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She/her | 19 I write repetitive stuff leave me alone “The longing will outlive this body”

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

How do people endure things. How does anyone survive anything. I still haven’t found God.

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

How do people endure things. How does anyone survive anything. I still haven’t found God.

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

Today, I pray to God.

I pray to have my heart picked from the bottom of my stomach.

My sister is going back to school. She has a brown box full of coloured highlighters, thin notebooks with turtle images on them, and a school uniform packed in a plastic bag.

My brother is seven and is begging my mom for a phone. He wonders how he can get in touch with her when he is buying her rice and ice cream from the grocery store under our house.

My other sister is older than me. She asks me where she can find a balloons store. She asks me for a website to upload free books. She asks me for my friend’s number.

I wish I had siblings. They are somewhere but I have swallowed them whole. I wish I could be preoccupied again with cold soups and the white things on oranges and the shoes that do not fit. I wish I could cry to my mom. Today, I pray to God and it is her birthday. I pray to God that if my mom is cursed with Hell because of my stains then let me pray harder to run out of ink.

Today, I pray and yesterday I prayed and at 5am, 19 years ago, I prayed. Does God forgive? Does God wring out the wrong red blood out of skins and corpses ? Does God compensate, for the stillness and spleen and majestic void?

[geryone]

i love you, it looks like rain, June Gehringer

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

My heart swells so easily and it fills up my entire chest and I hyperventilate and feel everything so closely and sensitively. The world is so beautiful and I am so full of love and nostalgia and I am so unloved

[toomanyrats]

on shame and yearning (pt.2)

[neophaim]

Sources:

S.T., "300122," Tumblr, January 30, 2022, https://www.tumblr.com/ryebreadgf/674840497145233408/300122-st.

Silas Denver Melvin, "love as an act of merciful conquer," Tumblr, November 2, 2021, https://www.tumblr.com/sweatermuppet/669052643259432960/from-love-as-an-act-of-merciful-conquer-by-silas.

chandajaan, Tumblr, accessed via https://rockboci.tumblr.com/post/674728141263093760.

Richard Siken, "Birds Hover the Trampled Field," in War of the Foxes (April 28, 2015).

Emily Palermo, "What I Could Never Confess Without Some Bravado," The Rising Phoenix Review, March 15, 2016, https://therisingphoenixreview.com/2016/03/15/what-i-could-never-confess-without-some-bravado-by-emily-palermo/.

Georges Bataille, My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man (January 1, 1966).

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (April 1, 2000).

Frank O'Hara, "Homosexuality," Poetry Foundation, May 1970, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=31570.

Heather Havrilesky, "I'm Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I've Wasted My Whole Life," The Cut, November 28, 2018, https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/im-broke-and-friendless-and-ive-wasted-my-whole-life.html.

Lucille Clifton, "climbing," in The Book of Light (July 1, 1992).

[inkskinned]

there is just something so painful about the whole thing because of course you're aware that you're in late-stage capitalism and that this entire experience has been curated for you by the hyper-rich, but what the fuck are you going to do about it? you go to protests and you vote and you donate and you volunteer and you make your stupid little posts and you try, but then, like. you still have to go to work.

there is evidence that people can make it big, but you're not likely to be one of them. you're just... a person. you need to triple-check your schedule and you like the idea of organizational systems but you often lose the motivation to keep up with one after about a month.

the thing is that some people can do it. you just... can't. it seems like a bad joke: you need a job so that you can pay for your mental health care and then in therapy you talk about how the job is ruining your mental health. and everyone's response is just get another job (but also are annoyed we aren't staying in one job for longer than a few years). here's the thing - the other job doesn't really exist, or was only posted for legal reasons, or has been filled internally by some ceo's kid. and the things you're good at? the stuff you'd love to do for hours? that shit is never profitable.

for a while it was really popular for YA fiction to have, like, hogwarts houses. and this kind of always depressed you, because (in all honesty) you weren't actually the type to be able to fit into any of those incredibly-thin categories. there's nothing particularly ... special about you. you have a mediocre talent in a world that is ending. someone else with glasses (and clumsiness) will save the universe. you, in the meantime, need to figure out where the hell you're getting the $250 for a trip to the eye doctor so you in your glasses can fucking see.

and you're fucking miserable because you can't leave the workforce without risking your life (where the fuck are you getting your insurance from?) but you can't stay, it's ruining you. but also, if you do stay? you're seen as lazy, unmotivated, entitled. you have actually heard someone say "back in my day" and then, while they were talking, googled the average cost of a house and groceries during their college years. just to see.

god forbid you mention that you're unhappy. people always assume that means something about you. if you're unhappy and work in customer service or retail - well, you might as well say "i deserve to die immediately." nobody fucking cares if you want to just not be yelled at for 24 hours. you should have thought about that before taking the job! this is your fault that your manager is an incompetent asshole! stop taking sick days and just spread covid!!

you mention that actually you work in a good job, making good money, and you still feel like everything is too expensive and that there's genuinely no housing. and the other person just rolls their eyes and says you make yourself crazy. are you? this horrible sense in your body that you weren't supposed to be behind a desk. somehow, it's antithetical to you. but what else are you supposed to do?

so capitalism is working the way capitalists wanted it to, but like. you're living in the consequence. like they shrugged their shoulders and sold your future. you are the statistic mentioned in people are going to go hungry. houseless. without access to proper medical care or education.

and then you have to get the fuck up. and go to work again.

