oh - year's end.

love me love me.

A good night

"You'll be gorgeous, as usual."

the brim.

i have a bad feeling that all i love yous are wishful thinking.

to the weekend

sometimes i feel uncertain and sometimes i feel uninteresting but then other times talking to you is the funnest thing ever and i think, yes, ok, settle now.
xx

2010

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams
William Faulkner, The Unvanquished
James Agee & Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
Joan Didion, The White Album

Pale

Real Life isn't really as good as it should be, you know?

waiting waiting room

Shed the superman/woman urge. No one is perfect, so don't expect perfection from yourself or others.
Learn to relax with walking, a sport, meditation, yoga, tai chi, laughing, singing, etc, and practise regularly.
Visualise how you can manage a stressful situation more successfully.
Find a hobby that will give you a break from your worries.
Live a healthy lifestyle with good nutrition, adequate rest, regular exercise, limited caffeine and alcohol, and balanced work and play.
Share your feelings with family and friends. Don't try to cope alone.

If you think you have too much stress in your life, it may be helpful to talk with a doctor, clergy member, or other caring professional. Reactions to stress can be a factor in depression and anxiety.

National Mental Health Association fact sheet, 'Managing Stress'

Blindfold eyes and cottonbud ears

Keep quiet, keep still,
little movements ruin everything.
Choke back, reel in,
fancy toppled and troubling.

My lips are far too loud
for this rented room we're in.

Again and again

Gosh, girl, you can be such a fool.

I promise I'm trying.

Do you ever think about the fact that we, each, have just one tiny little life here on this spinning sphere, and that it makes no sense not to simply swallow our pride or pain or so-called mind-spun 'issues' and just be with the people we want to be with? I saw a photograph today and I couldn't shake the nonsense of it all, the inexplicable waste of this train wreck year.

Grief, etc.

I still don't understand.

Last night

I slept, under a sheet, and a blanket, and a patchwork quilt, and the weight of my disasters. I woke up feeling heavily imprinted on the mattress, as if my body mass had doubled and sunken.

over-reading.

by thursday i forget tuesday, by monday i forget saturday, by friday i forget wednesday, and in the moment i forget everything. i'm not very good at holding onto temporal ends, frayed and flimsy as they are; five minutes ago is not too short a break to stop my head from shifting you entirely. tirelessly tripping over the loose hems of myself, alone (or something).

lisa hannigan - i don't know

If you walk my way
I will keep my head
We will feel our way
Through the dark
Though I don't know you
I think that I would do
I don't fall easy at all

You are a disaster to me.

I hope for you to hurt, despite knowing that will chew up my insides all slow but sure.
I watch where I walk and where I think because you're around every single corner in my head.
You made me really skinny (I eat hot chips without fear): not sure that counts as a plus side.
And you still exist, and I'm still not happy about it, although this other thing over here makes me feel a little tiny bit normal sometimes.

A couple.

I'm standing on platform 23 again.
This unobtrusively pretty girl - well,
she sort of looks up at him like she's got him.
Sort of looks downwards and then upwards like
she sort of knows she's the most charming to him and
the flowers in his hand, upright, agree.
And he's all leaning against the pole there.

Flowers are one of those things that catch value
from their own brash and brassy mortality.
People say that about about humanity, people I've heard,
but they aren't right about that.

Anyway their hips are touching just and - well,
I sort of look away but the way that they
can't even see anyone else is sort of maybe fascinating
or atrocious or something else lucidly-coloured.
It makes your eyes hurt. You?
You only gave me flowers once or twice.
Maybe you remembered the romantic
boulders and blocks in my head or maybe, you know,
you just didn't think of it and that's
another delicate little excuse I make
for the overestimated you I invented.

11:45pm.

i hate you i hate you i hate you.

