some dark hollow

This is the prose-poetry/personal essay-memoir blog of a non professional writer. Most pieces are devised without editing late in the evenings. They tell the stories of life in New York City, a small town in West Virginia, and (newly) making a home in Richmond, Virginia. I'd rather be in some dark hollow references a country song first attributed to Bill Browning in 1958.

[somedarkhollow]

and sometimes at night

I can hear the train whistle

warming the cool dark air

with a familiar tune

the candles, blown out before bed

sit alone on the altar

bathed in rosy magenta light

marking time and moon

I let my eyes trace the horizon

of crooked picture rail,

Peek down at the street lamp

past the wintry arms of my favorite tree

It is well lit in the ally

where artifacts and missing pieces

masquerade as garbage

spilling out of their temporary home

I’ve walked there alone

when shadows grow

into cloaked villains

And every bird has a song to sing

This city of bones quiets the living

and remembers the dead

as the light fades from view

And the truth remains unsaid.

[somedarkhollow]

stretch

Today I rose at the first bell, straightened myself out, and put myself back together. Last night's tears in drying pools along my nightstand, windowsill, and dresser glistened in the morning sun. I took to my morning chores solemnly but not sadly. I drank my coffee, took my shower, and walked the dog. I waited for the maintenance men, I answered my emails, I prepared lessons. All the while the vertices of my tired bones screamed.

I had heard before that these joints carry the pain and stress of days past, but today that lesson became more visible. Scratched into the corners of my mind as I attempted to stretch myself back into the woman I thought I was.

[somedarkhollow]

Yearning Hours

Let sleeping dogs lie, so I do, next to me. He snores lightly occasionally stirring to react to the music before settling in to sleep once more.

When I was in my early twenties, I called the time from 10pm onward the yearning hours. They were emotional, draining yet somehow romantic hours where I could live in whatever fantasy I needed to bring me comfort and rest. It was the time I'd exchange salacious messages with men who could never be mine, or search for another way to reinvent myself to better resemble ideals that felt like a step towards whatever I was longing to be. The nights were always long and sometimes even my dreams would lead me deeper into this sense of longing, a brand of sadness no other activity could hold.

Now I sit in the dark, listening to Ravel and wondering why this feeling has returned. Summer is historically my lowest point of the year emotionally, followed only by the icy depths of winter. I've tried shaking it off, devoting myself to work and wedding planning, but I feel so very far from myself and these actions that feel somewhat compulsory. I long to be understood more fully, to leave these doldrums far behind, and to be surprised again.

[halflifesk666]

[somedarkhollow]

there can be no more returning

On this day of days I sit reviving the beauty of a rejected piece of music. reliving the hopeful, beautiful dream that I tried my best to tack down onto black lines and white spaces. A dream turned away by the powers that be, but not lost forever. I sit and wonder if one day I'll remember this time as some sort of turning point. I sit and wonder when the turn will ever occur, and if I'll even notice when it does.

There are days where I feel like the past versions of myself have expired. They live in the same liminal space as my unsung melody, waiting to be thrust into song by the choir of my distinctive life choices.

As the window of hope slams shut, and the nails of dark, weak, evil scrape at the glass, I will sit and pray with every version of myself, past present and future. We pray for hope, for acceptance, for some semblance of the life played out with dolls on the green carpet in the old house. Once the prayer is complete, we'll bow our heads, say amen, and sing.

[somedarkhollow]

the artist at work

When I was a little girl, my mom used to describe the landscapes we would see through sharing the order in which she believed a painter would capture the scene. She'd start by telling us about the wash of color needed to capture the lowlights of the sky, then the contour of the hills or valleys before filling in the details of light and life and shade. I remember feeling like we were seeing the hands of God at work or as close to magic as I had scene in real life.

To this day I find myself noticing the brush marks across the sky and can't help but wonder about the artist at work.

[somedarkhollow]

It’s our last night in the first apartment we shared downtown. We watched the sunset over the stout old buildings through the two meager windows. The light slowly faded into a light blue scale darkening the shadows as we turned on our lamps and the street lights kick on one by one. The roar of cars on Broad street, the train’s whistle moaning light and soft reminds us of the romantic life in transit, something that feels especially connected to our place downtown.

