I believe you

"I'd love a 5 minute spoken word poem that said 'I believe you' over and over."
There are the dark, ugly things inside. The things people don't talk about. The things I don't talk about because it feels like this soft, fragile outer shell and I am afraid even one wrong move will crack its gentle interior.
I used to write openly and perhaps what some would define as bravely about my struggle with chronic illness. But the bold days of undiagnosed (where I had to write to give this thing a voice and the only other option was to be suffocated by it) have faded into these days of knowing exactly what this monster is lurking inside your body but being unable to fight it because it is both in you and of you, and I of it.
Some days I am wildly accepting of this truth in my life. I accept that my illness has created this order, even if it looks like chaos to me, and that rather than rage against what I cannot change I must find the courage to embrace it. I accept that some parts of my body look different than others, the same way leaves on the trees are different shades of green and yellow and red, and yet we do not yell at the tree for having such colors. There are days when I can settle in with my breath, in this body, when I can whisper to every single cell in my being, "Show me what you have to teach me today."
Those are my becoming days. It is on those days I feel strong, feel like I am doing this whole life with chronic illness thing right.
But there is no guidebook on living life with a chronic, genetic illness that is both in you and of you and at times feels like it has it's hands around your throat. And I am not always accepting of this reality.
There are days when the anger inside me bubbles up, and I cannot contain its strength. I am angry at this body, at myself for not protecting myself from this unknown invasion, at my emotions for daring to feel the heavy brunt of this load, at the world around me and the sun for daring to shine and people for daring to smile and my friends for talking about skating on frozen ponds and crushes while I am confined to life inside this body.
I suffer from the need to be near to people, find myself clinging to their warmth and security when I feel I cannot muster up my own. The ones closest to me, I turn their bodies into blankets and pray it will keep me from this oncoming storm.
And I am afraid. I am so afraid and I wonder how it is that I can be afraid of myself. There are times in the night when I wake, my breath caught in my throat, unable to think or make a noise, unable to escape from living inside my head. The night is worse, when panic runs wild and I cannot distract myself with the regularities of the day.
There is sadness too, the kind that makes me want to stay in bed all day with the covers over my head. Because my life has changed drastically and sometimes I am unable to cope with everything I have lost. I at times feel hysterical (though according to Eve Ensler, "Hysteria is a word to make women feel insane for knowing what they know.")
It is a world I don't expect anyone to understand, one I don't even understand myself. And yet I feel as though I have to defend my right to live in it. With no one around me understanding the depths of this, I must scream out my own feelings and fight my own battles and find courage to keep getting back up and daring to live life in a world that has repeatedly assaulted me over and over again even when I feel there is no courage, and at times I feel too small an animal to handle these tasks.
It is lonely, in this neck of the woods.
When I heard these words from the poet Andrea Gibson this morning, tears pricked my eyes. How wonderful it is to know that another soul on this planet has felt, and desires, the same things I have and do. They are the words I long to hear, as my hands shake and the emotions cover and I am gasping for air and sense in this maddening world. And as I crave them deeply, I say them back to a world that has not given me them as many times as it should have: "I believe you, I believe you, I believe you."

Today Means Amen

Dear you, whoever you are, however you got here, this is exactly where you are supposed to be

There are the days that empty, and the days that fill. There are days when it feels like my heart is going to explode, when I take in and absorb and receive so much I feel nothing but nourished and fed, taken care of and held.

This moment has waited it's whole life for you. This moment is the lover and you are the solider, Come home, baby, it's over. You don't need to suffer anymore

Today is the day when I sat cross legged in the middle of the room in my 8am class and felt like a little kid again.
Today is the day when I took a walk with people I barely know and listened to them talk about their days and why they are here and all the little things in life
Today is the day when an amazing friend comes in, takes my hand, listens to my story, prays over me some of the most beautiful words I've ever heard, and then we have coffee
Today is the day where I ate lunch with some incredible people, sharing stories and laughter and making memories
Today is the day when I laid on the floor of my dorm room in a patch of sunshine and listened to spoken word poetry
Today is the day when I played a board game for 2 hours, then watched a movie and smiled until my face hurt

The word today means amen in every language. Today we made it, today I'm going to love you, today

Today I can only sit back and look at these people, this life I never thought I wanted, all the experiences that brought me to this place and feel thankful. The healing is hard, but it's the beginning of something beautiful.