Ugly ever after.

a colourful, smiling picture from a few years ago: "you look less angry at the world". how horrible to imagine my anger unfurling itself in my gaze, seeping out of my pores, assaulting those brothers and sisters who've grown used to my tears these last months.
i really, really hate you. take this away from me, lord jesus.

on love songs

who do you write songs for now that you have tossed me aside? whose words do you steal now that you have no right to mine?

on not singing

i don't know how to sing hallelujah these days. i just put my hand to my heart and pretend i'm not trying not to cry and hope that everyone else is genuine enough about worshipping jesus that they don't notice. (they are genuine. but they do notice.) i love the prayers of my real flesh-and-blood, with-me-in-this friends, so much that the tears escape quicker than i can even pretend i'm not trying not to cry. but i want them to be your prayers, your arm around my shoulders, and your eyes willing my tears to stop. i wanted, just then, in the imagined space before the 'i' that begins this pathetic little paragraph, to write something on here that would show you how much i hate you, but i love you too much to hurt you like that. i perversely wish that i could protect you from the knowledge of how shockingly badly you have treated me. it sort of disgusts me how i still want to protect you. because, no, there is nothing that you have done to deserve my love. there is no doubt in my mind, or anywhere near my mind, that you are not going to meet someone better than me.

STILL CANNOT BELIEVE.

YOU PASSED ON YOUR DEPRESSION TO ME LIKE A COMMON COLD.

yael naim - far, far

Far, far, there's this little girl. She was praying for something to happen to her. Everyday she writes words and more words just to spit out the thoughts that keep floating inside. And she's strong when the dreams come 'beause they take her, cover her; they are all over. The reality looks far now, but don't go -

How can you stay outside?
There's a beautiful mess inside.

Far, far, there's this little girl. She was praying for something good to happen to her. From time to time there are colours and shapes dazzling her eyes, tickling her hands. They invent a new world with oil skies and aquarel rivers. But don't you run away already - please, don't go.

How can you stay outside?
There's a beautiful mess inside.

Far, far there's this little girl. She was praying for something big to happen to her. Every night she hears beautiful, strange music - it's everywhere, there's nowhere to hide. But if it fades, she begs, "Oh Lord, don't take it from me, don't take it"; she says, "I guess I'll have to give it birth."

Just look at yourself now, deep inside - deeper than you ever dared.

Angry easily.

people say crap to other people without knowing anything about them or about their hang-ups or difficulties or spiritual battles. and not suspecting that things that might appear trivial or superficial to them can actually carry huge and unwieldy baggage that they have no right to weigh down further with their thoughtless, black-and-white 'honesty'. surfaces aren't always just surfaces, and the symbolic freight of objects or things is always disproportionate to the actuality of those objects or things. obviously: that's the basic tenet of the symbolic realm. just because something looks lightweight doesn't mean that it's not really, when it comes down to it, when you penetrate those surfaces, when you think for more than two seconds before opening your mouth, when you get over your vague and arrogant assumptions about what's going on or not going on with people you barely know, when you get over yourself, when you actually shift to selflessness and pick up the load for yourself, incredibly, indescribably, painfully heavy.

i have no good reasons.

"'I think Pansy would do wonderfully well to marry you, and I don't know who should know it better than you. But you're not in love.'
'Ah, yes I am, Mrs Osmond!'
Isabel shook her head. 'You like to think you are while you sit here with me. But that's not how you strike me.'
'I'm not like the young man in the doorway. I admit that. But what makes it so unnatural? Could any one in the world be more loveable than Miss Osmond?'
'No one, possibly. But love has nothing to do with good reasons.'
'I don't agree with you. I'm delighted to have good reasons.'
'Of course you are. If you were really in love you wouldn't care a straw for them.'"

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 494.

update

7. i am newly clumsy.
6. i am a bursting balloon.
5. i am a disappointed future.
4. i am too far from thankful.
3. i am woefully self-indulgent.
2. i am an open bible and a closed mind.
1. i am without you.
0. i hate that that is my number 1.

retail

new pajamas don't actually make me feel any less sad, but there's something a little bit nicer about being sad while wearing new pajamas.

waiting for an escape

in a year when everything is broken and falling apart and wilting away, my dad has been so kind to me.

fragments

I once read the sentence, 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake'. That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.