You called it a hamlet, with the beautiful little hotel cafe, the main library branch, the large, old magnolia trees. The brick sidewalks and the old garden walls, and kind stoop dwellers invited us in and held us here, in the safety of North 1st Street for our first year of living together.

[somedarkhollow]

I saw a man examining his freshly purchased daisies in the grocery store parking lot. As he walked to his car, he peered down at the petals, parting and arranging them with his finger tips. I think of the small reflexive moments and ways we signal love shrouded in the secretive, casual disguise of a classic errand on a Saturday.

[somedarkhollow]

sometimes, when it’s late at night and I aim to soothe my racing mind, I put on a playlist of soft and low love songs I put together on a lonely spring night in 2020. As the shallows of the pandemic grew deeper and I made my first foray into living in solitude, these songs eased the loneliness that nipped at my ankles and left frost on my heart. I like to think of that girl, laying on the floor of her bedroom, windows open, wondering where in the world she belonged. Sometimes I wish I could reach her, to let her know everything would be okay so soon, but I also know it wouldn’t mean much. This was the land before you, seemingly the land before time in my fallible memory. Over the last few years I have been making more attempts to connect with the many girls and women who make up past me. When I see a pattern from a dress I used to wear, find a book I adored as a teen in the free little library, or hear an old familiar tune I feel like past me is sending me signals, little faithful reminders that I am many things. Little faithful reminders that I can be many things, and maybe a nudge in the right direction.

[somedarkhollow]

Dimly lit, I sit on the velvet, floral sofa that was once mine and is now ours. I see our art hung side by side on the walls. Our books are neighbors, tucked tidily into the book shelves like row houses on a coveted city block. Your bed becomes our bed, and we share a tee shirt drawer. The chores get assigned and we take turns cutting eachother slack as the daily wear and tear of working in our mid twenties snags the weft of routine we've tried so hard to set. Unraveling, we collide into one as often as possible, as a way of reminding ourselves we're still here and we still have each other even on days that seem to stretch us in every direction, pulling us farther apart until there's an ocean between where our minds are occupied and where we lie in our bed. It's not to say anything of our love, but to acknowledge the triumph of maintaining it. And soon there will be a literal ocean and I will be miles away from you as the tug of a career I have yet to make up my mind over pulls me out of our bed and onto a distant shore. We've done this before, but it can still feel scary. I have to remind myself, on nights like this one when I can't seem to find calm in my body, when I crawl out of our bed and onto our couch, when I take to writing after composing proves unfruitful, that I can believe the words you tell me and I can have faith in our love.

In the tense depths of arguing and crying early on in our time of living together, we stood in the kitchen, leaning on the counters when I remember finally spitting out words that I felt so nervous to say:

"We're holding on too tightly, we have to let each other go."

There was no intention of an end in either of our hearts, my eyes met yours and you repeated what I had said, nodding. We fell into one another and cried, softly. This, this is what had been missing in the flings of my yesteryear. The strength of letting faith and trust tether us together, allowing for light to shine in the spaces between. The power to trust that no matter how tight my grasp, I cannot change the course of time, I cannot lock your heart to mine and throw away the key. It's the realization that relationships that are meant to last will, and acknowledging the frailty of them while trusting in their resilience is the only security that means anything.

With the windows open in our apartment, our windows, I listen to the violent howl of the cars racing down Broad Street. I finish my thoughts, turn off the lights, and get back into our bed with you.

[somedarkhollow]

In the midst of a tentative autumn within my first few months in this new city, I've found a truth I was not prepared for. This revelation reminds me of a quote that while seeming quite obvious always struck a deep chord within me: "wherever you go, there you are."

It's on nights like these where my dear one has fallen asleep far earlier than usual and my mind begins to pick up speed again that I find myself looking for answers and grasping at straws. See, the aforementioned truth is simply that I must not allow myself to continually retreat inward. While in the past that has been the answer to overstimulation and stressful social situations beyond my control it has come to my attention that in this present moment I must allow myself the particular privilege and grace to radiate outward.