Dear you, and I have always meant you, nothing would be the same if you did not exist
This moment is a Hallelujah, this moment is your permission slip to finally open the love letter you've been hiding from yourself
You made it. You made it
Here

Quotes taken from Today Means Amen by Sierra Demulder

To the greatest teachers

In seventh grade, my teacher read us a story about knots. Don't ask me what it was called, or why we were reading it (But I believe it was for some kind of book report) but I remember at the time thinking there was something crazy about the story of this boy who had a fascination with knots.
I also felt like I understood this boy.
When I was little I would tie my shoelaces into so many knots, and then race to see how fast I could untie them. I pretended I was the most amazing knot un-tier in the whole world.
This morning I sat down to write a practice English diploma on a source we had just read, a poem. The question was about how situations shape a person's destiny, and the source was about a woman who referred to herself as tangled.
As I sat there in the computer lab, I thought of this story, and my seventh grade teacher. I could almost hear his voice in my head as I sat down to write.


My days consisted of tying and untying knots, always trying to make something beautiful with the strands of curled rope I found lying limp between my fingers. When my seventh grade teacher read us a story about a boy who untied knots, I knew I finally had a name for my turbulence. I called it tangled.


When I finished writing, I turned on my phone only to find the news that Maya Angelou had died. I'm not a particularly familiar with a lot of Maya's work, though I do admire the courageous steps she has taken to create space in the world for women and artists and I think she is a very wise woman.
But I thought of a time last summer, when I was going through a particularly rough season, and I turned on a documentary on Maya Angelou on TV. There was one quote she said, about love liberating, that has always stuck with me. At the time, it inspired me to write my own little piece on all the different places my heart was living at that moment, and how while there were a lot of people who weren't with me in the present moment I could set them free because I loved them.
Still, when I think back on that night, I remember that quote.


I never believed that I wouldn't reach that place where I would stumble upon myself and reach out with open arms, saying "There you are" like all this time I'd just been a little backwards in my directions


Since celebrating grad this weekend, I've experienced the seemingly inevitable low that follows an amazing event. There's trying to become reoriented with my life once again. There's been planning for the future, and a lot of who I thought I'd be by now. In light of the recent shooting that happened, I've been writing a lot, and thinking a lot, about feminism and triggers and mental illness and abuse and the kind of world I want to grow old in.
More importantly I've been thinking about the kind of person I want to be.
I remember something one of the speaker's at my grad said, which is "May you be kind, may you be safe, may you be happy"
And I've always said I wanted to be happy
But I also want to be kind
I want to be loving
I want to always learn and teach and laugh and grow and maybe even cry some and keep creating beautiful things as long as I live
I want to always stay a little bit of the girl that Mr. Brown thought I was, how he taught me to believe in myself even when I didn't feel like it
And I want to always be a bit of the woman I felt like watching that Maya Angelou documentary, which is always speaking the truth and living in love and overcoming the things that wish to overcome you
And I want to always stay true to who I am
In yoga we say something like "We acknowledge all of our teachers, and we acknowledge the heart, the greatest teacher of all"
I have been blessed with amazing teachers, in all different ways. I have been given a heart, which has become my greatest teacher
All that is left is to never stop learning


I am poetry and hot coffee, falling in love too easily and using my heart as a metaphor for too many things. I am still tangled, always tangled, but I’m getting better at learning how to untie knots. And I’m learning which knots to leave tied because these are the knots that point me towards my destiny. 
I am walking towards my destiny at full speed and face first. Even if it means entering the dark for a while. I know now something I didn’t know the first time I entered the dark, and something that has made all the difference.
I now know how to untie knots. 

