Note to self.

EVERYONE ALWAYS CHANGES.
EVEN A FEW MONTHS IS TOO LONG TO KEEP THE FEELING.
NOT ENOUGH.
DOING GOOD DOESN'T USUALLY PAY OFF.

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?