Stuff and Nonsense

I can't remember how the words fit inside the quotation marks, but it's something to the rhythm of -- What they say, 'write what you know' is silly. Write what you don't know. Write about the yous you have not been yet, or almost were, or could have been, or could still be. Write yourself born into another body, write yourself into the nos of you and the way you might be still if you are late to work, or late to marriage, or late to your whole life. Write you happy. Write you a way you do not know yourself. It's all within you anyway. Writing what you know is silly because you know all of it--- if you are aware of your essence, you can be aware of you in the midst of anything. It doesn't mean you make those choices. It just means know your character enough to throw them into anything- and know how they would respond.

Thinking of this as I am writing you into a book I have not written yet but am writing every day. I am thinking of you and eyes so bright and the world so dark but only because it was night time and we were speaking in circles. We knew what was going on. We still do. We do forever. I am just saying there is something beautiful in the possibility of what could have been when you know you never really wanted it. I can have it, in a different way, exactly how I want or picture. It's no matter. It's fine, even.

I am working on working it out. Working on making it better than I knew it might have been. I am working on a better me, buried inside of a me I have been desperately trying to shove down into the belly of my own definitions.

Something about all of this makes me want to buy a Roladex. 

I am already the person I was born to be. But what am I doing with that?

And in the silence comes the collision of all of the voices I tend to not listen to any or at least most of the time: it is usually easy--- when I am tired, it is hard.

The phrase "you should," and in terms of things people want me to do, people who "care about" me, people who have __MY__ best interest, when my best interest has nothing to do with me or things I do in general and I'm in the middle of a forest with a light shining only on my feet screaming for all the stares to just stop yelling at me. I want them to stop, like staring at a pair of purple panties in the middle of the classroom, they didn't understand, nobody knows. I can't even explain it to myself, how would anyone else be able to distinguish it from where I am shouting? Make it stop... make it stop.

I can't tell you what I mean, only that I feel something like a mess, but I don't want any help. It's not that I won't accept it. It's just that people are different. And it does matter. And I'm glad it's okay for some people but that's all the more reason I don't feel like it makes sense, like Weezy, like inhuman. Trying to be more like Jesus and less like you, do you know what I mean?

It's Jackson Browne playing piano, it's hot summer rain in Georgia, it's something like a crooked melody, it's the joyful sound, it's depression, it's the way an older man will look at you like he doesn't want you but like he already knows your kind, it's like the way we roll along like little spring floaties off of weeds, it's like how awkward it gets when your cat is throwing up, it's something like a loss and this concept that has nothing to do with you. It's a complete lack of understanding. It's the silence. It's okay. It just is. It's also not my fault. And that's okay, too.

I still feel like I am on the boat.

The awareness that God has not merely created the beauty in the world, but that the divine energy IS the beauty in the world. The sand is not separate from how good it feels between your toes or how well it suits the ocean's edge, but it is those things at the same time. This is God, too. This is all of it, too. This is the way we are, too. This is the only thing I can think of to explain what it was to have the foam meet my feet as the ocean roared God's comfort into my ears. Thank you, thank you. We all sing a chorus, we all sing, we all.

what we call fiction, what you'll remember as truth.

Acts of normality to beats you didn't introduce to me, living a life I made for myself or maybe fully to the credit of God (let's be real here) --- but there's something sick about living life so smooth, like nothing's on the agenda, like I don't give a ( word ) about it. I still can't decide what I do give about ""life"" or something like it.

In the empty howling of the night, I am with you in complete boredom, which, unfortunately looks exactly like a good time if you are a very unlucky person. Years later, I am with a different you in complete misery, which unfortunately looks exactly like love if you are stupid enough to be a romantic. Decades still, I am with a new you wrapped in the divine laughter of what it is to actually want to care about somebody, even if you are immensely and unconditionally incapable of this.

I'm working on that part.

There's a stigma around girls of my kind. Okay, I lied. There really aren't. Maybe I just don't know them. Maybe I just don't know girls like me. Maybe I just don't know enough people who would dare say "girls like you" to a face like mine. What does that mean? LIKE you? Like, like similar, like the dictionary points, like the way all things are the same in the end anyway so why are we wasting our earthy times defining somebody else's opinion of what you don't care about anyway? Do you want me to just start back at the beginning?

Falling asleep to the purr of your snoring, I am reminded that no matter how exciting it is to remember being miserable, my closeness with God is not to be confused with an admiration of a smart man's mouth. We are children of the sky, of the way the stars look when they start to disappear, the way the waning gibbous gets to have such a very cool name: for me, you are these things. And the rest of them are the fading stars themselves, are the way you smell after a long day of not doing anything important, are the way judgment falls into a place in your brain that you store only in times of complete and exact boredom as you are falling apart, desperate to be a sadder person. If we are being completely honest, I'm not afraid to tell you that preaching proverbs you have created does not make your heart holy, but only full of holes, broken and cracking and being filled with cement and the tears of somebody you may never meet. I am impossible sometimes. And I am stubborn more than that. And sometimes I love watching tv. That's just the way my life has been built and that's the way I like it. I'm not looking for your words to build me up and take me away. I am looking for the softness in the night that I have heard about when my friends tell me stories about when they get in fights with their blonde boyfriends or the way I remember her saying my name when we were alone the first time or how water can be when it's not in a hurry. I'm just saying things the way they are coming out of me, but if you need to know the truth, I will never be an articulate woman. I came here to sing and miss people, came here to cry my way into something good. I am going to stand on the street watching the lights change and hoping someday you come to your senses.

The sounds I cannot stand...