Trigger Warning (Maybe I need you)

There will be days when the fear of disappointment will sit so heavily on your chest it is paralyzing
He says this is okay
It feels like anything but okay
There are days when you can't deny the undeniable craving to be close to another human being, to rest your head on your shoulder and let them remind you that you are not an island
I've been here before, forced myself to believe it so many times, but still it's always a little hard to swallow
I am not an island
I am not a metaphor
I am not broken
I am not unworthy
I repeat the words over in my head like a mantra
I am not...
I am not...
I am...


There is a line in a poem by Shane Koyczan that says "For all intensive purposes you were alone in the womb, there was no one there to tell you that this is going to hurt. And it did and it does but it still remains a fond memory for your parents"
I've been thinking a lot recently about the languages I speak most fluently: music and poetry and metaphors.
I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a poet, to be a woman, to be a grown up, to be a human being. To be in love and what it means to be a mother and I'm trying to figure out this thing God made called a person.
I often feel like I am wearing my insides on my outsides.
Because of the things I've gone through in my life, I often feel a little bit fragile, a little bit out of sorts, always slightly disoriented like I have been looking into the sun for too long. There's always that part of me that seems to need the label Handle with Care written right across the front, alongside the words fragile and breakable
Because of this I often find myself walking into sharp edges and salty things and lemons and trigger warnings
There is no one here to tell me that this is going to hurt
There are days when it feels like the entire world needs to be labeled with a trigger warning. Every moment is a memory, and my heart is a little more fragile than it is on any other given day. I can't construct a shell big enough to wrap all the way around, can't find a way to keep it from falling off
There are days when I am so busy taping and gluing my heart shaped cast that everything else feels like work. I demand too much patience, too much grace, and can get frustrated easily.
Trigger warning
There is no one here to tell me that this is going to hurt.
There are days when it feels like my world needs a trigger warning
There are days when I wish someone was here to tell me that this will hurt more than you care to admit
That this is ok
That you are not a metaphor
You are not a poem
You are not defined by how he looks at you, or what she says about you, or disappointing either of them
You are not an island
You are not a horror movie, hate crime in recovery, bruised and bloodied victim the world forgot about
You are a human
You are beautiful
You are...

Dialog with a stripper

The idea of becoming scares me

I think there are moments when every writer forgets they are actually a writer. Suddenly you become the worst person in the world, and your mind is filled with words like lazy and unproductive and destined to fail. This is called the inside of my head when I am going through writer's block.

I sat in English class this morning, where my teacher read us a poem written during the siege of Sarajevo. The poet said that writing through the war was hard, but what was harder was not writing.

She asked us to write our responses, and I wrote that writers get naked for a living.

It's a line in a poem by Rudy Francisco, in which he compares being a writer to being a stripper.

A certain degree of honesty, and probably fearless stupidity, is needed to share your soul with the world. The most intimate, honest details of yourself are on display for other people and some people call me brave.

He looked in my eyes and told me this was a good starting place, but a starting place for what?

What will honesty and a few pennies in my back pocket buy me?

And when they say love doesn't pay the bills they mean it.

One of my biggest fears is that I will lose myself to a job I hate, to a life I resent, to something that feels forced and so unlike me.

Writing is one of those careers that makes people question your sanity. Writers always get this reputation for being crazy, and maybe we are.

Maybe it takes a little bit of crazy to bear your soul for the world to see, to turn your deepest failures and disappointments into poetry, to stand naked in front of people you've never even met, and some you have, and bear your soul, saying "Will you take this for me?"

Sometimes I'm scared that they will break it.

Most times I remember I don't have a whole lot left to lose.

I'm not sure which one scares me more.

When I was little, the first time I heard the word stripper used in a sentence, I laughed. As I got older, I began to see more of myself in the moment when I'd first heard that word. I was always taking off layers, spreading myself thin trying to get attention and fill this void inside of me. My sanity was a small price to pay for feeling worthy.

