Friday, May 06, 2011
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Lullaby
In a horribly sarcastic sense
There is a lull in my thinking
It steals over me silently in my sleep
Blooming over the veins of my face
That stand out in their Y-shape on my forehead
And draw attention to imperfection
Just the way they should
This lull is perverse because I have wanted it so
I have begged and pleaded for any refuge
From a barrage of thoughts and feelings
My insides have turned themselves outside
In a vague sense of righteousness
And a clear sense of wrong-eousness
Yet when it finally arrives, this lull I have waited for
It is simply a numbness that begins with my toes
As they sink into the ice that is packed so tightly
And spreads upwards until it bursts into song
And a dance that bleeds itself through my hands and feet
Until the carpet is red and I am white
A lullaby to my body and a lullaby to my mind
Meh, I don't know how I feel about this. It was just...there in the midst of confusion and then it was here on this blog...
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Oh, My Life.
After weeks of vague bliss there is a lull in the conversation and an uneasy silence follows while we try to figure out where to go from here.
As human beings we depend on other human beings to leech our emotions from—we can’t feel things on our own, everything comes from those around us. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why does being around a depressed person make you feel depressed? Why do we grab onto optimistic people like they are our last lifelines to happiness? Because it’s better than not feeling anything at all—better than feeling an unknown, unidentifiable ache somewhere in your body that you wish you could stopper and put into a jar and analyze.
Analysis of ache: somewhere just above my ribs and just below my breast, there is a dull throbbing that is not quite pain—it feels more like a constant restlessness, a need to do something, but without the knowledge of what I need to do, the ache will not end. Additionally, my ankle actually does feel pain, probably because I must have rolled it over the course of the last few days, sometime when I was tripping around in heels, and maybe this pain isn’t related, but it makes me limp slightly and is a constant reminder of the melodramatic opera that has taken over the last 48 waking hours.
There’s something about happiness that makes me, and probably others, uneasy. It is like we are waiting for the wheel to continue turning and we know that we are at the top now, but we’ll be at the bottom very soon. So we force ourselves to the bottom, thinking that self-inflicted anguish will probably be better than what the universe can dream up for us. And sometimes we force others to the bottom with us, and this is much worse. I have been forced to the bottom by another person, and it is, to say the least, an experience.
Somewhere in the midst of wondering whether all of this is my fault or if I should never have let my happiness depend on someone else in the first place, I hear everyone around me telling me that I am better off without him, and that nothing is my fault, but none of it seems to register. It may not be my fault, but it is most definitely my pain, and am I a horrible person for wanting him to feel more pain than me? All of those beautiful stories about romance and love (not that this was anything close to love, I’m no fool) involve somebody being hurt, and still wishing happiness and joy towards the person that hurt them because they are in love. How can this be? What an inhuman feeling—all I want is for the person that hurt me to feel far more pain than I feel.
It is a circling darkness, and there is a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye, and I am dancing in a red dress and he is looking at me.
I want this.
I want him to look at me, to know what he is missing, and yet I feel like an unattractive, ugly soul.
It is a circling darkness and I am dancing in a red dress and I am yelling at him, things that he doesn't want to hear because he thought this was going to be a clean break, he thought I wasn’t the kind of person to create unnecessary drama. I wasn’t that kind of person, but I am tripping over my heels and dancing in a red dress and his head and my head will be throbbing with a hangover tomorrow and the drama is here.
It is a circling darkness and I am dancing in a red dress and he is not looking at me.
I don’t want this.
He is leaving with someone else and rage is building within me but it comes out as sadness. I can’t be here but I am not leaving. Then I am pulled upwards and an arm is wrapped around my waist and it is not his arm, but that seems okay. If this was a movie this would be the artistic club scene in which the camera moves quickly and jerkily and creates a dizzying confusion for the audience because that’s what it would feel like if you were there.
It is a circling darkness and I am not dancing in a red dress, I am stumbling outside and there is an arm around me and I feel a vague sense of comfort, but it is gone in the same flash that it came with. This is where the ache begins.
I hear the voice next to me saying that he made a mistake, that he still likes me, and in a haze I believe it because it is what I need to hear, and it is easy to pretend that the voice is him, even though the arm is not his.
It is a circling darkness and I am sprawled across my bed in a red dress, my arms tangled underneath me and I am in deep sleep. I am dreaming in flashes of confusion, and I am dreaming about ways that the night could have gone so that when I wake up I can’t remember any more what really happened and what was in my dream.
