Leaving the Fold//Learning How to Come Home

It's a really difficult thing to remember how to write in English again, when all I've done is write in French for the past few months. Today was the first time that French came more easily than English. It makes me worry about when I go back, and what will happen. It won't be easy, I don't think. Any transition like that, a total shift in pace, language, in country and responsibility. It isn't supposed to be easy.

I think more than anything, being away each time teaches me how much I miss home. I spent the better part of this year hating home. Not wanting to be there and definitely not wanting to let anyone know that I was from there. America, the greatest frontier. The scene of a great fire. Vermont, which has taken eight people from me in the past year and a half. Vermont, where my parents might get divorced, where my father lost his business and where I learned it would never be enough for him. Vermont, where we have and will continue to face financial, emotional, moral ruin. It is not easy, this existence.
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I have tried to live these past few months with a new sense of purpose. My purpose had been, before that, to stay alive. To literally make it through each day alive. That was it, really and truly that was all I wanted, was to stay living. Purpose takes a whole new meaning when you don't have one except in the right here and now.
I've not been incredibly successful, because real life has a way of derailing even the best laid plans. My primary focus is still on staying alive, on being alive and realizing I do not have to feel guilty for that. But I am realizing that I have let things, other than just absolute survival, back into the peripheries of my life. To be fair, they are there on the very edges, just static and not quite involved yet. But they are beginnings and if there is anything the last two years have taught me, it is that beginnings are some of the most beautiful and unloved things.

And I am starting to feel like myself again, I think. I am a much more cautious, more easily upset and always with an underlying sadness, but I think I am beginning to feel like a new version of who I was. A new beginning which I hoped for from September on, from the moment I saw Kerry and absolutely lost it, in a crinkled white dress in a stifling hot church, covered in tissue remnants and tears. I hadn't thought about the future at all until then, until I saw this woman that has known me since I was in eighth grade, whose child I've seen grow, and who I have been in charge of for intermittent periods of time. I had never been that glad to see her, to hug her and to know she was there, and in that moment, I felt so acutely the way that time had passed. I was taller than her, and much younger, much newer to the world, but I knew we felt the same sadness. It made me feel so old, so tired, so aware of the fact that I was older than I had ever been. That she was too.
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"Call me by Your Name" really shook me, the first time I saw it and every time after that. My friend asked me what the entire premise was, why Oliver asked Elio to "call me by your name and I'll call you by mine." I was just so shocked she hadn't gotten it immediately because for me, I didn't even have to think about why this weird thing was happening. What are we but an extension of our significant others? As we learn them, as we know them, we become mirrors of what we know of them. That's a vague literary description and it may not even be right, but it is exactly what I thought. Those exact words, which I wrote down because I have a long note on my phone of the things I think.

And the end made me sob. Really, truly sob, because. Because I know the feeling of becoming who you are, of going through that life-altering process with someone. Of them leaving. I know what it is to be loved and be left. And I'm sure most everyone else does too. That's what makes a good movie. For me, it just made me sob. And it made me so happy. To see Elio become who he was supposed to be, to see his parents love him so much and so easily.
To be loved, to be left. To still be loved. To still love. The cycle that never really quite ends.
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"Je sais qu'on y parlait de roses à ma fenêtre."

Kind of Like That

Self-Portrait
I will write myself into these pages.
I do not want my body, scratched so
it resembles more of a screen than
of a true skin. I will cover myself in an animals pelt:
the caged bird, that is me.
Drape me into your words, let them wash over me and
in the same breath, let them leave me far behind.
Let them leave me but you, you, I cannot live without because
I have always been this way: what the world wants I do not.
I will be the first to declare myself as weak and the only true thing you will ever need to know about me is that I skip through the sad parts of movies.

I do not want this body. I can not continue
to be chewed up and spit right back out, so long
as I don't recognize how crunching can be such an easy thing to do.
So long, as has left me wanting but what the world wants,
I do not and the only true thing you will ever need to know about me is that
I skip through the sad parts of movies.
I do.

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I am back into this cycle of writing poems, in this, one of the greatest transition periods of my life, when I am in-between happy and sad, anxious and calm, in-between home and not, in-between my parents and in-between America and the rest.

