not sure where to start

“We have a moral imperative to keep up the search for something better than mutually assured destruction.”

James D. Watkins

We were born out of something strange. There was a mutual pain, a mutual pain-deliverance. We came together because neither of us could have the one we really wanted, and we could wallow in the devastation of that together. It felt good to touch you because it was almost like touching him – I think you felt the same. It shattered me to know that no matter what we did, we never could have been enough for each other. It frustrated us both, to look at each other and need something more. To need him. When he hurt us, there was a softer version of him waiting within each other. We could touch this version, hold this version, tell the truth to this version, eat this version whole and not get a stomach ache. And even though he was the reason we did anything together from our origin, the blinding pain of his actions the blight of our lives, I don’t think we could have loved each other without him. The pain he inflicted on us was crucial to our stability. His neglect was the foundational rock of our city. We would have crumbled apart if he did not inflict the wounds we gathered around to lick clean. He did leave, and we did crumble.

These are old pains, years old, and I can no longer feel the blood dripping from the cut. But sometimes when I am feeling alone, I will run my hand across the raised scar left behind and remember that I was not always on my own.

“Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.”

Arthur Shopenhauer

I am not the bad guy. I am not the bad guy. I just have bad thoughts. I can’t control that, right? That doesn’t make me a terrible person? I am selfish and arrogant and conceited and angry and self-sabotaging, but only in my head. I hold it all in my head because if I let it out that would make me bad, right? If I just keep it all to myself and quiet my cries and hurt only when no one is around to witness then I can still be worthy of love, right? Someone will still want me? All I have to do is be silent. If I can hold everything within myself, if I can avoid certain topics lest a sentence escapes that I would desperately try to return to safety with no avail, then I will still be a good person. I have to be. I’m not in control of my emotions, but I can pretend that I am. I can pretend that the sickness in my stomach is not ever-present, that the bile in my throat doesn’t choke me daily. Purse your lips so that nothing can get through. Close your eyes so that you won’t watch anyone’s face for too long, hoping that they can see what is true within you and want you around regardless. I have an evil seed pit festering in my organs, wrapping itself seductively around my intestines and popping my alveoli with pointed fangs and strangling the life out of my liver with its sinewy being. Did I swallow the seed? Did she grow from who I already was? Please, dear God, tell me that she is not intrinsically me. If I swallowed her, maybe she will die in the unfamiliar temperatures underneath my skin. Maybe the habitat will become unsustainable, because she is placing hatred where hatred does not belong, and she will shrivel up and wither away and I can move again. But if she grew from me, if I harvested her from my own womb and implanted her within my bloodstream, there is nothing I can do to stop her. I fear endlessly that I am her mother, and she my child. If the sinister within me is truly one with my body, what hope do I have for survival? Perhaps I will survive, but it will be in twisted retribution, a woman scorned by her own fingertips, and that is a life worse than death.

“And suddenly, we were stranger again.”

Anonymous

To You, My Severed Arm

My face goes red when your door closes

I stomp around and scream and become a child

I cannot explain why

I get no message when you are gone for hours

Did we have plans?

I suppose it does not matter now

I am going to bed

I will not lock the door because you do not have your key

I will turn off your bedside light for you

I will leave a bowl of chicken and rice on your shelf in the fridge

You will laugh and dance and kiss and be delighted

You spend the night in comfort with something more than I want to give to you

I will leave a bowl of chicken and rice on your shelf in the fridge

I am alone in this apartment as I will be in my own

Some city or another

Nowhere near Seattle

Nowhere near you

It is empty but I stick my hand back into the tree stump

I feel around

You are not inside

I do not exist

Do you need to be kissed more than you need to be a friend?

Must you go so effortlessly?

Maybe you have fallen to the bottom of the tree stump

That is it, that must be it, I will come get you

I feel around

You are not inside

I do not exist

You cannot, you must not see me now

I hope the kiss feels nice

I do not exist

I will leave a bowl of chicken and rice on your shelf in the fridge

“Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame. “

Benjamin Franklin

I stomp my foot and I am an angry child. Why, why, why? I throw something to watch it break, but I get more frustrated because it does not. I cannot clear the rage from my head; it is singeing the tips of my fingers and lighting my hair on fire from the root. I scratch and scratch, desperately and with fervor, at every inch of my blazing skin to make it stop. I hate to feel this feeling. I hate myself for feeling it. It lived in me as a seed, exiting my body only to return a fully fleshed beast that I can no longer quell. This feeling is not a part of me because it cannot be; I am sweet, and simple, and filled with nectar. I cannot make poison. But it stands in my mirror wearing my face and twisting my words, and I cannot deny that I recognize her. Can I hurt her without hurting me? She is me, but I am not her. Can I cut her from me like a tumor, snip her as a rotting leaf from my vine? Anything? Is there anything?

