the ‘i give in so easily’ tiktok meme, but it’s me sitting here thinking about doing nanowrimo again even though i have all my masters work to do and also my life is currently a smoking wreckage
so i had a book project for letterpress and book, which i decided to end with this quote i love from ‘night in the woods’, and when i was printing i made myself an extra print on pink paper so i could hang it up, and also because there’s something really funny about using such old tech to print a quote from a video game
[image description: a sheet of pink heavily textured paper with the following text letterpress printed on it in black ink; “nothing can save us forever, but a lot of things can save us today- mae borowski, night in the woods”]
On a summer night, Ophelia awakens from a terrible vision: in four days, everyone in Elsinore Castle will be dead. Even worse, she’s been thrown into a time loop from which she cannot escape. Forced to relive the same four days over and over again, Ophelia determines to do everything in her power to change the future.
After years of development, our narrative time-looping game Elsinore is releasing on June 24th. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re proud to have made a game which features a diverse world full of characters from all walks of life. You can show your support by wishlisting us on Steam here or giving us a reblog on this post.
I strongly encourage everyone to check this game out! i’ve been watching it’s development for i think at least two years, and i’ve logged some hours (not as many as i’d like, life exists) in early access on steam. as a lover of slightly unconventional games, shakespeare, and narrative experimentation, elsinore is a freaking delight.
So, as most of you know, I am ostensibly a writer, and I need to remember to post about the fact that I'm a writer. Currently, I'm working on a collection I hope to put together and publish, tentatively titled 'from the depths' and it will be entirely poems dealing with themes of water and ocean life. In the meantime, don't forget there are tons of places you can support me by reading or purchasing my work!
Reading:
my website: https://www.mxsarahbat.com/
my twitter: https://twitter.com/battywrites
Buy my work:
like my blog? buy me kofi: http://ko-fi.com/battywrites
Gumroad (cheap pdfs of my self published work!):
https://gumroad.com/sarahbat
Amazon: "in a box; under the bed" (a collection of personal epistolary poems) https://www.amazon.com/box-under-bed-collection-epistolary/dp/1530304741/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1547767502&sr=1-2
"Modern Maiden's Guide to Grief, Misery, and Other Misfortunes" (my thesis project. a collection of stories and narratives adapted from classics, myths, and history for the modern era, focusing on marginalized groups and giving back power) https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Maidens-Guide-Misery-Misfortunes/dp/1979476403/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1547767502&sr=1-1
i don’t know what to do with it, this feeling i cannot name. disconnection but not quite disassociation. adrift, but land within sight. like the vague nausea i feel before i get the hiccups, and somehow always forget proceeds me getting the hiccups.
a vagueness, building somewhere, me left wondering what it is. where it’s going.
sometimes emptiness has a weight, and that is the feeling in my chest, like my heart was a balloon full of the world’s heaviest gas. there’s nothing there but it’s sinking down, down, down.
the way the mental and the physical bleed together, sitting on the sofa, thinking about the slow throb in my ribs
is the pain in my chest, or my chest? i don’t know how to tell anymore. i don’t know if they’re different anymore.
how do you know if the way your body feels is wrong when it’s the only way you have ever felt?
i had only ever used it broken, how was i supposed to know.
i never used to cry and now i cry all the time. like i thought i was stopping the faucet from leaking but i just unhooked the water line. but one day it rained and rained and rained, and the pipes rusted and leaked and leaked and rusted and they drip into the old damp chipboard cabinets.
this body is cold and damp, but it is home.
like a hermit crab who crawled into a shell much to big for him and never left, it is my only home.
like skin that doesn’t fit
like bones that knock and chafe
like a body made from spare parts and worn thread
like a heart made to break
i know it’s silly to fear something as certain as death.
in the end, no one will ever escape it, so,
what’s the point?
i guess, maybe, the point is i don’t really fear death, but loss
and death is the only loss you cannot hope someday comes back to you.
i guess this is why people believe in the afterlife. heaven. ghosts. reincarnation.
we are desperate for a way to undo what can’t be undone, to find a way to bring back things that have been lost to us.
maybe death is just a place where lost things go.
maybe the silver ring i could never find is just as dead as my grandmother, as my father, as my mother’s best friend.
maybe heaven is a place for things that can’t ever go home again.
a dog that ran away. a father who left. a teddy bear, dropped unseen during a family vacation.
maybe the afterlife is full of lost loves and left socks.
maybe dying is just a cardboard box labelled lost and found
i am so blessed that my last memories with you are happy ones.
i don’t know why this memory always stands out to me, but when i miss you i think of you, me, and mom in that mcdonalds in monterey in the middle of the night. you wanted french fries, so we went in after spending a day in town, and actually sat down and ate in the restaurant. i had fries, and vanilla soft serve, and a coke. and we sat in that mcdonalds, talking and laughing, and it was the summer my dad moved out, and everything felt so light.
that same trip, we went to asilomar beach, and we sat in your van on the side of the road and watched the sunset over the ocean. we were waiting to see if we could see the green flash, the moment the sun finally sunk into the sea. and i swear to god we saw it. sometimes, being around you was magic like that.
the last time i saw you in person was the first time i ever ate salted caramel. it always makes me think of you, now. you came to visit mom and i, just for the day, and we drove to yountville and sonoma, and we bought fancy sweets and bread and lunchmeat. you bought a container of salted caramels at bouchon and shared them with mom and i.
