i dont even know @shatteredsaturn - Tumblr Blog

i remind myself i can do this;

i can sit on the stairs and cry and shake

i will pick myself up and take myself home

i will take the eyeliner off to keep my skin safe

i will force down the food so my body is nourished

i will try for sleep so my brain is rested

i will do these things over and over again, day after day for the rest of my life

because i can now

because i have to

vergeofinsanity

rb if you are about to lose your shit, have already lost your shit, or support people who lose their shit

inkskinned

this horrible screaming thing, this being alive for right-now, flooded over your lines, poured out all over the floor and through the cannisters. they love you when you are smaller than this, and controlled, and perfect, unspeaking and gentle in their pools and with your clothes off and with their hands around your throat. they love you when you dance pretty and suck their fingers and say yes and sit up straight and get the grade.

but you became needy again, didn't you, little bug. swatting at the ripcords around you. swinging your arms and watching the city fall. the path behind you is all smoke and ash and overturned cars. you were supposed to be good, good! good, after all. after the heat and the noise of it. you were supposed to be less, to want nothing, to hold all of your desires in a shoe box, to burn them in the summer of your 16th year, to bury yourself in chintz at the foot of their rosebush and come out without the smell of blood.

but you burned-sugar aberration. howling all that sorrow out from your bellybutton up into the green sky, yearning. they don't need you to feel better, they need you to shut up. they don't need you to heal, they need you to stop hurting so loudly. they don't need you to feel good, they need you to kneel down and accept the suffering. you don't get to do this. other people in your life get to lash out and be cruel, but you? you were good, and now when you are sobbing yourself raw on the floor of your bedroom, the first thing they tell you is this isn't like you. as if there is anything like you. you don't even know what you are, because you have wounded your desires and killed off your future so you are just a hungry animal, loping alone in the dark.

come on now, monster. turn your head around. you know better than to leak like this, when they need you. they need you. they need you, so shut up and take it.

i am loneliest in my skin today and i am asking you to love me, for once. i’m scratching at the walls, pounding at the windows and screaming to you please love me now, i’m begging you, please care for me. i have taken myself to hell and beaten it to death but for the life of me cannot understand why i do this to myself. i cannot understand why i pour my love into others without a moments thought, but withhold the love for myself in prisons that cause it to do nothing but decay. i lie straight through my teeth: i am independent, i can take care of myself; but i squirm and spasm for hours in bed staring at my ceiling fan wondering how, after years and years of “healing”, i end up paralytically stuck in the same spiderweb i was caught in when i was younger.

i can’t tell if i’m fooling myself into believing that i’m any good at taking care of myself or if i actually am. the lines between slipping into deep sorrows and letting myself rest are so blurred, i feel i spend my days and nights treading on a paper thin wire between the two, constantly tipping one way or another and never knowing which one is which.

inkskinned

it would have been okay, if it weren't for the loneliness. i liked to be alone - i liked the summer sun peeking her head over the lily-thin wings of dragonflies. i liked the shifting of a quiet woods, and the stirring matter of wildlife. the thin little bodies of crocus flowers; the silent knowledge of trees. i could spend hours in silence, listening. stirring my tea. knowing myself and the language of the world, in that way that being alone allows - as if nature says i'm showing only you this, are you watching?

but i was lonely. not in the places i expected, but in private, horrible moments. a snatched in-between state that would scream up inside of me, bristling - unannounced, the lonely just simply arrived, full and hungry. it saw me come out of the shower and said no one would know if you hit your head, my love. it saw the browning tops of perfect cupcakes and said you can never eat enough to fill this. it scooped me up in one giant arm and hung me over otherwise-peaceful moments and said see? where are you going? will anyone notice if you're gone?

a shifting, horrible thing - loneliness without escape. loneliness without shape. loneliness, swallowing me in a yawn.

it is far too hot for september and i am thinking to myself- i don’t know what i am doing but i’m okay. there are days where everything seems balanced and days where i can’t quite seem to feel out the fulcrum of my life. i shudder and shake for hours with anxiety, my ribs barely holding in my heart that erupts every time my brain slows down and my head throbbing like i’ve walked headfirst into a lamp post. but then in the evening, just before the sun begins to set, i sit out on the balcony and read kafka, i make myself a sandwich and wash my hair and i feel clean as ever. i look at my friends and think i love you so much i’m so glad i know you, i read pretty poetry and feel so overwhelmed and i kiss my mum and hug my brother and tell my dad how my day was at school. i’m two different people, almost. one hiding from the other, chasing shadows and reflections. playing a game of catch, that exhausts me to no ends. i am asking you to find your footing, not save the world. but i think i am okay.

