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?