I have never been so far away from my home, from everyone I love and while I am still confused as to exactly how I should feel, I can't help but wanting to constantly embrace every new thing, person, aspect, that my life now contains. After a semester of the exact same depression and the constant battle against it, I cannot help but feel relieved that I am away. That I have left my shell so far behind and that that life no longer contains me. It was so easy for me to give up, last semester, last year. It seemed like the only thing to do, the only thing I really could do. Now, I just feel relieved to not have to make the choice any more.

And I am still so tired, so bone-tired of existing and living with this sadness that will just never go away. That's the thing about grief though, it doesn't ever go away, it just changes. And all fall and winter, I was waiting for it to change, to finally be okay. I should have known it would never change just like that, that I would have to learn how to peacefully co-exist with this grief, with this soul-sucking feeling of helplessness and loss.

I remembered one of the trips we went on, a few days ago, and I couldn't help but smile at how funny the memory was, how we'd slept in the same bed and how much she'd made me laugh before my very first FIS race ever, when the fog was unrelenting and I was so scared. It was the first time I was able to not cry when I thought about her. And so many of my memories of her are so good, that I have been filled with such sadness when realizing every memory of her will now be so forever tainted.

I cannot continue to let her memories be tainted because it just does not feel right. She was sunshine and so are the memories I have of her. I will live with them and let them be funny, let them be sad and great and will let that be okay. I have to learn to live with this grief, to let it change and become a part of myself that does not make me feel ashamed. And I am still learning how to do that, still having moments where I am not dealing at all (see: the episode in which we watch the movie Lion and I full on bawl in a room full of people), but I will no longer be so hard on myself. I was not fully equipped to deal with such grief at this point in my very short life. I am doing the only thing I know how to. I am doing the only thing I can think of to.
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"If you're travelling, to the North Country Fair,
where the winds hit heavy, on the borderline."

Tea for the Tillerman

It has been a long time since I've written anything new. I have felt so trapped, so anxious of what to say and so afraid it will be the wrong thing. I have always firmly believed that the best writing comes from the times of greatest pain, yet when my greatest pain hit this year, I closed up all my journals. I logged out of the account to take me to this source of writing. It felt too much to bear; I could not look back at myself without disgust. This horrible, terrible thing had happened and I could not believe I had ever complained about much of what I did. Pain, hot and persistent, had wormed its way into my brain stem.

It is still there. I am still in pain, I am still sad. I was not myself this year, and this made me so incredibly upset that I was sure I'd split myself in two. I would explode, I would do something, then I'd lock myself in whatever vessel was closest to me. The bathrooms, church confessionals, libraries and classrooms of Massachusetts and Vermont have seen me at my worst. I don't know how to reconcile my pain with my life. I just don't. It was there, last October, with the five. The pain was there. But so was the overwhelming love. Now, after the election, the breakup, the past year, the love was not there. My world has effectively been torn apart and I do not know how to piece it back together.

This has always been something I'm good at. Picking up the pieces after I've failed to keep them together. I didn't let my terrible geometry grade tear me apart in ninth grade, I didn't let my terrible skiing tear me apart in tenth grade, I didn't let the terrible things that happened in April to tear me apart in eleventh grade, I didn't let my first stinging college rejection tear me apart in twelfth grade. I was momentarily stopped at the metaphoric gates, but I sat back up, gathered myself, and I kept going. Last year, when I thought the worst had happened, I took all the love I felt around me and let it protect me. And I was okay.

November, the election hit. January, it really hit. Every week after that seems like a dream, the week before Valentines a nightmare. I have never been down for this long, have never been this unsure of how to gather myself. I mark my life's events in months, and September 2017 will live on for a good long time as the month that she died. I can't bring myself to write her name here. I can't do her justice. No one could. That is how I will remember her.

My reaction, now, is to cry. I used to want to fight. The truth is, I don't know how to fight any more. I really do not. I am used to being a person that is confident in their decision making. I have a strong compass that I follow and until this year, I have not felt truly lost. I am now, adrift and uncertain of what to be, do, how to feel or love. Everything means that much more to me. Everything. No matter what I do, every single action, every single eyelash blink, can move my world. I wish things were not this way, because I do not know this version of me. She is new, will take a lot of getting used to. She is incredibly broken and disappointed and so bone-tired of existing. It won't always be this way, I think. I can't see anything clearly, right now.

