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