While previously, when I sat in silence, alone in a New Jersey apartment with my windows flung open and my candles ablaze, disconnecting from the cultish social realities of my undergraduate education, clinging to what free time I could scrounge to be home by myself, I felt free. But now, when adult life has provided the seemingly luxe opportunity to work from home, this same practice has me singing the tune of captivity.

For the first few weeks of this working from home and newly living with my dear partner I found myself feeling what I thought were the negative effects of ingrained misogyny in my own world view. I had breakdowns where I lamented that I felt my years as an ambitious, working woman were dwindling as I began to think about the timeline for domesticity and producing children. I blamed myself, my partner, "society," etc. But, as time wore on, I felt the clutches of this fear loosen, although they did not fully release.

2 weeks ago, as I traipsed out of my neighborhood gym and began the short walk back to my apartment I was accosted by two men. What started as strained niceties on my part in reaction to their gregarious approach for 9:30am small talk turned into a degrading description of my body and the actions they felt entitled to in reaction to it. I looked around and saw nothing but empty sidewalks as I mustered a less than empowered "Good Lord!" before turning the music in my headphones off and making adjustments to my route home as not to potentially lead the men directly to my residence should they choose to continue this pursuit. I have not been back to the gym since. I stopped walking the few blocks to the coffee shop, I struggled to make trips to the post office down the street or even the two blocks to the parking lot to get my car. I was trapped again, this time with bars on the windows adding to the captivity I had felt before.

I only realized how captive I felt quite recently. My dear one was out of town and I awoke to find my day utterly without agenda. Although I awoke early that morning, I found myself stuck in bed as I argued with myself in my head about what to do with this time. I finally flung open the windows to the apartment to feel the morning chill on my skin, threw on a sweatshirt, pants, shoes, socks, and my favorite denim jacket before setting out on the 0.3 mile walk to the coffee shop. I had avoided this walk for over a month at this point and found that I had almost forgotten the way. The sun was so bright and the air so crisp, I watched the tourists and workers dart about in their sweaters and boots, dotting the streets as they paused to examine their maps or light a cigarette. I finally felt as if I was out of captivity, but still not quite home. I began to realize the root of the truth I mentioned earlier, when it comes to making somewhere feel like home and feel safe, you get out what you put into it. In isolating myself from this community, locked into my apartment by fear and the responsibility of my first adult job, I lost my connection to it which fed into the feelings of not belonging and insecurity. It's like losing your place in a novel with too many characters and little discernible plot, how will you ever know where and how to jump back in again?

For now I'm finding that jumping back in requires a bit more dedication than I'd like to admit. I'm learning how to let the sun hit my face and how to feel safe in my own skin, in my own neighborhood. Because as I truly begin to settle in to my new home, I must remember the aforementioned adage: Wherever you go, there you are.

[somedarkhollow]

from thoughts lost like sparks from a bonfire, lingering with such ambition up, up, only to disappear into the cool indifference of a night sky, I shake back into reality. What’s real and what’s happening elsewhere are one in the same yet feel as if they’re worlds apart. I languish, as I often do, the thought of pining and pinning away as much loose change as my dear heart can muster to spend a short period of my non working hours away from wherever it is that I live and whatever it is that stresses me so. I dream of my days in Oxford, strolling along the bridge over the river, fishing for secrets as the punting boats lazily pitched and disappeared beneath the stone overture from where I linger. The disappearing boats and the evaporated spark share not the time of day but the exacting action of being and not being all in a single second. There are days where amidst my doodles the scrap of paper I’m toying with suddenly reads “I do not exist,” as if it were clever to appear amongst the chicken scratch and tiresome scrawlings of a bored, overgrown child. Yet, the text is in my handwriting and the words ring me into the present, like an alarm, overbearing and angry, shaming and shaking me awake to reconnect with the ghost town of my passions and personhood. Urging me not to slip away into the cool indifference of the night sky. No, not yet.