You probably know more of my secrets than you think you do.

And don't get me wrong, I love what I do. I can't imagine doing anything else. Writing is like breathing the purest oxygen, it's making love all over again every time I pick up the pencil and put it to paper, it's how I'm finding my sanity again.

But there are days when I am lost in the business of it all, when being a struggling artist sounds less romantic and more desperate, when self doubt plagues my mind and writer's block leaves me lacking inspiration and creativity and the feeling of fullness I have come to marvel at as it blossoms to life inside of me.

There are days when being a writer feels a lot like being a stripper, and I wonder why I'm standing here naked, bearing my soul with all it's scars and tattered edges.

I tell my version of the truth, hand my heart over to people with whom it will never be properly introduced. Sometimes I forget to tie my shoelaces and end up tripping over myself on my way out the front door to make something beautiful.

Sometimes my beautiful ambition turns into standing on the street corner with a bloody nose and a bruised eye without my clothes. My soul is dangling outside of my body and I wonder why I love this job so much.

Sometimes the things you love have the power to destroy you. And sometimes they also have the power to put you back together.

For me, writing is both. It is my destroyer, and my redeemer. It is everything beautiful, the first thing I want to do when I wake up in the morning, the thing I want to spend my whole life doing, how I interpret the world.

It is messy and honest and bold and beautiful and if you give me five minutes of your time I'll entertain you by stripping down to my soul and letting you sneak a peek.

I only ask that you are gentle with it.

Because after the night is over and I've covered my soul with layers again I still have to go home.

I have always belonged to the light (National Poetry Writing Month)

April is National Poetry month and this year I have the privilege of joining some amazing writers in participating in Napowrimo, or national poetry writing month. Basically the goal of this is to write one poem every day for the month of April
It has turned out to be challenging. Most of what I've been writing has been squeezed into small bits of time, rushed elegance.
Many, if not all, of the poems I've written this month (6 so far) have been dedicated to a person. A guy in an interview I read, someone I met over lunch, my younger self, someone who changed my life.
And by writing these poems, carving out these moments for elegance and beauty and poetry, dedicating them to people, it feels almost like a spiritual practice, like for a brief moment in time everything else falls away and there is just me, and God, and love and beauty.
So while this month is shaping up to be a challenging one, it is always turning out to be rewarding.
This is something I wrote today, unedited and lacking in proper elegance, but none the less poetry
This is my heart speaking poems


He told me my eyes looked brighter today
I imagined kaleidoscope colors spinning like a pinwheel
reminded of six years old and peppermint ice cream
of the days before my light was stolen and I forgot what it means to shine
I felt lighter today
felt hopeful, washed in grace and love
like sunbeams peeking through my ribcage after a long winter
like purple tulips and rain on the tin roof, washing away my yesterday and new life blooming
I felt the breath today
reminded of the release, finally feeling peace settle on my skin
it whispered to me softly, like I've always been in the light
and maybe I have
The night nips at my heels, trying to pull me in, calling my name
But let this be my battle cry, my sweet release, my remedy
"I have always belonged to the light"

Deterioration Transfused

A poem


You’re killing me.
I mumble the words as I sit in the front seat of my car listening to some country station
You’re killing me
Like the poison they are feeding you through lines and tubes is flowing into my veins, creating a lethal combination brewing in my blood stream
Loving you and missing you feels like it will be the death of me
My heart beats too fast (every beat a resounding “Don’t die, don’t die”), my palms are sweaty, my muscles ache, I barely sleep.
You, my love, will be the death of me.
Its not fair.
I want you here, to hold you and promise you a thousand tomorrows. And when time screws us over, as time has been known to do, we’ll still be running like we are invincible and death is just a detour.
There are no answers. All I can give you are empty words and promises. There is nothing romantic nor elegant about deterioration.
It happens in twins. One deteriorates followed by the other. Its a crisis, an emergency.
So why, now, are there no alarms sounding?
I’d do anything to turn back time, to change things. But I am not god nor magician, only a simple poet with her heart on her sleeve.
Your deterioration is killing me.

