The City called Grief

“Hey sis,” His words hung soft in the thick air, gentle, like he was already beginning to lose his voice from all the pent up emotion floating beneath his diaphragm.

 I didn’t know what to say. And it wasn’t for a lack of desire, because I wanted more than anything to have the right words, but the same reason I assume most people say nothing, which is because I was terrified of saying the wrong thing. I was terrified of entering into this raw, broken place and what it would do to me, and to him. In that moment, more than anything, I wished I was brave. But even with as much time as I have spent hopping from one dark place to another, I have yet to become so familiar with it that I could draw a map with the way out of it. Maybe because the entire city is just a street of dead ends and back alleys, and there is no way out. It sounds hopeless, and awful, but I think sooner or later you find comfort in the darkness of it all, in the absolute destruction. There’s something familiar about the broken slants on the front porch and the cob webs hanging from the rafters, the streets that have never been paved and are full of ruts, and the musty smell that wafts in from every direction. Once you have familiarized yourself with darkness, with grief, even though it is unwelcome it is familiar and it is lightness, pure joy, that seems like an intruder.

 I spent months yelling at the sun because it dared to shine, at the birds because somehow they still had a song to sing while the only noise I could make was the one where my heart repeatedly slammed into my rib cage, reminding me I was still alive when I didn’t want to be.

 I wanted the world to stop turning, wanted to not habitat the condemned building in the darkest corner of the city called grief, wanted to not feel like my heart was on fire. I wanted to feel normal again.

 I know now there is no such thing as normal. Maybe I should have learned that ages ago. There is no secret back road that will take you out of this city. There is no road map, no survival manual, and no emergency number to call in case things get clouded along the way, and they will. This is a solitary journey, and one you never asked to be a part of. There is nothing I can say that will help you settle in to your new accommodations in a city you never asked to live in.

 And so I will sit across from you in this bar called blackness and ask you if you want another drink. We will listen to Grace Potter and maybe sing bad karaoke and make dark jokes.

Because this I can do.

Time

Sometimes you don't get all the time in the world, but maybe, if you're lucky, you get enough
Enough time to grow up
To own up
To mess up and start over (and over, and over)
time to fall in love (and fall in love again)
to laugh until your stomach hurts
to be brave
to let yourself be loved
to make memories that will last a lifetime
to find your home
to belong
to create
to dream
to heal




"I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”  

Thanks for the memories

Today was my last high school English class, and I found myself getting slightly sentimental
We sat there in our desks discussing Hamlet and grammar and I wanted to be the one to scream "Remember this."
Remember this because I never thought it would happen but it did and now it's here and it's beautiful and I never want to let it go.
I wanted champagne. I wanted toasts and balloons and pictures. I wanted speeches and moments I can hang on my wall.
Instead I got smiles and laughter and the way his eyes sparkled and I willed myself not to forget a single moment of it.
I want to stay like this forever. In this place where I know there will always be a twinkling eye to greet me every morning, and that even if I don't want to I will laugh. Sometimes there will be embarrassing pictures on my phone. Sometimes there will be cartoons on the side of my homework that I didn't draw there. Sometimes I will be annoyed with these people as much as I enjoy them, and sometimes I will experience both in the same breath.
But at the end of the day we had this. We had this room, and this class, and each other. And maybe I'm the crazy one for wanting to hold on to this for as long as I possibly can.
I know I can't keep it clenched between my fists, that moving on is inevitable.
And maybe all this is was a shout into the void, but it was something. I have to believe it was something. It won't last and it's built on teenage emotion and being shoved in a classroom together for an hour a day, five days a week, but it's something.
 When I entered this class, I never expected to find what I did. I learned Shakespeare, and that people are amazing. If you let them, they'll surprise you.
In this moment, we are beautiful.
In this moment, I swear we are infinite.

Five Minute Friday: Hands

 When I saw the prompt for this Friday, I knew I had to write something. Because this morning I found myself staring at a pair of hands, and creating a story with mine.
There is so much more I could write on this topic, but given only 5 minutes I could just skim the surface. But I want to keep creating, keep writing stories with my own hands.
My hands were made to touch, to create, to explore the world around me and fall more in love with it with each passing day

I look at his hands as I sit behind my computer screen, typing out an English essay on kindness. It’s not much, but the gentle curve of his fingers is prompt enough to begin a train of thought.

I am reminded of all the places I’ve been, the people I’ve loved, the gentle touches and soft glances. I remember the feeling of being found the first time he looked at me, and how that was a feeling I wanted to spend my whole life remembering. The feeling of found, I wrote that day, is not something I take lightly.

My own fingers are sprawling over the keyboard as I begin to write about kindness, giving it and receiving it and how sometimes you have to dig it up out of yourself. I wrote about it and I watched his fingers and I was reminded of the first day, when I didn’t feel so very kind, and all the different sets of hand prints that make up my story now.