after my mom told me you died, i went and got a salted caramel frappucino, because you were also the first person to give me caffeinated coffee. (we were at a gymnastics meet for michael and katie; i left my guiness book of world records in your car.) i walked on the beach and poured some of the coffee into the foaming ocean waves.
the last time we spoke was over the phone, sitting in my mom’s car in the dark safeway parking lot after my high school graduation. you told me you loved me. you told me you were proud of me.
i wish you could see me now. i wish you could see me graduated from college, holding down a steady job, living with the love of my life.
one of my earliest memories is of your house. i don’t know how old i was, but i was young. i was going over for a sleepover with katie, all by myself, for the first time. we met you half way between our houses, for lunch. i’m pretty sure it was an applebees. we took katie to gymnastics that night, and it was storming, and you drove me around in the rain. then it started hailing. we stopped by the side of the road, by this vast, icy puddle, and gathered hail stones into a water bottle, so katie could see them. we put them in your freezer. you saved them for years.
i don’t know if i believe in the afterlife, but wherever you are, i hope you’re happy.
i hope things are easier for you there than they were while you were alive.
i hope you know you are loved, and missed, every single day.
i wrote this at work. i have a lot of complicated feelings about my father. these are some of them
content notes: familial death, alcoholism, mentions of verbal abuse, cancer
it’s your birthday today and on saturday it will have been four years since you died
and i still don’t know how to feel
or how i do feel
(either or)
the last time i spoke to you
(other than when you were dying) was december 19th, 2012
i remember the exact date because it was the same day my mother, your ex wife of nearly twenty years, was having a cancerous tumor removed from her breast
which was the only reason i was speaking to you
you were on the (long) list of people i was updating and fielding texts from
i was exhausted and stressed and scared
and the last thing i wanted to do was play phone tag with my verbally abusive father
so when you kept texting, leaving voicemails
i bit the bullet
i ripped off the bandaid
(pick any metaphor you want, anything works as long as it hurts)
and i called you
and i explained to you, as calmly as a nineteen year old girl whose mother was in surgery could, once i knew anything i would text everyone and let them know
i wasn’t ignoring you
i just didn’t know anything yet
(We ended up spending sixteen hours in that hospital waiting room)
and you
you, ever the asshole, ever juvenile and selfish
told me you were ‘sorry for caring’
the next day, when we finally got to go home, i told my mother what you said
and she told me i never had to speak to you again
and what does it say about you, about me, about us, that when I think of you, of your death
this is always what i think of
your voice, biting and sarcastic over a phone call in a hospital waiting room
“sorry for caring”
breaking my heart all over again from a different state
i talked to you again, one more time, while you were dying
sometime in that endless week between when mom told me you went into the hospital and when she left work early on october 6th 2014
(it was a monday)
telling me she needed to ‘talk to me’
and i knew you had died
i don’t remember anything you said to me
i told you i didn’t forgive
(i still haven’t)
i told you i loved you
(i still don’t know if i meant it)
the next day, mom talked to you, and you had no memory of speaking to me
and when you finally died, i think it was the first time i ever really let myself be mad at you
because––
of course you got to forget
got to die
and leave me, barely an adult, struggling with the things you did
and you died
and i lived with the consequences of your actions
and it’s fitting, because you were always so goddamn good at playing the victim
so good at blaming the alcohol or the past or your parents or my mother or me
you never once gave me an apology that wasn’t selfish, wasn’t meant to ease your guilt instead of my pain
so it’s fitting that even in death, you were selfish
burning down the house and dying in the blaze,
leaving the rest of us to burn our hands cleaning up the mess you left behind.
i don’t know what to do with it, this feeling i cannot name. disconnection but not quite disassociation. adrift, but land within sight. like the vague nausea i feel before i get the hiccups, and somehow always forget proceeds me getting the hiccups.
a vagueness, building somewhere, me left wondering what it is. where it’s going.
sometimes emptiness has a weight, and that is the feeling in my chest, like my heart was a balloon full of the world’s heaviest gas. there’s nothing there but it’s sinking down, down, down.
the way the mental and the physical bleed together, sitting on the sofa, thinking about the slow throb in my ribs
is the pain in my chest, or my chest? i don’t know how to tell anymore. i don’t know if they’re different anymore.
how do you know if the way your body feels is wrong when it’s the only way you have ever felt?
i had only ever used it broken, how was i supposed to know.
i never used to cry and now i cry all the time. like i thought i was stopping the faucet from leaking but i just unhooked the water line. but one day it rained and rained and rained, and the pipes rusted and leaked and leaked and rusted and they drip into the old damp chipboard cabinets.
this body is cold and damp, but it is home.
like a hermit crab who crawled into a shell much to big for him and never left, it is my only home.
like skin that doesn’t fit
like bones that knock and chafe
like a body made from spare parts and worn thread
like a heart made to break
photos of the set up for my thesis defense back in november of 2017! over a year of my life went into this final project (book available here!) and i am so gosh darn proud! information on the project and contents of the boxes can be found here
i know nothing image based has image descriptions for screenreaders, and i really hope to start getting those typed and posted in the next few days but i just don’t have the spoons today, so it’s going to happen in stages <3
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
areudirty
snowghoul
janainaart
vaporwave