Another breakup poem

So I've decided to share a little of what I've been working on lately, some of the writing that is making my heart sing. These pieces are personal and honest and I've decided to only share the ones where nobody really knows who they're about. So this is one of the pieces in my current Taylor-Swift-Style-Poetry stuff.

I fell in love with the world that slipped through your fingertips, the one that curled its way through your crooked gap toothed smile. You seemed comfortable in my world, like you fit. Just like the way your fingers curled around mine when we were sitting in class and you thought nobody noticed, just like the way you casually leaned over and looked at my paper, so close I could feel your breath on my skin and I thought, for the seventy sixth time, that this is what it’s like to love someone.

I can turn you into a poem. Wrap your body in words, run circles around your mind with my ribbon made of elegant prose and not-quite-there rhythm. I can turn you into a work of art; hang you on the wall of my chest like a Picasso painting. I can romanticize heartbreak and, when we end, as inevitably all relationships do, I can write you a mean breakup poem. You will become a monument, a reminder that I loved you once.


But me? You will turn me into another notch on your bedpost. I will dissolve in the cereal you eat every morning for breakfast. My name will be crossed out in your notebooks, the ink underneath bleeding through your best attempts to erase me the only proof that I was here. I will be just another girl, just another story you put on the back shelf and forgot about. I’d write a book for you, darling, but me, I’m replaceable.


They say don’t bother falling in love with a writer because she will capture your every word on paper, turn you into a shrine and dance circles around your memory, making magic out of you forgetting to put milk on the list and having to eat day old macaroni and cheese. She will turn your flaws into just another place to kiss you. And when you leave, she will spend months questioning the existence of the sun, writing more and more pages about how you loved her once, how she loved herself once.


But I think they should say to the writer not to bother falling in love with anyone. Your heart is this animal, a fragile beast. You will fall in love twelve times before breakfast. He won’t turn you into a monument and praise your memory; he’ll just forget to put milk on the list and never pick his clothes up off the floor.


If a writer falls in love, she’ll just end up writing another breakup poem.

Poetry Taylor Swift Style

January is turning out to be very introspective. It's like the cozy blue sweater I'm wearing. It's been the perfect backdrop for me to ask the big questions, to screw things up (over and over and over) and to actually get a few things right.
I've been getting pretty honest in January, pretty stripped down to the core and left to sort through all the mess with my own two hands, pretty raw.
I've been writing a lot this month, but not sharing a lot. The words I've written are words I'm incredibly proud of. They are some of the most brave, most honest words I feel I've ever written. When I get to the end of whatever I'm writing I can feel it in every part of my body and sometimes it helps me figure out what I'm thinking and sometimes I rework the same piece over and over again until I finally get it write (And sometimes I don't get it right.)
Most of the pieces I'm working on right now, and have been for the majority of this month, are addressed to certain people. Old friends and new friends and people who's stories I've heard or who have said something that struck a nerve with me. I write them all down, making pretty good poetry of it all.
I feel like that person that if you ask me if I'm writing about you, I probably am.
I feel like Taylor Swift in that I'm going to end up turning my heartbreaks and friendships and loves into pieces of art.
I understand now why people do it. I don't know if I would be so brave as to put it all out there for everyone to see, but I can understand why people do.
For me, writing is how I process the world. It's how I understand things, including relationships and things that happen in my life on a daily basis.
So recently I've been writing a lot of real, honest words, spending more time getting my feelings out onto paper (scribbling so fast the side of my hand is covered in ink and I can barely read what I've written) and less time blogging and talking about my feelings. Less being open with the world and more being open with myself. And I think there is a time for both.


