Dreams-and-nightmares - Lost In Time And Space

Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”

me, an autonomous adult in college: *looks up tips for managing adhd on a deadline*

every single result: AS A PARENT to help YOUR CHILD WITH ADHD monitor YOUR CHILD'S behavior and reward HIM for doing work because CHILDREN WITH ADHD need constant support-

“If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another. The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.”

— Deepak Chopra (via lazyyogi)

Sanna Wani, “Who is the Sun, Asking for Sleep?”, My Grief, the Sun // Brenna Twohy, A Coworker Asks Me If I Am Sad, Still

another random epiphany i had on my drive home from the store was that things that are the most obvious often feel the most profound. i was looking at the sunset through my window. i was like “this is beautiful and it changes all the time so every sunset is a little different and also beautiful.” which led me to think “if you look at the earth from space, the clouds are never pink or blue or yellow or orange, they are just white and grey all the time. in space perhaps the sunsets are not very different or very beautiful.” which led me to think “the sunsets are only beautiful because i am so small.” which led me to think “so many things are only beautiful because i am so small, or if not only then they are at least much more beautiful than they might otherwise be, either because my vantage point of smallness allows me to see details that big things wouldn’t see, like when i see the flash of the sun at sunset with my little eyes on this big planet, or because my briefness finds vastness so incredible cuz it’s so much bigger than me, like when i sit under a very very old and very very tall tree.” and this was all somewhat obvious but it didn’t make the feeling of epiphany go away or diminish at all

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)”

bathroom sink meditations, r.a.

"Yes, Think" – Ruth Stone

Mother, said a small tomato caterpillar to a wasp, why are you kissing me so hard on my back? You’ll see, said the industrious wasp, deftly inserting a package of her eggs under the small caterpillar’s skin. Every day the small caterpillar ate and ate the delicious tomato leaves. I am surely getting larger, it said to itself. This was a sad miscalculation. The ravenous hatched wasp worms were getting larger. O world, the small caterpillar said, you were so beautiful. I am only a small tomato caterpillar, made to eat the good tomato leaves. Now I am so tired. And I am getting even smaller. Nature smiled. Never mind, dear, she said. You are a lovely link in the great chain of being. Think how lucky it is to be born.

“I am young, and, at last, life is not so dark and so painful. The sun shines, and the moon is calm.”

— Takuboku Ishikawa, from “Romaji Diary & Sad Toys,” published c. 1985

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.