i shrink when you are near me and the way my heart races when i hear your steps near the door

you say you are almost thirty

well i am still the same. the same mistakes follow me over and over, i am still an ailing astral body, i am still chasing after you, i am still hitting the ground and i am still left behind and i am still waiting. i am waiting for myself to get better, for you to change. has it been twenty years and or twenty billion? (i could believe we were there before the universes birth, like we were together before ours.) unyielding are the roots that anchor, heavy is the dirt that clings.

if you have not been everything, how can i see it? the yous of yesteryear are ever present over our shoulders. if we have not always been together, how do i feel it? etched into my bone and breath, i search for you, i think of you, compulsory and unceasing.

you are almost thirty

its true but it isn't, you're just a year older, its just a year, but time slips away from me so easily these days. i blink and i see you, far too grown up, i dream of your future like i dream of my own for i have never known a life without you.

last week we were still young. our whole world used to be so small

4 grandparents, 3 dogs, 2 parents and one sibling, countable by all 10 of my fingers and holdable in both my palms, do you remember that life?

picking paint off the railing and fighting all the time- the monster in you and the micro in me

the universe that imploded when you grew up

[sad-writers]

sunlight through the kitchen window im putting away our collection of mismatched spoons

there are words for this feeling that haven't been invented yet but i feel it soaking in

these days i love to look at you

swiping through the albums on my phone, taking in your smile, gripping onto everything you send me, waiting for you by the door but pretending it doesn't matter when you walk in

can you tell i love you?

sometimes i think we were born at the same time- that there was never a second i breathed a breath that wasnt also yours

[sad-writers]

wrote this without realizing it's the 3 month anniversary

i write this with tears in my eyes and i don't know if it's from the thought of writing or from the sun that's blinding me through the window of this cold, empty house

i end the sentence and a tear rolls down my cheek as if it's performing for someone.

i don't really cry loudly when i'm alone, it's always when someone else is near. im allowed to feel when someone else can share the feeling with me. i've felt so alone for weeks. maybe i should listen to the voice recording of g and k and me driving through the altadena ruins crying. the last time i watched someone else feel something. 

[seven minutes later after listening to the recording and uncontrollably sobbing so much in a shaking, ugly mess] 

well, i guess i can cry alone 

[fourteen minutes after a roommate walks in and i compose myself to ask about her day and laugh about something insignificant that happened in mine]

what was i saying? the numbness is back. 

i can't remember. 

this is what it feels like every damn day and i want to fight and i'm mad as hell and i want someone to cry too but only to catch me in that rare moment where I let myself cry because i'm also tired from watching others cry while i'm consoling them like i always do and--

heather, my therapist, asked me today why i'm always reaching out to others and why i'm trying to get the community together for a dinner / a call / to make art. and, why i'm never able to say i need this for myself. why i'm scared no one would show up then. why i want people to care so damn much that their care can take care of me and themselves and the greater issue at hand and--

i don't want you to do it just for me. i don't want you to feel just for me. i don't want you to cry just for me. 

sometimes i think if i disappear how will things change -- and no, not in the way you're thinking, but -- just, disappear. would people feel lighter ? i know some would.

i wish i didn't want to control things as badly as my dad and my sister and every perfectionist in my lineage likes to control people

and i wish i didn't want to store all the ugly feelings as deep as my mom has

i don't know who i'm writing this for anymore. it's not for you, and i hope you don't take it as that. i'm not asking anything from you. 

i know I've been showing you the worst of this ugly, angry mess and i don't do it because i want you to pity me but because i can't show anyone else anymore

i talk about friendships more than i talk about fire. 

a lot of things have burned recently. 

should i listen to the voice recording again?

[it's been twenty three minutes]

the house is full now. full, in a no-traces-of-my-tears-full. full, in why was I writing this, again? full. my face is dry. my body is empty. 

i'm so sorry i'm such a mess right now. i don't know when i'm going to be myself again. i'm so scared this is it. 

[sad-writers]

hi hope you like your gift (its 2am, naturally, im thinking about you)

t feels a little hollow to "give" (couldn't even manage to do that much) you something you already had and I feel a strange knot in my soul doing it i wish you could have the one that you brought to senior year presentation night, the one that went to peace camp, the one that has written me poems i've look forward to seeing in my birthday gifts every year since i was fifteen. (half a decade of birthdays ago) i wish i could give you back everything.

unfortunately, ebay is yet to sell time machines. so i hope you like your gift! i hope you imbue it with all the love and light in your hands because you're the reason everything got to be so special. i hope this new typewriter takes on new memories, and is part of a new senior year, and i don't know, i guess lora and moe can get poems written to them, so long as you can still leave one for me. really, really hope its not an off-putting ghostly reminder of what used to be (yikes!) hope you can think of it more in a "wow, things i love come back to me!" way or something like that, honestly, it doesn't matter. i hope it helps to fill the void but i understand that not a lot of things can. I hope it makes you smile? i dont know, i just hope you like it love you, n

[sad-writers]

for our sad grad

i nearly cried on the phone to my mom today

when I told her where you are

you spent six years getting me where I am

and I always wished I could repay the favor

i should've known you would find a way

you always have

i wanted everything I got, for you

you deserve more

i worked so hard in your honor

you have worked more

i am so so so so grateful that I won't have to consider your sacrifices only for the people you've lifted up

but that you may get to rise too

and I know it may sound strange,

but I am so incredibly proud of you.