When I crawl out of bed I recognize the ache and this has never happened to me before. I can feel my face being a mask that is ready to crumble at any instant and everything around me is making me think about what has happened and I see myself in the mirror and I know what I was the night before. I wasn’t a girl dancing in a red dress, I was a train wreck in red dress who thought she could handle this but she can’t.
It is the longest day that I have ever known.
This morning I woke up and saw the sun filtering through my blinds and the ache lessened.
One step at a time.
In the shower I touched my face and felt the layers of tears I had not bothered to wash and makeup that had covered it and as I picked up the soap I had this thought.
I’m better than this.
As human beings we depend on other human beings to leech our emotions from—we can’t feel things on our own, everything comes from those around us. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why does being around a depressed person make you feel depressed? Why do we grab onto optimistic people like they are our last lifelines to happiness? Because it’s better than not feeling anything at all—better than feeling an unknown, unidentifiable ache somewhere in your body that you wish you could stopper and put into a jar and analyze.
Analysis of ache: somewhere just above my ribs and just below my breast, there is a dull throbbing that is not quite pain—it feels more like a constant restlessness, a need to do something, but without the knowledge of what I need to do, the ache will not end. Additionally, my ankle actually does feel pain, probably because I must have rolled it over the course of the last few days, sometime when I was tripping around in heels, and maybe this pain isn’t related, but it makes me limp slightly and is a constant reminder of the melodramatic opera that has taken over the last 48 waking hours.
There’s something about happiness that makes me, and probably others, uneasy. It is like we are waiting for the wheel to continue turning and we know that we are at the top now, but we’ll be at the bottom very soon. So we force ourselves to the bottom, thinking that self-inflicted anguish will probably be better than what the universe can dream up for us. And sometimes we force others to the bottom with us, and this is much worse. I have been forced to the bottom by another person, and it is, to say the least, an experience.
Somewhere in the midst of wondering whether all of this is my fault or if I should never have let my happiness depend on someone else in the first place, I hear everyone around me telling me that I am better off without him, and that nothing is my fault, but none of it seems to register. It may not be my fault, but it is most definitely my pain, and am I a horrible person for wanting him to feel more pain than me? All of those beautiful stories about romance and love (not that this was anything close to love, I’m no fool) involve somebody being hurt, and still wishing happiness and joy towards the person that hurt them because they are in love. How can this be? What an inhuman feeling—all I want is for the person that hurt me to feel far more pain than I feel.
It is a circling darkness, and there is a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye, and I am dancing in a red dress and he is looking at me.
I want this.
I want him to look at me, to know what he is missing, and yet I feel like an unattractive, ugly soul.
It is a circling darkness and I am dancing in a red dress and I am yelling at him, things that he doesn't want to hear because he thought this was going to be a clean break, he thought I wasn’t the kind of person to create unnecessary drama. I wasn’t that kind of person, but I am tripping over my heels and dancing in a red dress and his head and my head will be throbbing with a hangover tomorrow and the drama is here.
It is a circling darkness and I am dancing in a red dress and he is not looking at me.
I don’t want this.
He is leaving with someone else and rage is building within me but it comes out as sadness. I can’t be here but I am not leaving. Then I am pulled upwards and an arm is wrapped around my waist and it is not his arm, but that seems okay. If this was a movie this would be the artistic club scene in which the camera moves quickly and jerkily and creates a dizzying confusion for the audience because that’s what it would feel like if you were there.
It is a circling darkness and I am not dancing in a red dress, I am stumbling outside and there is an arm around me and I feel a vague sense of comfort, but it is gone in the same flash that it came with. This is where the ache begins.
I hear the voice next to me saying that he made a mistake, that he still likes me, and in a haze I believe it because it is what I need to hear, and it is easy to pretend that the voice is him, even though the arm is not his.
It is a circling darkness and I am sprawled across my bed in a red dress, my arms tangled underneath me and I am in deep sleep. I am dreaming in flashes of confusion, and I am dreaming about ways that the night could have gone so that when I wake up I can’t remember any more what really happened and what was in my dream.
When I crawl out of bed I recognize the ache and this has never happened to me before. I can feel my face being a mask that is ready to crumble at any instant and everything around me is making me think about what has happened and I see myself in the mirror and I know what I was the night before. I wasn’t a girl dancing in a red dress, I was a train wreck in red dress who thought she could handle this but she can’t.
It is the longest day that I have ever known.
This morning I woke up and saw the sun filtering through my blinds and the ache lessened.
One step at a time.
In the shower I touched my face and felt the layers of tears I had not bothered to wash and makeup that had covered it and as I picked up the soap I had this thought.
I’m better than this.
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