[kosmogrl]

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

I pray everyday. It is automatic and unconscious movements. I pray with open eyes and needles in my legs. And although prayer never felt that intimate, it became so when I turned strangers into Gods. Strangers into sites of worship. I never beg. I never ask. But in those times, my knees kiss the uncomfortable hard ground more than ever before. In those times, I am a small entity, like a wrinkled vegetable. I am so full of love I do not know where to pour it. My heart stretches shyly. I stutter. I can feel my body trying to transcend its own physical boundaries. My body betrays me, my body snitches on me. My fingers are undisciplined messy children. They reach out alone to the skin that denies them.

Look at me. Tell me that I am gentle. And loving. And so excruciatingly honest and intimate. Tell me I am insane and unbearably good at locating every mole on your body and every pore in your skin. Soothe the wounds left by the falling needles. I can feel my legs again. I can walk. But I will keep seeking the needles and pins because I always walk and stumble and throw myself into the hands that choke me.

The red marks left by choking and scratching mean that I have been touched and seen. I never forget the hand but I always forgive the long nails. I thank them. I am real.

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

“I love you like something not worth loving back”

“I felt less lonely before I met you”

“You do not have to be loved to prove that you are real”

“Please spend another hour sitting in my passenger seat”

“Everything I have ever let go of has claw marks on it”

“You can put your strength down. I am sitting with you at the kitchen table”

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

“I love you like something not worth loving back”

“I felt less lonely before I met you”

“You do not have to be loved to prove that you are real”

“Please spend another hour sitting in my passenger seat”

“Everything I have ever let go of has claw marks on it”

“You can put your strength down. I am sitting with you at the kitchen table”

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

“I met you and now I am kind to myself in my sleep”

“Teach me a better way to say my name”

“To be loved is to be changed”

“I lay my sunburnt hand on your table; this is the time we have now”

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

I pray everyday. It is automatic and unconscious movements. I pray with open eyes and needles in my legs. And although prayer never felt that intimate, it became so when I turned strangers into Gods. Strangers into sites of worship. I never beg. I never ask. But in those times, my knees kiss the uncomfortable hard ground more than ever before. In those times, I am a small entity, like a wrinkled vegetable. I am so full of love I do not know where to pour it. My heart stretches shyly. I stutter. I can feel my body trying to transcend its own physical boundaries. My body betrays me, my body snitches on me. My fingers are undisciplined messy children. They reach out alone to the skin that denies them.

Look at me. Tell me that I am gentle. And loving. And so excruciatingly honest and intimate. Tell me I am insane and unbearably good at locating every mole on your body and every pore in your skin. Soothe the wounds left by the falling needles. I can feel my legs again. I can walk. But I will keep seeking the needles and pins because I always walk and stumble and throw myself into the hands that choke me.

The red marks left by choking and scratching mean that I have been touched and seen. I never forget the hand but I always forgive the long nails. I thank them. I am real.

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

[sadswaggynerdyfrog]

I can feel the blow on my back. The car seat is black firm leather and my spine twitches against it. We are not moving. I didn’t touch anything but my fingers are dirty and the dust gathers when I rub them against each other. We are not moving and everything around us is accelerating. I can hear the crushed gravel creaking against the other car’s heavy wheel. I can hear the wind howling. We are not moving. I can feel something behind us opening its hungry mouth and tickles run through my broken back. Hit me. Make time stop. Make my body feel like mine, make me aware of the reality of my rotten flesh. Make my heart drop too low for my wretched arms to pick up. I forgot how to cry. Quit milling around and hit me until my body becomes all soft no bones, wiggly and dry like the top layer of a cold soup.

I paint my nails with at least 3 layers of transparent nail polish so I could see through them in case bugs come crawling back from under my fingernails and the insects buzz over the rot of what my hands have done. But I am not worthy of clumsy beauty attempts, and I peel my nails as soon as they dry. I roll up the peeled remnants into a dirty white ball. I want to swallow it and taste the metallic rust of my skin. I want to see how I burn other peoples stomaches because it must be the reason the blows keep coming back and the flies keep roaming around.

What do you do when the womb that birthed you does not like you? Where do you put this anticipation of pain when pain is already in your body before any blow comes you way? How do you paint over a needy body if when u’re done you are still left with the paint?