i know what you deserve and it is this and more

[sad-writers]

i realize now that my life is going to be an endless string of goodbyes and like pulling a loose thread on a sweater i think i will just continue to unravel

[sad-writers]

you, and you! and you.

i hated the week in english when we'd do editing reviews

i've always been protective over my words -- they are one of the few things that are only for me

and yet--

i would trust you with my poetry.

i would let you change the phrasing and move the stanzas and turn my periods to commas

i trust you to know me

i trust you with all that is mine.

you keep the flow moving, you promise the sincerity in my tone, and you better my language

i love when it is infused with you

afterall, that is the word i write the most

[sad-writers]

sad4ever

we met at our worst

with such intensity that everyone else in my life is afraid of

and poured ourselves into each other's souls

(and it sounds dramatic already, but i know you'll get it)

so now

with life a little bit lighter

your presence gives me such ease

and catching up is never required

because I already know what you think

i love how we fell in love in this order so that we can exist in the quiet

i love how you were not scared off so i can be fully as i am

and i love that as i write these words,

you'll reciprocate with all you have

[sad-writers]

realization in the basement bathroom of dwinelle

if you didn't know me, you would love me

if i didn't know you, I could never

[sad-writers]

nose goes

i wish you would tell the truth to me- to yourself

if you glanced up there and saw nothing would anything really change?

if your heart is full like his nose, then that is okay

but the emptiness of checking will consume you

do you call him zaddy because you know your father adores him?

you're embarrassed but you're not, is the shame because you fell in love or because you fell in love with him?

hes losing you but hes always gaining you back

n, to a

[sad-writers]

glancing up, reaching down

my mother is angry at the traffic jam on the street- its a homeless man who got hit while trying to cross the road. The person who hit him had just glanced over him like he was already gone. Tonight, his candlelight vigil is comprised of blinking red tail lights and his gospel song a wailing siren. sometimes a person's whole life is worth fifteen minutes of delay and someone who will throw their hands up in exasperation and ask, “What is it this time?” 

Yes, up is the direction we all tend to glance. Maybe someone looks skyward and sees god but I spent my whole life in city and I can’t see the heavens through all the smog. the only figures i know capable of causing world ending floods and life saving miracles are the ones who hold conference meetings at the top of the buildings i drive past on the way to school. After all, they offer the same promise: a splendid routine. Predictability, efficiency, calculability, control. “God” is at the top of a building reassuring you. Don’t worry, there is a place for you, preternaturally assigned based upon your actions, your worthiness. Oh, sorry, worth. A dead man in the road is just an obstacle on the stairway to heaven

The billionaires will chase comet tails but I know the divinity I'm looking for is in the ground. Two months ago I held Lucy’s plastic skull in my hands and stared her in her empty eyes and saw the cosmic dust that sparked the long line of coincidences and butterfly wing flaps that became our reality. Did you know that we left africa twice? The first time we failed and yet the second time we lived. history likes to tell a linear story (a winners story), like the hominins all got in lanes divided by broken white lines and coasted. In that tale, no one crosses the road when they aren’t supposed to and we proceed cleanly to our great modern society. 

And yet Lucy left africa, even though she was never meant to and the best part is that she went home too. She went home but by sheer love and adoration, her head was in my hands, and the plastic was warm because someone else had held her just before. She wasn’t one of us but she is loved all the same.

My roommate whispers to me in the lecture hall, “I'm not supposed to be here,” and yet here you are! You ought to thank Lucy! She is winking at you- her other name has stretched its hand across the binding ties of time to place itself on your shoulder to give you her own promise: “you are marvelous!” the bones in the earth love you more than the buildings ever will

Maybe god is in the sky but everything we love we eventually put in the ground.

[sad-writers]

At the end of 8th grade, everyone in my class was given a letter from a teacher, coach, or administrator who worked in the school. It was a letter of well wishes and advice for high school. In my letter, the teacher told me that she had met her closest friends in high school. At the time I laughed it off, how could I form such close friendships with people who hadn’t known me up to that point. She was right, though; I met my closest friends. This is for them:

With every sunset, I think of her

And how if she were with me she would insist upon a photo

Yet the gorgeous breathtaking hues in the sky pale in comparison to her beauty

A beauty inside and out; a strong spirit that cannot be contained

On a fiery unstoppable path to change the world - to make an impact

And yet she already has changed a world: my world (and I know the worlds of many others)

Words cannot express my love

I can only hope she loves herself like the sunsets she insists upon capturing

And that she knows her presence is even more magnificent than the greatest sunset could ever hope to be

Everytime I hear someone mistake my name for hers- my heart cannot help but swell

What an honor to be seen as her even if for a second

I revel in her magnificence before I must break the news that my name actually starts with another letter

I like to think the universe intended for us to be twins, but I selfishly convinced her to go a few days before me to tell me what it’s like

What other explanation for our close birthdays, names, and instant connection

And, oh, how I wish she would view herself with love she so deserves

Her strength, creativity, and grace forever inspire me

And I know that even moon must watch her in awe

When my I am with them, my soul is liberated

The weight of societal boxes are lifted

Familial pressures wash away like footprints on the beach

And finally, I am free

Free to simply be

As much as I complain, I love your bickering in the car

To the sisters that I never had - I love you

Your friendship is the greatest gift life has ever given me

[sad-writers]

I'm healing; I can feel it

-l