Poetry has to be honest. Without honesty, it's useless

2013 Reflections

On New Year's Eve of 2012, I received an email from a friend. I was feeling unsocial, uncomfortable in my own skin, and anxious. Her message ended up becoming a mantra of sorts for my year: Wishing you Poetry and Stars.
And, looking back on the year I had in 2013, it was filled with poetry and stars, just not in the way I expected.
One thing I tried to do in 2013 was to write. And I did, almost daily. I kept a running tab, wrote entries filled with whatever I was thinking about that day. Some months I wrote every day, and other months I wrote only a few times per week. But looking back on those entries, on the music I listened to in 2013, on the mementos I kept pinned to my wall and on shelves in containers, I get to see how far I've come in the last year, how I've changed, how I've grown.
This is my sentimental reflection on 2013, a goodbye echoing out as I ready myself for a new hello.

January
January began with hope, the desire to be better. It began with metaphors and stories and wishful thinking, the way January usually begins. I thought a lot about redemption, about the meaning of home, and struggled with finding peace within myself.
January was a month filled with hope and the promise of new beginnings. I was blissfully happy, learning to find myself in the world.

February
February began with thoughts of love and the transformation into a lion hearted girl. I was still wistful, happy in a way I couldn't quite understand. By the final day in February, my world began to crack. I didn't know then it was in preparation for the break that would upend my life.

March
March was grief, and brokenness. It was falling to the floor screaming and standing beside a grave with no explanation, only anguish. It was everything I didn't know how to understand, and everything I never wanted to have to learn. It was discovering the meaning of strength, daily. It was a time when my heart was broken, shattered into a million pieces I didn't know how to fix.

April
Looking back, I barely remember April. The days seem to run together, one moment fading into the next, none of them feeling real. I was still broken. I craved darkness, silence, solitude. I was restless, and angry. I tried to write through my pain, most of the words leaving my body bereft, inconsolable, and fierce. I watched too much television in an attempt to ignore the world that miraculously kept turning in despite of my brokenness.

May
May felt like another round of bad luck, like the blackness had swallowed me whole. The wound I had been trying to heal in April felt split open again, and I was bleeding all over the floor. I cried more in the first part of May then I remember doing before: in a parking lot, on the kitchen floor, in a doctor's office where suddenly the roles were reversed, and too often, in my own bed, crying myself to sleep. I held onto hope like if I curled my fingers around it tight enough, then it couldn't be broken. I went inward, taking stock of my life, bracing myself for the pieces of my world that kept falling in.

June
June was for rituals, for clinging to ceremonies. I was desperately searching for a way to be full again. I did a lot of yoga, ate well, and searched for people who were bravely walking through brokenness. Words weren't as easy to come by, and if I sat in the silence for too long I started to feel the voices in my head begin to take over. I chased sanity as if it was something I could grab, locking my fingers around it and holding it tight.

July
The discomfort I felt inside my own body grew heavier. I slept in hotel rooms and thought about death, and life, and living. My body felt broken, my mind felt broken, my heart felt broken. As many strings as I pulled, hoping to hold my life together, it kept unraveling. I felt like a stranger in my own skin. I had a restless mind and a restless heart, and I didn't know how to sit with myself and not run away from the pain, in some way or another.

August
August was for lusting after life, trying to swallow it whole. I tried stupid things and not so stupid things and did what made me happy. Maybe it was covering some deeper issue I still had, maybe it was well done denial, but I felt alive for the first time in months. I felt like the world was begging to be noticed and I vowed to take advantage of every moment.

September
September welcomed new things. It began with a desire to be brave, to experience life, and ended in quiet reflection. I was introduced to a world that challenged me, intrigued me and mystified me (and still does.) It was my first introduction to some amazing people. I wrestled with myself, asking a lot of questions, some that didn't have answers.

October
The broken heart was analyzed as more losses fell, reminding me of the grief that had draped itself over my life. It was death, and letting go. It was also welcoming new life, stretching to make room to accommodate it all. It was driving down back roads and listening to loud music and falling in and out of love daily.

November
November was for fiction, for distractions. It was poetry in dark closets and too many hours spent staring at the wall. It was the month when I turned another year older, which was both exciting and something I dreaded in the same moment. I was stuck in my head too much, as I always am. The world felt like it was moving too fast for me to keep up. I felt helpless to stop the spinning of my own mind. It was also a month of gathering stories, memorizing faces, collecting moments.