I hope one day soon, I will start writing here again. For now, though, I just can't. I have tried so hard, and even what I've said here is not good enough. It never will be. Life is more than can be encapsulated within words. Hers certainly was. And it is messy, and so sad that it will most certainly break a heart you did not think could be broken any more. It is all the more beautiful for being so.
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"You're still young, that's your fault,
there's so much you have to go through."

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

I've tried to start this about fifteen times with something eye-catching, pithy or deep.  That's on the blog template (my internship's blog, not this blog).  You start with the hook.  Something personal, funny, relatable.  Three to four sentences that tells you, "this is it." Enough to make a person decide to read.  Enough to inspire caring.

Let me tell you, if I had to write myself into four pithy, relatable, attention-catching lines, they'd go something like: She existed. She was sad a lot and tried to make up for it with wit.  She cared too much and for too long.  She was afraid.

That's not the eye-catching type of thing anybody is looking for, is it?  A lot of what I've had to come to terms with is that not everything I write will be worth reading. Not everything I write will be worth writing, in fact a lot of it won't, and most of it will mean nothing to you common folk. But really, it's kind of all I have.  This is the part where I'm supposed to say, "But my words are all I have and damn it I'll use them."  I then fix the camera with my determined yet soft gaze, and I set off to find my destiny.  They are not all I have.  They are a tiny part of my life and a tiny part of the way I quantify what I have.  They are, however, something.

A lot of what I write will not be worth writing, will not be worth reading.  Not everything I write will make me feel proud, good about myself, and I will not want to put it out for the outside world.  I am coming to terms with this.  With the fact that my words mean nothing to anyone, really, but me.  

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The night we slept at the Lake of the Clouds was unremarkable at first.  It was so foggy that we couldn't see the hut until we were on top of it.  It smelled of a thousand unwashed feet and the bodies they had carried.  It was freezing, windy and raining.  My father had lain out, in detail, the spectacle of this magnificent hut for us.  We had anticipated it for weeks, Gabe and I.  We'd been so ready to sleep at the hut perched on the edge of the sky.  Disappointing didn't even cut it.

The hut itself sits right next to a  moderate-sized lake (duh), which is kind of more like a giant pond, if my memory is correct.  It sits in one of the valleys on the ridge of Mount Washington, and is placed right on top of a pretty significant drop.  On the right days, one can look out and feel as if they're floating over the aforementioned clouds.

Gabe and I were hungry and tired, annoyed that our magical evening was no longer possible, and above all, freezing.  Despite this, our father made us go back outside and explore.  I'll be the first to admit that the terrain is quite a bit Hobbit-esque.  I can appreciate this now, but eight-year-old Katy did not feel the same.  We made our thousandth rock cairn of the day, and trudged back inside, too glum to articulate how upset we felt.

That night, Gabe crawled into my bunk and shook me awake, "Katy-mo, are you awake? You have to wake up!" I grumbled that I was awake, not wanting to admit I'd fallen asleep so fast or so easily.  Our room had a window and Gabe pointed out it, his eyes wide.  He only said, "look."

Outside, the fog had cleared, and the moon was full and close enough so that we were able to see everything.  The clouds, directly below us, formed a base of silvery water.  Dark mountains stretched for miles beyond us.  We were looking out of a ship's window, us two.  And that night, we slept on the clouds, my brother and I.
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The Heavy Kind of Music

Dry-dirt January creeps in with sticky fingers,
the click of a fan being set and
the way that Solomon Burke sings.
Everything I've ever forgotten,
sewed together and layered out.

Fingernails scratching on blue flowered-sheets,

and me, at five, white feather boa

clawed around my neck.