-kp

inkskinned

maybe there will be untold horrors - there already are. maybe it is foolish to make tiny poems when there are already whole libraries of better writers and smarter scholars. maybe it is insipid to love flowers when there are more beautiful and thoughtful vistas and visions. maybe, maybe.

but i am holding your hand, and you smell like the cupcakes we have been baking, and this is somehow new, isn't it, the way energy is reconstituted into magic around you. there is a nowhere land you take me to, somehow; a place where a little kindness is big enough to fill the lungs of peace, a place where hope actually knows her name. we will make the bed and sing along to bad music and the way you laugh will be enough. and i am melting for you, stunned suddenly - oh, oh! the answer had always been love.

inkskinned

today all the love i have for you is pushing up against my skincells and today all the love i have for you is the same as for my childhood playground. is the same as light in the forest. is the same as freshly-washed sheets. i love you all the time but today it is beautifully in focus, something so wide and humble and satisfying - something so innate i cannot help but sing

inkskinned

no, i think they knew there weren't mermaids. i think they knew there weren't centaurs, either. i've been on the ocean; i've been deep in the woods. i've seen the way the earth can turn, suddenly and soft, into an alien planet with terrifying claws. there is-enough to be actually-afraid of; the hiss of something slipping into the nightblack water. the eerie, impossible silence of something in the forest looking-back.

but the other day i stood on a dock and a little girl asked me are mermaids really real? and i thought about how when i was 10 i almost drowned - i've written too many poems about that moment now - and how it felt to be 10 before that, with my long hair streaming down my back, having mermaid powers in fish ponds.

and i thought about her question and i thought about the truth. i thought about what we already know lives in the deep, with their white bodies and rapier teeth. i thought about bacteria that can coat your dog's fur in inches. i thought about the trash island somewhere out there, killing the fish.

and i told her: yes, absolutely. i saw one once, actually. and she looked a little bit like you! how amazing, and how funny.

delighted, astounded, mystified, she put her fingers in the water and began to sing about fish and swimming.

it's okay, for now, after all, for her to believe in magic. there will be time to learn about pollution in the fall. for now, it is summer, and her knees are scabbed, and we will have popsicles later, and the hardest choice she will have to make is between ice cream flavors.

and it is okay, for now, if i can keep passing along the stories of a better world. so much of the ocean remains unexplored, after all. and who knows what i actually-saw in the night; it was so dark and it could have been a seal or it could have been a selkie - i haven't gotten my eyes checked in a while.

and who knows. maybe atlantis was not a history but a prophecy. maybe it was not-sank but instead hasn't-yet-existed. and maybe we will wake up and touching water will give us fish tails and gills and we will be able to control the weather and i could kiss my girlfriend while we swam towards paris, our hair streaming down our backs and our laughter in bubbles rising.

it is summer, for now. we might as well believe in magic.

I’m reaching out my bruised fingertips to every soul I’ve loved even for a heartbeat,

im undeniably an amalgamation of everyone who I’ve given tiny pieces of myself to,

i get hurt so much because i give so much more than other people can-they reduce love to a transaction of give or take when it could be so much more-

im afraid that one day i might wake up with nothing left though

i’d give myself away in so many tiny pieces to so many people, i wouldn’t even have enough to make crumb trails so i could find my way back home

inkskinned

i have been thinking about the way we, in love, give power to others. this sense - i am allowing you enough room that you could set the house on fire.

when i was younger, people used to tell me it was going to be different after-your-first-love. it has been. it's been easier, most of the time. i know who i am. i used to think it was romantic to say i gave him everything i am. now i know that the right people will not ask for that - they don't want to take from you, only to help you build. i used to think it was lonely, the way adults said we have our own lives. now i know what it is to have that other-life be separated - how wonderful, to have someone i can share with, and someone who celebrates my life and the way i have grown into it.

people said: after you have been hurt, it will be different.

this is true about most things, after all. my experiences were branded on my body. i don't talk about the scars, and you're too smart to ask, and we're both healing. i used to be able to do certain gymnastics tricks - but i fell once, and i haven't been able to get over the mental barrier since then.

the thing is - we learn these stop-measures because someone took advantage of us first. we learn how far is too far because someone forced us too-far. as a kid, i thought there is no too far was romantic. i didn't know better.

it took me a very long time to rebuild parts of my life after him. it took me a very long time to rebuild parts of my character. i think i probably still have rooms without any floors. places that only go down. ceilings full of spraypainted warnings.

i have been thinking about the ways new love comes in. and we crack open each sealed door together, one-at-a-time. and i hear myself in front of her, nervous, saying if you start a fire, please keep it contained in here, it's a place i can afford to lose.

and i hear her, time and time again, utterly confused: why would i do that? it's beautiful in here. i don't want to hurt you.

the way we know it can hurt, and we love anyway. the way we walk the thin ice and say - the risk is worth the skating.