December
December was the apology I never knew how to write. It was days upon days lived in a perpetual state of fear, of panic, of grief. It was losing my mind slowly. I didn't try to understand it all. I went through the motions. I didn't write, didn't let my mind run away with the endless possibilities that were churning inside of my skull. I didn't let the brokenness of the month, and of all the months that have come before it, catch up with me.

2013 was a year of firsts, a year of being completely broken open. As a whole it was probably filled with more tears than any other year, more grief, more moments I didn't know how to comprehend. I told my secrets to the stars and wrote poetry on the side of coffee cups and crawled my way up out of the grief.
I'm coming out of 2013 not at all the same person who walked into it. I've been forever changed by the things that happened this year. I questioned my whole life, and am on a quest for answers. I cried, screamed, felt and wrote my way through this year. Because sometimes that's the only way you can do it.
I carry more anger now, am more jaded, more scarred. The world doesn't make sense to me anymore, not in the way it used to.
But, despite all the grief I carry with me from this past year, it was also full of good things. I felt the world inside of myself, and started (As I always am) making peace with it. While I lost people, I also met some amazing people, people who make me laugh and fill me with hope and encourage me to be a better person, to "write with blood" and to experience life. I had moments when I felt truly alive. I fell in love with people, with things, with the world despite it's brokenness.

"You'll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living, breathing, screaming invitation to believe in better things"

"Sometimes its the smallest things that save us: the weather growing cold, a child's smile, and a cup of excellent coffee."

This is not a love story

I've never been good at writing love stories.
Mostly because I don't know how to be in love.
I've done it before. I've loved. Some may say I love too much. I love passionately and quickly and fiercely and with the awkward clumsiness of a newborn foal.
I love until it hurts too much and the feelings threaten to crack my heart wide open.
I love until I feel like a fish beneath frozen ice.
See, it's all poetry and stars and breathtaking moments. Until it isn't.
I love like a lightning storm.
So no, I've never been good at writing love stories because I never can finish them.
I have this folder on my desktop for unfinished love stories.
It's about how every time I'm lonely, or nostalgic, I send letters to poets I've never met because maybe their words feel like a supernova exploding in their veins too.
It's about how I fall in love with moments, bits and pieces of people. Her eyes, the way he looked when he held her hand, the way he smelled.
It's about the little bird who has built a nest inside of the cage composed of my ribs and sometimes I can feel him, fluttering. His wings beat against my bone and I know he wants to get out and taste sunshine as badly as I do.
Its about how I am not a girl who is easily loved.
I've been told that before.
I'm a mosaic of broken glass, jagged edges and rough sides. I feel too much and I love too much and I carry stories that don't belong to me inside of my body because I don't know how not to.
I collect moments. I drink my coffee black.
I tried it with cream once and it tasted too easy, too simple.
I am always pulling at my nails and I can never manage to keep my room clean and I write on sticky notes and find them in places I'd never expect and chances are if I know you I'll probably fall in love with you.
At least part of you.
I'll love you until the supernova explodes and its too much work to pick up the broken pieces and I have this fear of getting hurt that makes me tread carefully, treating relationships like land mines.
Maybe I wasn't made for staying.
Maybe there's always been this part of me that's meant for leaving.
Maybe there's always been this part of me that never knew how to write a love story.

