overwhelmingdread

i look for you

[tamsoj]

Robert Bly, "Depression," from A Mind Apart: Poems of Melancholy, Madness, and Addiction

[willnotbcoming]

at the last stop before the bus turns around, i’m on a bench with a bag balanced between my hands. You tend to go in downward motions, or any direction not frequented by others. you bury yourself deeply elsewhere, take three steps back when you need to. I’m at the bench where the bus stops before turning back around. the ice cream in the bag is melting despite the cold winter air. you have so much you need to do, you’ll do it before you worry about anything else. There’s a hole in the bag through which the ice cream melts, making shapes on the ground darkened by rain. Bus after another come to a halt, mistaking me for a passenger before turning, going over their route in backwards order. You’ve needed more than three steps back since elsewhere started to feel familiar. I am waiting and the ice cream stains my shoes. the wool scarf you thought i had made starts to smell like wet livestock, my eyelashes feel heavier than before. i’m at the bench where the bus makes its last stop before turning and i will stay seated. you’re not here anymore, and you haven’t been for a while, but i sit waiting for you still. if the bus goes through your path, at whichever stop you may be, i’ll be on the bench where it makes its last stop before starting over. i am waiting.

1.17.24. Waiting, excerpt from unpublished anthology; Letters to November

[willnotbcoming]

I seek warmth. Unlike the kind that my skin absorbs from a chair left soaking in a summer day’s sun. Nor the warmth spreading through my body after a long day of swimming; not that at the pit of my stomach after you had told me something I have been aching to hear. I seek warmth. The kind of warmth that stings my face upon entering a heated room after some time in the cold. The kind where I layer the covers until the discomfort of coldness fades. The kind that is adjustable, controlled. I seek warmth that remains consistent throughout a vacant winter. No matter how many times you seat yourself before a gas heater, you will always be met with the same warmth; you will go through cycles, the moon will shift in its phases; you will leave your first home, and fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time. You will feel cold on the hottest day of summer. But the moment you return, it shall offer the same consistent heat. As long as the weather outside is cold, it will meet you with an everloving warmth. I seek this warmth, but I am trapped in a never-ending month of July; this warmth is not one that I seek, this warmth suffocates; it controls me with an unwelcoming shrug. I sit on this long solstice day, longing for a kind of warmth that only the coldest of winters can grant.

i seek warmth. excerpt from unpublished work: Letters to November 6.21.21

[flowerytale]

Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vanessa Bell (August 1908)

[willnotbcoming]

i tried. i stepped out and into what others perceive to be the world. i wore different shoes. I thought of a life far removed from you, from everything we talked about. I remember the effort i had given, I remember closing my eyes and clenching my fists and imagining myself living a peaceful life with someone. I imagined settling, if that’s what it was. I imagined accepting a role i had been fighting since birth. Maybe i’ll grow to love it, maybe i will develop motherly instincts if i find someone worth having children for.

the frustration grew, there was no one else i would have wanted to settle with. A creek still runs through towns with old houses i was no longer interested in. Nothing sounded good. It was unfair to everyone involved, i could not settle if I could not cross over the bridge of what we had wanted for each other. If that life was not for us, then that life is not for me in any other way.

Alone, that’s what I will do. I don’t have to hurt anyone if i settle for myself. I still want you, i still want to sit by the creek that runs through the town with old houses with you. I still want to live in an old house with you. I still do.

1.16.24 letters to november