Tamborines as they are thrown,

and the sound of an oven door as it slams

so hard that it breaks,

The kind of music that doesn't exist
but makes your bones hurt
all the same.
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A collection of stories, I've decided. That will be my book. That's what it will be, because that's all I have and so far, I don't have much wisdom to share from them with you.  Not because I haven't gained anything from them, but because I am not ready to share.  Contrary to popular opinion (or not, I don't really know), I do not share quickly, or easily.  It may seem like I do, but that is only because most things I do share I consider to be surface level.  I'm really open about a lot of things, but it takes me a lot longer to go deeper.  I think sharing my stories will be the deepest I can go without going too deep.  I'll give something of mine to become something of yours.  They will not be to me what they are to you.  They will not be to you what they are to me.  I like the idea of that.
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"Take me to your river, oh, I wanna go"

The Piano in my Mother's Home

Life Itself
To go home early, every time.
To leave, to get up and run.
To know what it was like to not be yourself.
And be wrapped in a cocoon, a shell
so deep you couldn't tell where it began,
where it ended.
To know the mountains so deeply,
every groove and divide
you built yourself up on.
To write and not know what
you say, to try. To try not to
be angry.  To try not to be sad,
always, always.
To go home early, every time.
To rise and not know what the air
feels like and, to try
anyways.
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A bunch of poems, because I'm feeling a multitude of the feelings and not feeling like I have any right to those feelings, but still having them anyways.  A bunch of poems because it is so hard to have to know and to explain always, to justify and analyze and be the English major I am.  A bunch of vague, open-ended poems that are just as unsure as I am.  They will not tell you my darkest secrets.  They will not tell you my lightest secrets.  They will not tell you anything you don't already know.  They will exist, and they will be an extension of me and they will not make me feel better.  They will not make me feel better.
A bunch of poems because I'm done trying to explain how I feel, why I feel, what I feel.  I'm privileged and I'm disadvantaged and I'm terrified of what's happening.  I. Am. Terrified.  A bunch of poems because I am terrified.  They will not make me any less scared.  They will exist as a testament of how scared I was and at the end I will not triumph because that is not the dominant narrative.  I might not be okay, I might never be okay, but they will exist.
A bunch of poems, because I'm tired of being the kind of person who writes poems.
A bunch of poems, and they will not make me feel better.
A bunch of poems, and they will not make me less scared.
A bunch of poems. They will exist.
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A recurring nightmare,
funeral processions which carry me
on their shoulders. Slowly, slowly.
My gods peel off their skins,
pick out their bones and strip
straight down to their atoms.
A never-ending string of
unworthiness and then I can
slip into (un)consciousness, because
Existence and resistance,

sound too much alike.
Love and death exist in the same sphere,

And god, I've loved you forever.
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It's been a long week.  It's been a long month.  It's been a long year.
"No one knows me, like the piano
In my mother's home."

Riders in the Dying Hills of Heaven

I wonder if this is what it's supposed to feel like.  I have a limited scope of reference, and as such, I can't help but compare them side by side.  They are never the same, just as everything is never the same.  And there are many moments when I catch myself, worried as ever, thinking, "is this what it's like? Is this what it is?"  There are few things that have clear descriptions of the way they feel, the way that they're supposed to feel. All I know of it is my parents dancing in the kitchen, a shattered oven door, and my mother's voice as she read to me.

Worried as ever, that is me.  My fingernails bleeding, hands with calluses from where I've rubbed them together too much, lips bitten.  I have always been worried, worried, worried, for as long as I can remember.  My mother always said there were oceans of what-ifs in my eyes.  I don't think it's the what-ifs that paralyzed me as much as the already-haves.  My penguin sheets, my aching knees and bleeding nose, my broken oven door, the saying of no, bottles of pills and angry journals.

And sometimes, all you can do is go.
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All I've been doing is listening to French music, Spanish music, old soul music, as I wander through the stacks.  It's an odd sensation to snake your way through books over and over again.  It almost feels like home.  Almost.  It's easy to lose yourself, up on the third and fourth floors and particularly on level A north.  It's just you, and a bunch of old books. Dust, timer lights that tick continuously, and it's usually warm, warmer than it should be. I remember feeling like that when I was really young, back when we lived in Cambridge, when we would go to the public library.  I used to disappear between the rows of books, winding my way through, running my hands along their spines.