For You - Because you told me to be honest and this is me trying

Over the past few months, I've been writing more words than I speak. I've been writing pieces of poetry and prose, all of which are (hopefully) going to be combined into one big story. And I hope, at the end, I'm looking at something more elegant than the emotions I'm feeling as I write.
A friend told me to try honesty, but if I'm being honest the idea of honesty scares me.
I'm skin and bones, stitched together with good intentions and with the secrets and mistakes that haunt me pressed into the empty spaces in the small of my back, my hipbone, my collar bone, my ribcage. I'm trying to figure out life, and love, and God and myself and where exactly you start after you've hit the bottom. I've done it so many times you think I would know but it all feels so foreign to me, like I don't even fully understand this and my life is trial and error, hoping I don't make more mistakes than can be fixed. All these questions and secrets and words press up against the inside of me and sometimes it feels like my insides are going to burst out of me and sometimes it takes someone to remind me I'm still human. Sometimes I feel like a hurricane, and I'm not really sure what to do with that just yet.
So I write, so many words of poetry and prose and fiction and venting and talking to God with the cap locks on and I slowly begin to sort my way through this mess.
I try this thing called honesty, and this thing called working through your crap (easier said than done) and this thing called believing you are falling together not falling apart (a lot easier said than done).
And I'm trying.
 

I woke up in the middle of the night, my socks cold with frozen water, huddled in a pile of blankets. I stumbled to the bathroom and pushed back my hair, examining the bags under my eyes. I look like I’ve been wrestling tigers and sleeping with the serpents. My eyes are wild and my body is cut and torn. And I look at this girl in the mirror, the vulnerable one who feels inadequate, the one who’s finally feeling like an artist, and I touch her hand through the glass. And I tell her: "it’s ok to be afraid, darling." It’s ok.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crutches

Don't know where this came from... just a little something I've been thinking about the past few days...

I am constructed of crutches.

I drink coffee; watch Grey’s Anatomy more then I should. I write on this blog, on Microsoft word documents on my laptop, in my paisley covered journal, in my notepad, on the back of physics worksheets.

These crutches hold me up. These are second rate crutches, but none the less I clutch at them, grasping the empty space.

My body turns against my mind daily.
My hands, they long to cradle the blind hope, the peace, the relief they had once cradled.
But now they cradle nothing, my gentleness has left.
My hands, they lost the ability to do simple things, to grasp, to release, to touch.
Even in sleep they remain twisted, curled, waiting.
You never know…
The hands were raised to the air, in hope or despair was not quite certain
These crutches are like a scalpel, like the numbing effects of alcohol, like a magnifying glass
 I am constructed of crutches.


I don't know anyone who isn't haunted by something or someone. And whether we try to slice the pain away with a scalpel or shove it in the back of a closet- our efforts usually fail. So the only way we can clear out the cobwebs is to turn a new page or put an old story to rest- finally, finally to rest

Together

I've been trying my hand at poetry. I don't know if I'm very good at it, but I'm finding I love it. I'm writing everywhere, from jotting down notes in my cell phone to sitting at the computer and typing and letting my soul find it's voice once again. So here's something I wrote today

With sunshine in our hair and sunburns gracing our shoulders
With laughter, and jokes made and drinks shared
With hope in our hearts and smiles on our faces
With twinkling eyes and devilish smiles
With a little girl grabbing your skirt and laughing, her eyes dancing as you pull her into your arms
While we scream and laugh at bugs and fish and make jokes about the future
Because we can, you know, because we are still young
We are here, on the brink of becoming something marvelous
For some of us, we are here in these final days of high school, before we set off on a new adventure
For others, we are counting down the days until the school bell rings for the last time and we are set free
With longing in our souls and our eyes set on the horizon
But today, we are together
In this day, our hands are joined and our laughter still mingles together as it echoes out across the park
We are together, separate beings yet part of something bigger then we can hold in our hands
The future is so uncertain and everything in our lives is changing, yet we are still here
As we were the summer before, with our heads held high and our hands united
And as we are on our journey of becoming, as the future holds different things for each and every one of us, we are also here, as a group of people who formed this friendship that can’t be described by mere words
This friendship that has withstood hours squished together on a bus and reaching out and stepping out
This friendship that has been my anchor as the storms of this life pull me, as we have ministered to each other in times of heartbreak and tragedy and in hope
We are more than friends, they are family
And as we stand here on the cusp of becoming, we are together
The future is coming and for every one of us it holds something different
And as we welcome in summer with our heads held high, and hope in our hearts, we are together