If there were ever a thing, one of those things other people talk about, maybe like what they call "trigger," maybe it would be this--- this list, these songs, the soundtrack to solitude, the soundtrack to a life I was never sure how to live but that felt natural, raw, something like I always pictured nudity feeling like. I'm still not sure what to call it when I turn around, when I excavate my own languages from that time before, when I think about crying a lot, when I remember silence, when I remember the first night on a weird bed with open windows and no pictures and everything feeling distant and just like the time before it. I still don't know how to explain to anyone else what it was--- just that, oh, what a something it was...

It's years later now in the way we count time. It's something I'm not sure of. Not just that time with the weird bed but this whole chapter I have forgotten when I was quieter, when I was sadder maybe, when things were not what they are now--- full of lightness and ease, full of worldly frustrations and problems that do, in fact, have solutions (let's be honest: life is easy).

I am sorry for the way this soundtrack makes me remember. How I could not fall asleep without these beats. How this was the answer to my entire life. And now I don't know how to get back to the girl with a heart. I am frozen in the center of a lake on fire and I am not sure how I got here. (Author's note: happiness is hard to accept if you are born uncomfortable. But don't misunderstand my expression for anything other than that.) I just get sad remembering that I knew how to get to that before, somewhere deep inside of my own self (Author's note: sorry I write like a douche bag). I don't know why it takes this to make me cry anymore. It's not a bad thing. It's just confusing. And I wonder if the price we pay for happiness is some part of our soul/spirit/sadness. I am not sure how ready to give that up I will ever be. I am still trying to figure out if it is my way that I've lost or the desire to find my way back to never feeling like I would be home.

I can't write in silence because everything starts sounding too loud. If I have forgiven myself, what is this rattling? What is this? Do you remember what it was like to not be in that weird bed? Do you remember what it was like when you were not walking the woods with me? I remember the goblins. I remember not being able to make friends. I remember being the only one who would speak up and I remember hurting people who are older than I am. I remember that feeling hurt me. I don't know why I can't remember where I put those tears, though. Or where the girl is crying alone in the middle of the first room I got to have all to myself (that i still never slept in), burning candles to crappy music I still don't feel bad about listening to.

I hope that in some of this you can find yourself.

too truthy

Bringing it back to the way I like it, windows wide open and a kitten running around, making a mess of all material things because this is my room and this is the way I like it, Joni Mitchell calling me home and telling me none of it matters anyway, or maybe that's God filtering down because that's how He's wanting me to hear it, but that's the way I like it. I like it when I am alone. I like it when I am alone. I like it when I am alone. Something like a mantra or maybe it's me trying to convince myself that that's actually how I feel. Something like that is more about right.

I like it warmer with the roses in my way, I like crawling through the darkness to laugh with you in the mornings and I like the way it is when there is a quiet after it all and you are telling me I am pretty even when we both know there is a long way to go before that's true. I like it when I can feel you wanting me forever even though I'm not sure how either of us feel about that on a practical way. I don't want you to feel differently even if I talk that way to myself sometimes because I can't imagine long-term pain and even with all of you surrounding me and all the voices inside of me from love songs I use to navigate the way I feel, I could never know how to hurt you that way and the only thing about you that could make me cry maybe is that--- is fear, is us, is our fear, is our lack of being able to imagine something possible. I'm not asking you for a way in, all I am asking for is a way to settle my stomach when I am in the middle of thinking things big girls might think about (not that I would know even what that resembles). I am not sorry. It's just weird to be honest with yourself. I'm not sure how I feel about honesty because the only policy I have found that ever works is listening and then keeping everything to myself. It's not a good policy but it seems to be working better for me than saying what I mean.

//

Laying naked under a willow tree, I am crying.
Sad things make me cry. Sad people make me
feel at home. Something like forgetting is the way
I feel best. I am glad to be under that tree in 40
years with bare feet, whether I bring someone
along is not up to me--- up to up alone and alone.

"If you are born January 21st..." and other important details

Neglecting my knack even though I've got nothing better to do- thus informing my peers about my lack of damn to give, not really to sound critical or serious or even like I mean anything I say- basically, I'm just saying. Something that comes out when I press tips to keys is this rhythm of repetition that I use all the same words to say really different words and I like saying the words they kept telling me not to, words that are weak, not curse words but worse than that - things like beautiful and different, really and amazing, happening and being, and all these other important meaningless things. I don't know. I just start spitting and this is what comes out- this, and something like the way it's just nice to have the pillow between your knees when you sleep even though you're not old enough yet. Basically, I am just trying to not talk about a lot of things maybe I should be talking about just because I don't want to think about those moments and that coldness and how I am so cold. You know, in that big book of birthdays, one of my flaws is "lacking self-criticism" which behaves in different ways in my life like allowing me to live more according to me doing whatever the heck I want to do because I don't let myself/others judge me/I don't care. But there's this big part of me resistant to that phrase because I feel like where does all of this come from then? How am I so upset? I am cold and worried about freezing in the middle of a heat rash in a consistently sunny city in the most radiant life of my light. I don't know. Something about being this autobiographical makes me feel like a jerk and also uncomfortable, because if I am being honest, I just write in circles. I don't know what I'm doing here any more than anyone else. I truly don't believe I have much of a purpose other than to just speak my truth (#selfish?). But the worst is that I just do it anyway. I don't care. If I am being honest, I could sit alone between the roses for a hundred years and feed off the way it feels to not care, to not worry, to not be bothered with any of this stuff I worry about normally that I'm aware doesn't matter, and I would just gravitate toward the love and listen to God and feel the way things are and not think so much about the "right thing" or the "way" or any of it.

I hope for your sake you don't know what I mean, you know?