I basically do the same thing now, except I get payed for it.  Kim asked me how I could possibly stand my job, because it's so boring and mindless.  She's right, it is, but at this moment in my life that's all I want, that's all I need.  I'm exhausted, to the point where I can't remember what it was like to be well-rested, what it was like to not feel like a shell. I lose myself in the stacks, quiet in thought and with only the echo of my footsteps and the tick of the light timers.

Sometimes I synchronize the two, tick tick, step, tick tick, step.  As I wind, and wind, I measure my steps, my breaths, to the ticks, to my thoughts.  I feel whole again, like I am one instead of half, instead of a bunch of parts scattered and torn.  I'm just one. It's nice to feel whole again.  Almost, almost whole.
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July 2016

Back when everything was good

or was it bad? I can never remember.

All I can think of is the scratch

of couch cushions on my thighs,

blue glare from the screen,

inches from our face(s).

I remember the way the world smelled

when I pressed myself to your neck,

the way your nails nicked,

always too long.

I remember what it felt like when you left,

and at that, you were very good.

I remember your eyes,

the creases on your skin,

the curve of your lashes.

And was it good? Or was it bad?

I can never remember.

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"Who's gonna tell me which without making it work?

Only to be the healer whose making you hurt"

Est-ce que tu réves d'avoir des réves? 

The Unbearable Fragility of Being

It has always puzzled me, the way we move through this life.  I've tried to make sense of it, but I don't think there really is a good way to make sense of it.  Like anything else, we've created ways to interpret it, how much money you make, your relationship status, race, class, offspring, etc.  It's guesswork, at best, and at worse, it's just nonsense.  It is irksome that it's just so well accepted that this is the way it is supposed to be, that we're supposed to create measurements and schemas and whatever, and that we're all supposed to assume they're right.  What if they aren't right?  What if everything we do is wrong and we don't even know because we don't even have the right language to say that it is wrong?  What, What, What?

Nobility.  An interesting concept.  Dictionary definition, "The quality of being noble in character, mind, birth, or rank."  That gives you nothing.  You're not supposed to use the word in it's definition and everyone, everyone, knows that.  But what does it mean to embody it?  Can anyone ever really embody it?  We've all done non-noble things and does one non-noble thing negate the existence of a noble act?
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I am always worried. I have always been worried, no matter how hard I've tried not to be.  What if this isn't right, what if I'm not doing this right?  And that devolves into, what if someone moved my things, what if they changed my sheets or cleaned my room, what if the dust particles aren't even anymore, what if this is too little words, and what if it's too many, what if I will never be able to function again, what if my teeth fell out and what if I broke all my bones; where is this even going?  Does it even matter? Does anything, really, anything, matter?

This might seem like an overreaction. It most certainly is, and I am very aware of that.  Humans, however, have the ability to think and overreact in much the way I currently am, and that gives me a certain sort of pause. My dad's favorite quote is, "I think, therefore I am."  I'm pretty sure everyone has heard that before, whether it's been from your weird history teacher, or the old guy who was essential in your creation.  Creation.  Another interesting concept.  I don't know if we were created to overreact.  I'm even skeptical of the notion that we were "created" at all.  But here I am, overreacting, thinking too deeply, existing. But here I am, overreacting, and the world is continuing.  Something makes me think that isn't an accident.
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Poems are not Cute

You’re like snow, every day in July,

and November.  If I look close I can see

where you’ve been nicked and scratched,

where your cheekbones end and begin,

where your rings are twisted and

un-twisted. 

Everything will start, everything will stop

but I wish you didn’t, you were the ocean,

the night never came and sleep wasn’t

real.  If I close my eyes, I can smell

you on my sheets, I can feel the bones

of your hands.

Nobody says sweet like you, no one knows

what it means, like you. Milk and honey,

sweetness that doesn’t know it is sweet,

but when you blink, I know. When you

move your hands, one-two, three-four,

I know.

And laughing, you know.  You

know what sadness tastes like, what

it means to be asleep so deeply that the

world ceases to exist and the trees detach

and that teeth come un-glued. You flick in

and out, on and off dreams.

You are like snow, every day in July, and

November; I want your flakes

to fill every sky. 

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At this point, all I can say is that I wish I knew a better way to convey how I felt.  And I'm sorry.  I am always sorry, always.
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"And in the nighttime, she's beautiful
I'm sure her mother knows."