[somedarkhollow]

these are the glory days

there's that quote from the Office that says "I wish there was a way to know you're in "the good old days", before you've actually left them." for a series that occupied so many evenings of my early adult life, this sentiment somehow found ways to further ingrain itself into the way I experience time.

in a rare moment, I can find myself looking upon the present with nostalgia. Today I poured myself a cup of coffee after a blissful morning with my partner and opened up my trusty laptop to write this down. His music on the speaker in our home, locally roasted coffee, spending the morning moving slowly and not feeling pressed to begin the day. As I sipped my coffee I couldn't help but think about the aforementioned quote and the way nostalgia for the present can manifest itself in both good and bad. Good in that I feel connected to my life and care enough about it to let the light in from time to time, capturing photographs in my mind as time refracts in waves along the walls of our apartment as the sun sets. Bad in the ways I feel time slipping away and locking in, the unwillingness to let go of the promises that went unfulfilled in my youth, will the wildness still find me as I age? But holding on signifies nothing but greed.

About this time of the summer in past years, I'd find myself giving up on the wait for fall. I'd say "fuck it" and pull out all of my sweaters, hang my autumnal garlands and stare menacingly at the heat rippling up from the sidewalks. I've captured that angst in songs, captions, and poems like this one, but this year I'm singing a different tune. I want to love every last minute of my first summer in this new city, living with my truest love through the hottest days and finding the glory in the mundane. When fall comes I'll embrace her cold branches with no anticipation, I'll simply allow autumn to wash over me and seep into the dry, cracked parts of me that summer inflicted.

[somedarkhollow]

he’s the man that fixes my sewing machine, or at least tries.

he’s the man that lets me dry my tears with his tee shirts as he pulls me close.

he’s the man who keeps a watchful eye and makes me feel safe when things get scary.

he’s the man who learns with me as we hideaway together, slowly building a nest of our own.

he’s the man who holds my hand and jumps into the next chapter of life, the no training wheels, no safety net, parter in survival I didn’t know enough to dream about.

he’s the man who’s passionate about almost everything and will not forget to tell me all about it.

he’s the man I met in Central Park on a whim and the man I share a bed with each night.

[somedarkhollow]

I saw a video of a girl showing off her thrift store treasures. One was a small floral bowl not dissimilar to the one that sits in my cabinet as I write this. She said she hoped to use it for salads and cereal and I found myself smiling at the hopes and dreams she had for this bowl. I’ve been feeling like a little too much is set in stone lately, like the stars aligned and I like what I see but I can’t help but be the least bit curious about where they’ll go next. So much has changed so quickly and suddenly I find myself in this period of rest that I didn’t quite sign up for. While I’m feeling almost stuck in this new world I find reminders all around me of past lives, poking holes in the world that keeps spinning no matter how much I wish it could oscillate from one happy memory to another. I want to look at a bowl and assign it a new task, take up an object in my hands and redesign its meaning. But for now so rest, unwillingly, in a museum of happy things that tether me to something that feels like fiction but holds weight like fact. Perhaps that’s what’s driving my emotional disconnection these days, why I find myself crying at videos of bowls I find on the internet.

[somedarkhollow]

regional magic

I’m not sure what they put in the twilight movies and gilmore girls and certain corners of warm evenings on the east coast, but there’s something mystical there. I remember the feeling so distinctly because I spent most of my life living on the west coast. there is west coast magic, don’t get me wrong. the tears in my eyes as I drive down the pacific coast highway with my windows rolled all the way down listening to the indie alternative radio station or the coo of a morning dove in dry air or even most of Lana del Rey’s early music all contains the glittering magic of my former home region. but here I lay, belly down on my bed less than a hundred miles from where I lay the first time I felt the east coast magic. it was a warm, late summer night and the air was thick before it began to softly rain. I lay with my window pushed up ever so slightly to feel the warm air after sitting in air conditioning all day at work and lit a candle. it was earlier then, still light, I remember laying there looking up at the ceiling and not knowing how to think about the future at all, but I thought of the hustle on the freeway just a hop and a skip away from where I lay my head, I thought about new york and simon and garfunkel and falling in love. it seemed so nostalgic but somehow pulled me present. 

