Spilled Words - Blog Posts

You know, I struggle with my first and only language English, and it especially shows when I am in a panic.

One time my friends mom who mainly speaks Spanish was driving us to our musical practice. When we got out of her car she was driving away when I panicked and tried to scream

"Stop your mom! My phone is in her car! "

But what came out was

"STOP YOUR MOM! MY CAR IS IN YOUR PHONE! "

And if that wasn't embarrassing enough, right afterward I realized that was holding my phone in the hand I was using to point at the car.

Not only did my friends die of laughter, they do what good friends do, never drop it.

If I’m not a little scared of him is he even hot?

So I’ll nod until my neck snaps

Worn down to paper thin skin

And measly shrugs

Traded my glare for a complacent grin

Plastic tea cups for ceramic mugs

Stolen glances for a rehearsed laugh

Soft ice cream for thigh gaps

It seems easier now,

To starve than swallow.

My tongue is raw,

Jagged teeth dug into the muscle

Excuses never slip.

Sunk to the bottom.

“Fallen angel,” they cry,

Drunk sailors watch, aghast,

Hopeless, lifeless, she lie.

They dredge her up,

Callin’ her pale hue tragic,

They study her vacant eyes,

A morose sight, bloated to the surface,

On days of somber skies,

They think of her.

A lonely girl, too young to die.

Spilled Thoughts

...I’m tired.

Not physically, but in an emotional way...

I feel like I hide too much...

From friends,

From family,

From everyone...

...I’m tired of this mask...

When can I take it off?...

Why is kindness such a rarity?

Who made it abnormal to treat another human as if they actually are a living, breathing being?

What caused us to retreat so far into ourselves that we don’t notice the pain around us?

When did we become like this?

...and how can we change it?

False Guilt

It’s easier to think,

That you are a monster born broken,

Rather than a human made flawed.

I’ve learned my lessons hard but,

I’ve learned my lessons well

I make the jokes my mother does. I have a habit of mot acknowledging my dad bevause of my mom. I ignore my anger because i dont want to be my mother,

The legacies people leave behind in you.

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.

How terrifying, how excruciatingly painful to acknowledge this. That I am a jigsaw puzzle of everyone I have briefly known and loved. I carry them on with me even if I don’t know it. How beautiful.

The only darkness I shall allow into my life, is the night

For even then, I have the Moon.

love freely - E.C. - oct. 2020

Heres a silly little poem!

You love them, You want them, but you could never reach them.

Will you still love them after their face is no longer obscured?

Will you still want them after the filter that once sheltered the laughable features is absent?

Honesty is always present, favorable or not.

It is always there, waiting for the moment to obstruct them.

The anger was just boiling up. I didn't know what to do with the excess water. It was overflowing the styrofoam cup and I needed to put it somewhere. I needed to throw something. I had to punch someone so hard it hurt me more than it ever hurt them. I grabbed my scalding cup and poured. A whispering drizzle ran down the hill side drilling into the dirt digging at the rocks breaking the dam of soil to bring forth a rushing river. Hurt yourself. I pounded my fist into my thigh. Hurt yourself. I scratched at my arm nails on a chalkboard. Hurt yourself. I didn't stop when I started bleeding. Hurt yourself. My skin was stuck under my nails. Hurt yourself. I was drowning head down in the deep waters so hot it was icy cold to the touch. Hurt yourself. I liked it. That hurt the most.

All will die, including myself

If I am the only one who was not harmed

If so, I was the creator of the blaze that killed us all

I have nothing to be sorry for

Except that I left us all behind

When pain has crossed the limit

It turns into a heavy stone

It sinks into soft skin

Continuing past flesh and bone

Until it finds it's way

To your feather light soul

And there it stays

heavy and cold

Sometimes I think the dreams are either alternate versions of me or another person completely and I'm just hopping along in their life that night.

I had a dream I was a woman working in a book store but this woman was not me. I've had this dream before over a decade ago, same woman, same bookstore. She now has her own office so she's doing well since the last dream, she seemed happy, fulfilled. I woke and felt motivated to do something with my life. Maybe visit a books store, maybe I'd see her in the women checking out books, Maybe I'd one day see myself with my own book adorning the shelfs.

