GROWING PAINS

“Really, when I look back on it, I did exactly what I had set out to do. I changed my life. I woke myself up. I rediscovered passions of every variety. I forced myself to take a little time. I found a way to bring some of who I used to be into who I was.”

— Katherine Center, Everyone is Beautiful 

the thing that gets you sometimes is the frustration. for every time someone else sees you being late, losing something, forgetting something important: there are hours in your day dedicated to it.

you have strange, fae-like rituals. the keys have to go in their special bowl, because if you forget even once, they will be gone forever. you stack items on a stool in front of your door so that you can't leave without touching them. you can't take your wallet out of your bag, ever, it will simply fade away.

everything has to be written down. everything, everything. whatever you need to do, you need to do it now. you check and re-check the busmap only to still get lost on the same route you've always taken home. you start getting ready to go 3 hours early and still end up 15 minutes late, unsure even of where the time has gone. don't sit down, there's something strange about your bed or the couch or the floor - once you sit down, you'll get stuck.

you are very used to operating without instructions. people say you're good at winging it but really you've never really known where the rules are coming from. you have to live in constant strange anticipation - when your brain does fail you, how can you predict every horrible outcome. maybe today you will have a minor curse, and forget to brush your teeth. or maybe today you will wake up - and no matter what you do, your whole body begs to return you back to sleep. maybe today you will break a glass and then just stand there, surrounded by the shards, frozen in place - because you need to go to the bathroom, but you also need to sweep.

and everyone else seems to have gotten the memo, and it's easy for them, and it never, ever gets easy for you. make plans and keep them. they roll their eyes when you say sorry it's too messy we can't go over to my apartment. they ask why did you leave something so big until the last minute. on instagram, your friend makes a reel where she says if they cared, they would change. they literally do not care. someone says it's a symptom, and in the comments, all they get is then go to therapy! it can't control everything you do!

so you go to therapy. and you work out to calm down and you do your self-care and you try to be grateful for the small things. and you structure literally your entire life around it, around the ways you can't live right. you have failsafe over failsafe over red flag. you have shelves of organizational manuals. you have alarms for things like did you remember to eat that you still manage to figure out how to snooze. you have time-blocked sites and deleted apps you get lost in and you are constantly trying. because you also want a life where you are not stepping over laundry. juggling knives, you spend your whole life feeling like you're ice skating.

and still. she sighs at you. i mean, it's just. i don't understand how you constantly miss all the small stuff. i mean, this is the easy part. you're just not trying hard enough.

“Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.” ― Nicole Krauss

1.Rumi | 2.Holly Warburton | 3.Maggie Stiefvater | 4.Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 5.Nickie Zimov | 6.Clarice Lispector | 7.Nigel Van Wieck | 8.Georgia O’Keeffe | 9.Andrew Wyeth | 10.Mary Oliver | 11.Ilenia Tesoro | 12.Sylvia Plath | 13.Walt Whitman | 14.Nickie Zimov | 15.Jean-Paul Sartre | 16.Lydia Roberts | 17.Natalie Wee | 18.Lew Thomas | 19.Albert Camus

Ellen Bass, ‘The Thing Is’

it astounds me even until now how i can come to this blog and go with a piece of my soul back in place. i was wondering if you had any poems on 'ghosts' and their 'haunting' people and places, romantic or otherwise. there is a ghost, you see, and she haunts me even though i know her to be alive and well. i am unsure of which terrifies me more: her being in and out of my reach or my hope that i too am her ghost.

so these are not all poems, but:

“I think ghosts are memory—memory haunts bodies, haunts places, haunts the narratives that hold our minor and miraculous lives together. Ghosts are that which return and return and return. The body has its own hauntings, too: phantom limb sensation, organ transfer memory, the traumatic self. And others.”

— Shastra Deo, interviewed by Sumudu Samarawickrama in Liminal Mag 

— Valeria Luiselli, from Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)

— Janet Fitch, from White Oleander

“But the fall—the falling / of it / even after it’s done—”

— Jorie Graham, from Overlord: Poems; “Omaha (Lowest Tide, Coefficient 105, Full Moon)”

— Jessie Lynn McMains, To Be Haunted

— Dorothy Allison, from Boston, Massachusetts (The Women Who Hate Me, 1983)

“it’s not enough to look back at the past as at a thing / to shy from, this is not / nostalgia, you must look at it,”

— Carl Phillips, from Wild is the Wind: Poems; “Gently, Though, Gentle”

— Nikki Giovanni, from “[Untitled]”

— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

— Adonis, from Selected Poems; “A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)

—James Baldwin, from Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems; “Conundrum (on my birthday) (for Rico)”

one day I woke up and realised all the waiting and yearning was actually me living my life and it’s happening right now and it’s still good even if it’s not perfect and there is no moment when all your dreams get fulfilled and everything makes sense. like… this is it. this is life. you’ll waste away your youth waiting for some imagined future if you don’t love life for what it is now and make the most of it

“Art differs from nature not in its organic form, but in its human origins: in the fact that it is not God or a machine that makes a work of art, but an individual with his instincts and intuitions, with his sensibility and his mind, searching relentlessly for the perfection that is neither in mind nor in nature, but in the unknown. I do not mean this in an other-worldly sense, only that the form of the flower is unknown to the seed.”

— Herbert Read, The Origins of Art (via mesogeios)

Me shortly,

a little nostalgia for today