I’m wondering if moving to the south will reveal it’s own special kind of magic. when I lived in West Virginia I mostly felt specifically West Virginia magic. The kind that pours out of a bottle of moonshine and teaches you to be brave, almost a confrontation and private reckoning in the woods as you learn how people are just people and where the ridges connect and divide. 

Whatever the magic is in virginia, I hope I can keep the magic from the west, the east, and the hill country tucked into my jacket pocket or sewn into the hem of my skirt like little stars. I hope i can stop running and let what needs to be let go be gone. maybe the magic of virginia will be less like magic and more like a balm for the girl living out her days warped by a past she barely remembers, enchanted by magic she’ll never forget. 

[somedarkhollow]

the last view

 It’s mid march and you’re sitting on the edge of your parent’s bed staring out the large windows with your feet up on the sill. It’s not cold by New York standards but it certainly isn’t warm by California’s. Dad is in the bathroom applying sunscreen and I take a photo to post to instagram through the side of the window not gridded by a black screen. That’s it. A few months later Mom and Dad pack up the house and it’s sold very quickly and, from your vantage point back in New York City, unceremoniously. The house you lived in for fifteen years, the house next to your best friends’ house, to quote Miranda Lambert: the house that built me. And by me I mean you and by you I mean me. 

I guess this is a universal happening, the leaving of the childhood home is one thing because, seemingly, it was a timeless place you could always return to. It was a choice to leave, mine at seventeen as I moved to New Jersey for college. I was leaving so much behind, so much had happened in my seventeen years in my house on the canyon, so many things I couldn’t wait to put behind me. So much so that I didn’t find a way to make it out there to help pack up my remaining belongings and say goodbye, so much so that I haven’t looked in any of the boxes from that place. 

But there is so much I miss. By the time I moved out we had painted the walls in my room at least 3 times. We finally landed on a seafoamy light blue, it matched the Virgin Mary window cling the elderly nun we cared for when I was young gave me. That room and that tiny twin bed where I listened to every Lana del Rey song, scrolled through early tumblr, wrote down crushes names, kissed boys, made videos with friends, learned lines for every show I was in, and my resting spot each night. I remember the mourning dove coos echoing between the stucco walls, terra cotta roof tiles, and cinderblock wall between our’s and the neighbor’s side yards. I remember how misty it would get out my tiny front facing window, so misty that all I could see as I stood on my bed to look out was the eucalyptus trees in the front yard. Sometimes, if I went downstairs to get a glass of water I would look in the backyard and see the yellow street lights across the canyon looking fuzzy in the fog from the marine layer. I remember the bricks embedded with the concrete in the driveway surrounded by small bunches of weeds, even in the drought they’d still pop up there and my Dad, even with his bad knees, would kneel on the concrete to pull them up. Our neighbors had these iconic palm trees and we had an iconic pine tree, for years it grew and grew until it threatened the house and Dad took it down. 

Tonight as I laid my head on the pillow to sleep I had an idea for a song lyric, so I got up and grabbed my mandolele and began to find chords to match this line “We were the ladies of the canyon and we didn’t even know it.” I meandered along through a few more chords before coming to a chorus of “In California I’m always a kid” before I broke down sobbing. 

One memory that always feels strange to me and pops up from time to time is one from the summer between freshman and sophomore years of college. I was back in San Diego in my neighborhood and I ran into a guy I had briefly had a fling with in high school. We ended up making plans to hang out at his place the next evening and we decided to watch Footloose as our netflix and chill. I was still a virgin at this point and it seemed like that might change at the rate things were moving. I stopped him at one point and he understood, spending the rest of the movie playing with my hair and holding me. This memory feels so out of place with home. Maybe it’s because there was a glimpse of adulthood in that moment that I had yet to see in my hometown. Early adulthood, for me, was kept relegated to the college town I terrorized in New Jersey and was basically stripped away when I went home to my family in San Diego during breaks. 

Now I lie on my couch facing the window shrouded only by lace curtains. Propped up by a pillow I’m gazing upward at the high rises across the street from my modest apartment building in New York City. This is a dream I had in that small bedroom in San Diego and now in my small studio apartment in New York City I dream of being back home.