I wonder if she dreams of me, I wonder what she sees. Am I a recurring dream, the Young women that prefers to stay curled up, that never went out with friends and now lives half in a world of pretend. Does she see me lay in bed, lost but searching, waiting but hiding. Am I a nightmare. Does she wake confused and heavy and think thankgod that's not me.

Am I only ever meant to dream of what could have been.

It's nearly halfway into the year and I feel a little bit lost and heavy. I feel like a stone sinking into the summer months. warm. sleepy. Isolated.

Let's be honest.

Let's be truthful.

When you meet your own eyes in the mirror

Can you recognise or a least reconsider

The apathy

That you let cling to thee

It's carefully downing you

It feels a secure embrace

But you're afloat

You've lost the boat, to passion, to joy, to meaning

It's calling out

ahoy

Where did you go

I see your eyes meet mine in the mirror

I see what once was starting to flicker

Are you but a ghost

A lost dream turning thinner.

I don't get out bed most days, I barely remember to drink water and my hyper fixations seem to be doing me more harm than good. But I go to get groceries in the late evening hours, as the birds call out to the fading sun. I can't bring myself to go regularly, but I've been in my house for weeks and the birds are singing and the streets are empty and life seems beautiful and fresh when you walk alone just breathing or singing to your self. I walk over the fly over, closer to the branches that reach up and away from here.

I sat outside on a wall across the pub. My dad was inside. I hadn't spoken to him in ten years. But I had seen him through pub windows and passed by him as he smoked in doorways more than a few times. Once I heard him sharply inhale, coughing as cigarette smoke choked him when I passed, but reached out he did not and neither did I.

It was summer, the air was warm and still, the daffodils had fully bloomed. I don't know how long I sat there, but I know it started to get dark and the streets emptied. Someone in the pub put on Sweet Caroline, everyone inside sang it with all the energy of a football chant, I hummed along to the chorus looking at the sky as it changed from blue to pink to black. I sang I'll be fine (I know now those aren't the lyrics) even though I felt so alone in that moment, I was adrift, I was waiting. And I'd waited long enough. But how could I stop. It was all I had.

I kept my eyes fixed on the door for awhile, then the stars, then back to door blinking against the tears gathering at the edges of my vision. I wanted to take off my shoes and rest my feet on the cool pavement, I wanted to feel rooted in something other than my loneliness, my sadness, but I didn't. Instead I quietly sang along to Sweet Caroline, sang about hands reaching out and felt more alone than ever, felt an ache settle deep and heavy into my bones, i suppose I was rooted by my feelings after all.

I'm not sure why I stayed there, was it in the hope that he'd spot me, rush out, hold me close and say it's going to be okay now , dads here or was it a punishment mixed with self pity. All I know is I couldn't bring myself to go inside but also didn't want to hide. The song ended and the stars above looked on in indifference.

Then a man walked passed. I got ready for a suggestive remark or something similar. there are some streets in my city as there are in most around the world, where women line dark alleyways and men in cars roll down their windows and ask how much, and if you happen to be a women walking alone in those areas you might get asked if your working tonight. So I was prepared for something along those lines, I was prepared to politely smile and get my keys ready between my knuckles if needed. He paused for a moment.

"Are you alright love?" he asked, his voice quiet and concerned.

With the relief came the overwhelming need to tell him the truth, to spill everything to this stranger, to tell him that no I wasn't alright, I was deeply not okay and the heavy feeling has been following me around for so long I dont know how to live without it, instead I indulge in it, I give it a place at the dinner table, I drink it with every meal and tuck it close to my heart every night, I use it as a substitute for a lullaby. But I couldn't , I didn't.

I flashed him a quick smile , the most hollow thing you could imagine, the only thing I could muster. it was just something I did to get him to walk away. "Yeah, I'm good thanks".

He didn't walk away, he stood there with eyes so caring I was afraid they'd make everything I was holding in unravel in a messy pile at our feet. "Are you sure, really?" he knew I wasn't, my sad shining eyes didn't help.

I shook my head slightly, another quick smile "I'm sure."

Beware the ides of march they say. Perhaps we should beware every month, as we the participating audience watch this pantomime play out on insta reels and YouTube shorts. Meanwhile groceries prices go higher, innocent people die trapped under the rubble of their homes and country relations are haywire，all because the man on stage wants to pretend everything is satire. And he does this while the world catches fire, calls it progress. Calls it great T.V. But will call foul play when shots are fired when the people he hurts grow tired.