“For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, […] and these selves of which we are built up, one on top of the other, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own… so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not there… and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.”

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

I have grown exponentially. There is a childlike giddiness in realizing that you react differently than you might have 1, or 3, or 5 years ago. This change, this growth, it is real; it is no longer the item that adults tell you you will possess with hindsight and experience. You have earned it through challenge and anger and you shed the skin of the being you were (although, do not be fooled; she lives within you yet) to reveal someone proud of their change. You are wearing a shiny blue and gold ribbon pinned to your shirt.

That makes it all the more infuriating when I think of you. I know I am me. I am the me I have worked so painstakingly to craft. But when I think of you, I am the me I scream at. I am the me I cower from in my memory and would erase from my mind if I could find a way. I am the me who is scared, insecure, alone. I would shelter her from you if I could, but the me I am now does not exist in my memory. She is alone there. I will sink back within her in search of comfort and warmth, and you will never meet me. You will only see her, and you know what you are capable of doing to her. I hate you for it.

Maybe one day, in the far or near future, I will introduce the two of you. I will warp her into me, and you will be forced with the confrontation, the storm, she deserved to give you but was not strong enough to wield. And then I will feel peace. Or, perhaps, it will make me even angrier, although I cannot imagine the feeling. What can be more violent, more all-encompassing and raging, than my storm?

Regardless, there will be a time where you cannot touch me or her. We will both be free, and I will cradle her in my arms until I am ready to make peace with her existence, both her mistakes and her heartache. She will always be me, but I have not always been her. I have grown.

For now,

G.D.

“She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she’d forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them. “

Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting

Why do I feel so disconnected? Why does time feel like it is simply passing, and I am no longer experiencing anything? How can I feel so deeply that I am a failure when in actuality I am not failing a single course? Am I only failing myself?

Why am I unable to plan, to arrange, to organize in any way the world that I am supposed to navigate? I no longer feel like myself, or maybe I feel the most like myself, or maybe I feel like nothing at all and everything at once. What do “I” truly feel like? What version of me is the real me, if any of them are? Is it an amalgamation of every version, or the one I like the most, or the one I like the least? Because truly, deeply, I do not know. The woman who writes every sentence is a different creation; all women having a conversation with herself and each other about the collective hand that picks up the pen. And not a single one of these women knows a definitive truth about any of the others, only her own mind and words and thoughts; yet despite this, they will be destined to share one mind, one mouth, one hand, one pen. I am desperate to pluck one of them up from my head, situate her between the tips of my two fingers, and force her to tell me who is real. This would garner nothing, not a peep, because none of them know any more than I. Can I be no one? It must feel nice to be no one.

In truth, I feel no sadness at the thought of being forgotten about by history. Why should I care?; was I loved while I was here? Why should I be concerned about becoming the past if I will not even be present to observe the future? For all purposes, it is probably best to be forgotten after everyone who has loved you has died. I will not be warped as some Jesus figure; distorted by time, human error, turned into a beast I had never become. So many authors write, create, discuss, as a desperate attempt for someone to please, Dear God, do not forget me, let me be remembered so I cannot cease to exist!!! Entirely ridiculous. No one cheats death, existence. You will die. Nothing will change that. A moment will arise where you, both your physical form and any remnants of you, will cease to exist. Just as one day, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Austen, van Gogh, will be forgotten, so will I. Whether it is one day or 500 years, you will be left behind, and it will not matter when because you will not be here to see it. This is in no way meant to be upsetting; rather, a comfort. When you are forgotten, no one will twist you. You cannot be an icon, a figure-head. Because who are we, when all of our humanity is stripped from us and we are left with nothing but fact? What do I care that you wrote a book, or were born years prior to your death and died years after your birth, if I do not know what song you hum to comfort yourself or how you liked to wear your hair? Your book, your art, your creation, is not your humanity; you die, and your work takes on a life of its own. So what is the reason you fear being forgotten? Perhaps I will never know. I do know I will never share your fear, because I have loved life and been loved by life, and that is enough for me.