If you peel back my skin and expose my heart, I am also certain you would find sets of fingerprints, all unique but splashed together to create a beautiful piece of art. These are the fingerprints given to me, the stories and touches and smiles I have used to create something beautiful. They are my poetry, my inspiration, my heart beat. They are the words I have created with my own hands.


I think there is something beautiful about hands, and the way they can create and move and touch and express.


With this, I begin to write

The Heart of Life

It doesn’t matter how tough we are, trauma always leaves a scar. It follows us home, it changes our lives. Trauma messes everybody up, but maybe that’s the point. All the pain & the fear & the crap, maybe going through all that is what keeps us moving forward. It’s what pushes us. Maybe we have to get a little messed up before we can step up.


I've been writing a lot recently about trauma. About the intricate way the Universe works together, the soft hum it makes that you can hear if you listen closely and press your face to the ground. I think it sounds like holy ground.
I've been pulled to the idea of human nature, and have seen the brutality of it all that has left me lacking in the belief that people are still good.
When life hits you hard so many times, I think sometimes the easiest thing to do is just stay there.
I wrote yesterday that I want to stay here, with my face pressed to the ground, trying to hear the hum of the holy above the noise that is created.
It is easier to believe in the good down here, I reasoned.
The noise of the world threatened to overcome me. I tasted bitterness beneath my tongue, tasted pain and hurt every time I licked my lips.
And so I put out a status on social media, asking people what the kindest thing someone has done for them was, or what was the kindest thing they did for someone else.
The responses trickled in, one by one.
Baby showers, pictures, vacations, organ donation.
I let it all fill me with the belief that there are still good and beautiful people in this world.
The pain exists, but so does the beauty. So does the good. And I believe you see what you look for. There are days when it is so easy just so succumb to the desperation and taste the dirt. I know this. I have lived in this place, with my ear pressed to the earth listening to the world until I have the strength to live in it again.
But there is also beauty, and it is finding it in these hard days that it matters the most. It reminds me that people are still good. Life is still beautiful. This world is still a good place to live.


Pain throws your heart to the ground
Love turns the whole thing around
No it won't all go the way it should
But I know the heart of life is good

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. 

"I think I deserve something beautiful"

“You know what I felt this morning, Delia? Nothing. No passion, no spark, no faith, no heat, no nothing! I think I’ve really gotten past the point where I can be calling this a ‘bad moment’… This is worse than death to me, the idea that this is the person I’m going to be from now on… There’s like nothing – I have no pulse! I used to have this appetite for food, for my life, and it is just gone! I want to go someplace where I can marvel at something, anything.”


A year ago I was sitting in my basement praying for my life to change. I wanted to marvel at something, to actually be alive and experience my life. I felt exhausted with the idea of my life.
I was watching a movie about a woman who goes to Italy in order to find herself. I'm a sucker for movies like that, where the main character goes on a journey and ends up finding out things about herself she had been searching for.
I decided to create my own Italy. I needed something risky and exciting and new.
I decided to enroll in public high school.


"I'm not checking out, I need to change"


As the weeks leading up to my dramatic re-entry into high school passed, I began to see this more as a bad decision and less of the something new I had been hoping for. All the unknowns seemed to be looming over my head. The what if's became big and daunting.
I entered my first day of classes fearful of this big new world I had been thrown into. I felt like a fish out of water.
So many times in that first month I remember crying because I was completely overwhelmed. I remember sitting and forcing myself to find the good things that happened in each day because otherwise I would be overcome with this sense of dread.
In September I remember thinking I would never make it until June.
And then something began to change...
It is now May and in a few days I will be graduating. I will be leaving this world and entering a new one. And the day that once seemed unconceivable is now here.
I would be lying if I said I was ready for it to come
This past year has been a challenging one. I have learned so much, about subjects like biology and history, but also about myself.
I have met so many amazing, incredible people, and made friendships that I cherish.
I have laughed a lot, cried a lot, stumbled and failed more times than I would like to admit.
But I have also succeeded in more ways than I can count.
And the thought of saying goodbye to all of this in just a few weeks terrifies me.
The place I was so hesitant to walk into now feels like home to me. The self discovery that has taken place inside of those walls amazes me. The people I have met are beautiful.
I went into this year searching for something beautiful, something marvelous, something new. I wanted my life to change.
And now, a full year after that incident in my basement, I can safely say that it has.
I have seen beauty. I have experienced love. I have learned lessons about biology and history, and what it means to be human and new experiences. I have laughed and cried and loved and been stressed out and sometimes I can only stand back and marvel at the wonder of it all.
In September I never expected the profound impact that this place would have on my life, and how it would shape me in just a few short months. I am walking out of this experience existing more than I did when I entered in.


"I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own"