When I was little I was collecting all my future pains and putting them in a neat little line, each one climbing up the ladder of my spine. Because what is time, what does it matter when I could see the ending before I had even begun. It was like the Me that would live through broken glass and kicked in doors felt her heart beating so loudly she sent the sound back through time, and it found me in my room when everything was good. This organ we prescribe love to felt so much fear it ran back to a time before the palpitations.

I want to write about the pain of it all, I want to write about the people I qued with outside of food banks; there was an old man who looked like a wise wizard with his long white hair, he waited for a small portion of pasta most days and offered me advice on the best times to turn up, there was a group of polish men with cans of alcohol shared between them, who at first assumed I was polish aswell and tried to talk to me, but all I could say was Przepraszam, nie wiem Polski the old man told me to stand next to him after that, there was also a brother and sister who where both addicted to heroine, most days they seemed to be going through intense withdrawals. We would all wait in a old medieval churchyard, some sat on toppled headstones while others leaned against stone angels with their faces covered. I want to write about what complete isolation and poverty does to you, how eyes don't meet yours and voices talk over you. But when I do, the room goes quiet and people look away, suddenly i feel the need to awkwardly laugh and say so yeah anyway.

Anyone else physically recoil when thinking about how we are made of flesh and bone. I can even look at uncooked meat, if I've seen it raw I can't eat it cooked. And if it looks like a limb I'm not eating it at all. Then I think about how my body is uncooked meat and my bones possible tools and I shudder, I feel far too close to the tendons and the blood, I feel alive, so alive that the sound of my heart is a warning and a blessing, I feel so alive I'm afraid I'll die, I'm afraid of how gruesome it is.

An incoming phone call you say

And I freeze like a deer in headlights

Have I been hit, I feel blooding rushing past my ear drums

My heart is beating quick

then quicker, a fast rapid flicker

it's trying to run away, but my body won't move

Instead my body stands shock still and I watch locked in, but so far removed

I'm dizzy spinning around and round in my amygdala, a ringing is pulsing against the outside walls of it

trying to get inside

I cannot hide

Then the ringing just stops

it's stops

Incoming call is dropped and rational thinking has lost.

I stole a bible a few years ago, I browsed the shelfs not looking to steal but to pass the time and then I saw it, black cover and pages edged in gold. I wasn't religious, more agnostic or an atheist that dabbled in Buddhist ideas, I felt the Christian narrative or at least the one I heard about was always about who would pay. How jesus payed for your "sins", and if you didn't believe then you'll pay in the after life, so hold on to guilt and carry your strife , but I also knew that I wanted , needed something. I wasn't looking for misplaced shame only hope and I wanted to have it tangible in my hands.

So with my stomach empty and my shoes hole ridden, I ignored the fashion magazines with diet tips and beauty tricks and filled my emptyness with something close to hope, if only to cope. I grabbed it from the shelf and I left the store. I was too afraid to steal food , I didn't dare even with my hunger, but possibility of having something bigger than life to cling to on cold and lonely nights seemed worth the risk.

During that time I wasn't doing so well, my mother was drinking and taking drugs with her friends god only knows where and the cupboards where completely bare. I would wander around town, I would wait for the days to pass, I would wait for something to meet me in my loneliness. I wanted so desperately for something like god to reveal itself to me, my mother wasn't someone I could lean on and my father wasn't around so I think naturally I wanted something to believe in, to sustain me when food and family couldn't.

Last year my brother and I where almost homeless, we slept on the hard floor in a cold empty room for three years, we spent every day waiting. I would wait for the stores reduced items at the end of the day, wait for the sun to dry my clothes, I would walk for hours round and round, my shoes didn't last long, I tried ducktaping the soles but the pavement wore through that aswell. When I wasn't waiting outside food banks, staring at white walls or writing, I sometimes would visit the church in town. It's a cathedral and I still have no idea what denomination it's under, but I'd walk around and admire the marbal pillers and stain glass windows, I would try to remember how people hundreds near a thousand years ago carved angles into stone and placed their hope in something other than themselfs, that back then a church may have been the only place you could go if you had no where else. I reminded myself of all the people who would have prayed there, that would have stood where I stood and cried, wished and waited as I did. I would light a candle and I would wish for a better tomorrow, I wasn't asking jesus or a god, I was asking the universe, I was asking subconsciously myself to keep going.

What do you think of religion? (Are you religious?)