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.