* * *

Don't hold yourself like that cause you'll hurt your knees.
Well I kissed your mouth and back - but that's all I need.
Don't build your world around / volcanoes melt you down...

And what I am to you is not real,
What I am to you, you do not need,
What I am to you is not what you mean to me:
You give me miles and miles of mountains and I'll ask for the sea.

Don't throw yourself like that in front of me.
I kissed your mouth, your back - is that all you need?
Don't drag my love around / volcanoes melt me down...

I kissed your mouth.
You do not need me.

* * *

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.



(C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed; Damien Rice, 'Volcano'; Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking)

You never really liked the Psalms that much.

If an enemy were insulting me,
I could endure it;
if a foe were raising himself against me,
I could hide from him.
But it is you, a man like myself,
my companion, my close friend,
with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship
as we walked with the throng at the house of God.

Psalm 55:12-14

Unintentionally suspended -

I'm waiting and it hurts a lot. Please hurry up.

Liar.

"Private assurances are terribly easy to break; they evaporate like the morning dew. After all, it is only your word against mine when I say that you misunderstood me and I didn't really say or mean what you thought. We are deeply prone to self-deception in this area above all."

From a book by Christopher Ash that was lying on Eirian's bedside table the night before she got married. On why marriage needs to be a public act.

the reality is.

i miss you terribly and i hate you for it, and i keep asking god to take away the dreams and the anger. you said that you hurt me too much and that you had to put a stop to it, but nothing you did to me then comes close to what you are doing to me now by suddenly and completely cutting yourself off from me and wiping out all the beautiful things along with the ugliness.

ben harper - amen omen

there is a boy playing guitar in my living room right now. i wish it was you but it's not and it's absolutely breaking me, still.

*****

i don't know where you came from
and i don't know where you've gone.
old friends become old strangers
between the darkness and the dawn.

amen omen, will i see your face again?
amen omen, can i find the place within
to live my life without you?

i listen to a whisper slowly drift away,
silence is the loudest parting word you never say.
i put your world into my veins
but now a voiceless sympathy is all that remains.

anon.

all my words are bloated with other people's words, and i hate that you made me a cliché.

instant

this feels so wrong. i have nowhere to put my feelings.

still life.

hope does not disappoint us

whether well-fed or hungry

we have the mind of Christ

then we shall see face to face

the fragrance of life

unveiled faces

the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort

who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light

a quiet life.

Letters 2.

i'm looking forward to one day being able to answer 'good' when someone asks me how i am
but then again the last time i looked forward to one day it didn't work out so well

Letters.

i imagined myself with a new name

By the way

I'm not desperate. But you should have fought for me.

denial

a month spent in a big black cloud. so hazy i can't even think of an original metaphor.

i'm really scared, just quietly.

You Have Forgotten.

People keep telling me I'm coping really well but they are wrong. I wake up crying every morning after fitful nights passed in and out of horribly realistic nightmares. I want this warped version of you to get out of my dreams. To step outside the hazy edges, morph back into the man who loves me, decide that i'm worth fighting for, and come back home to me for real. Because love? It doesn't just bail.

God says

That I have loved right.

forever in an hour.

i'm regretting all the times i took for granted just walking down the street holding your hand.

i don't know why i never imagined those walks coming to an end.

i want to string together beautiful little sentences to make you want me. but really, i just want you to want me. i didn't think it was really that much to ask. i didn't think i would have to hold you down and twist your arm.

thousands of kilometres shouldn't mean anything if you really cared for me. but then again i can't, cannot, face the prospect that you don't really care for me after all.

do you really want to let go of my hand?

will that really make your life better?

i guess you don't understand how much you've hurt me. i simply can't believe that you could have done this to me if you had any inkling of what these days would be like for me.

faraway.

what on earth are you thinking? how can you be like that when i am like this? why do you think things are so hard for me right now? who do you think made me feel this way?

i cannot

handle this.

you

you know what? life is really hard. really un-cookie cutter.

new year.

down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down.