“People are different from each other.”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Life is moving so swiftly, yet excitingly. I have promptly decided that romance is, in fact, not for me – at least for the time being. I have more important things to focus on, such as my academic prospects and the ever-looming job hunt for anything applicable to my field. While terrifying, this new phase of my life is quite promising, and I look forward to the fruits of a steady career.

Yet, for the present moment, I remain a student to literature. My every moment is consumed in the pages of numerous books. I wake up to write. I wake up to read. I wake up to comprehend, illustrate, create, discuss. It is exhilarating, and nothing was ever more exhausting. I must admit I have never been one to balance multiple projects with grace; this weighs upon me the further into the academic year as new accounts are piling. I am tired, yes, but with the removal of outside responsibilities, the load seems lighter and my heart feels, on a physical level as well as emotional, so much stronger; it allows me to breathe easier.

I will update with any large news or new feelings. As for this moment, everything feels calm; although this may simply be the eye of the storm.

For now,

G.D.

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths.”

Virginia Woolf, Sketch of the Past

I do not feel that I have a singular moment to breathe. Even in the lulls where I am able to sit and muse, there is forever a stale thought lingering in the background of my memory; its acidity invades my tongue and rips me from my peace, forcing me into action. Some thing, permanently shrouded, floats around the rim of my sight, just out of reach, taunting me with its blurred outline and begging me to chase it. I wish these thoughts would retract, allow me sleep, yet they pervade my mind with insistence. How can I be expected to look behind me, understand the weight of my actions, and continue on wiser if there is a wall indefinitely placed, as an act of God, on my backward path?

I feel most days that I am not cut out for romance. The weight of it too heavy, too unlike the ecstasy of imagination, for me to fathom. If I should hold her, the love I could manifest, she would be opaque, blackened with soot, and heavier than something I ever might have grabbed off of the floor or some shelf; it was merely placed into my hands, prophesied to sink with some otherworldly urgency. In childhood, she was cloudy, milky white, as the froth accumulating on the world built between the wave and the land, and I could toss her ballooned figure up with giddy, naïve joyfulness. She was nothing more than the car ride after coming home from school, and a grandmother cooing with a syrupy sweetness at your shining golden hair. Not a complication, or a restriction, or some hidden code for you to decipher. Simply a softness in a wicker basket.

For now,

G.D.

“Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.”

Vita Sackville-West

As a child, I had such fervor for writing. Every moment was ripe with inspiration, every detail shoved into a pocket by grubby little hands to write down for later. I owe much of this to my upbringing; my grandmother had an unbelievable impact on the earlier years of my life, as she cared after me while my mother worked. She had a passion for literature which she bestowed upon me with adamant pressure. She has scrapbooks of pages covered with my infant scribbles, telling me that it was simply me creating a story before I knew about words.

As I got older, and with the introduction of personalized technology, the want to create flittered through my fingers. I could no longer see stories hidden in sidewalk cracks or milk cartons. With this rush of worldly information sitting in my hands, I was wholly enveloped with the pleasure of literature I did not have to create.

I wish more than anything that I had the time, or the juvenile imagination, to create stories as passionately as I had in my earlier youth. There is a mourning of the art that could have been created.

For now,

G.D.

“Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

Virginia Woolf

There is nothing quite so breathtaking and terrible and powerful as a woman in anguish. I can see this reckoning, but I am not myself in anguish. I am in nothing, entirely. Perhaps I am in boredom, or in waiting. There is not much that arises in me the power that a woman may contain in her breast. To move the sky and rehome the seas is truly a woman’s power. Observable, yes, but obtainable? If you may not feel the lightning jar within you, dear reader, that is alright – I lack its pull, as well.

With such a power comes the burden of its emotional weight, the entirely overwhelming and constant tug downwards into your own being that, if it is to succeed, would have you never speak again. You cannot always fight. Sometimes, you shall be tasked with weighing the cost of fury against the loss of sanity. When your rationale is to win, you may be in boredom or in waiting like I.

Remember that, even when hidden, you possess the jar. You are merely saving it for a day when you can unleash it in all of its monstrous glory.

For now,

G.D.