Tracks

I didn't mean to drag you down, it’s just that I show love by suffering at people. That’s how I express myself. I learned to find a freedom in it, through it, and I wasn’t so much trying to pull you down as pull you with me. Where to, I don’t know; I think the point was not knowing.

Do you remember that time we followed the old railroad tracks in winter to that abandoned sugar-shack sat still since about 1955, frozen in time, unchanged even though so many springs passed since and the sap flowed fresh and rich and golden each time? Who decided to stop harvesting it? Who just gave up one day and said fuck it? Decided to stay home? They didn’t come back to collect anything off the walls. They just left it all as it was.

Only a few vagrants had enjoyed it since, as evinced by some half-crushed Pepsi cans and other modern rubbish. And us, we enjoyed it, before the barking of large dogs sounded in the distance, but definitely getting closer. I imagined them, hulking and black against the snow, barreling down upon us as we spent those last surreal days together in late February.

And then, you boarded the plane for China. Where else could you go?

Don't be afraid to feel. Fear is never strength.

There are a lot of people in this world who seem, on some level, afraid of their own emotions. They mask them with sarcasm, irony, logic, substance abuse, denial, or some other form of distraction.

I am one of those people, and it’s silly. Why are we, as a culture, so ashamed to feel? What’s weak about crying? Emotions are the very thing that give power to all we do. The more emotion you can poignantly convey when you create, the more powerful and moving your creation. The more emotion you feel in a touch, or when you look out over a stunning natural vista, or greatest of all when you see the sun dapple on a weed in gravel and suddenly understand that it’s marvelous, the more you understand about life and the more you appreciate it.

The ability to feel strongly is a gift. Don’t hold back.

{Prose/general fiction} "Countdown" {TW: Eating disorder references}

When I start to see the scale dip towards 100 and think of continuing the countdown to zero like a self-destruct sequence in slow motion, a part of me feels victorious. It feels like I am taking some kind of control of the way I have felt inside my whole life. I have always felt like a freak, was treated like one, and was eaten up by a hunger for touch and for connection and for things I cannot even name -- but on the outside I looked perfectly normal. There was no sign of my inner state and I was always judged and rejected if I tried to voice said state or show it emotionally. I have come to enjoy writing it on my skin, instead.

I like to make my body a canvass for the twisted silence in me. I like to look a little desperate. I like to look hungry. I like to remind people of things that unsettle them: Death, famine, poison, pain. When I embody the macabre I feel in tune with my inner self. It's just another method of nonverbal communication, and surely anything deconstructed with enough effect and purpose begins to teeter on the verge of art.

This is the mute horror that cannot be silenced yet cannot be ignored. This is impact. I will crawl under your skin and a part of me will haunt you in your last thoughts before sleep takes you.

When I look deathly pale I smile and feel touched by the mournful watch of the moon. Bones peeking through skin beg the softness of arms to fall into. My scars tell the story of a journey down a path that was not well-traveled. I stumble to you at the end of it looking sallow and blotchy and hollow-eyed, finally not having to utter a word to ask you to feed me, love me, hold me, bring me back to life and make me whole for a little while.

Art from: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/anorexia-laura-seed.html

Free

The music takes hold and I drift away on the high notes of flutes as they trill bird calls over the great waters in my mind; slowly I transcend into being one amongst those calling, soaring, looking down on worlds of my own creation all the while. As my wings spread I am darting across endless snapshots, fantasies I could choose to dive into, only to wake again in another reality. For a spell I can be a Russian Tzar, a Celtic warrior, a tiger lying low amidst jungle ferns; I can ride horses across the desert under a tapestry of stars, or I can fling myself into Arctic waters and lose myself amongst the shifting blues of ice floes -- I can change shape, change form, change time and space. I can dream of another time and place where you never came to be, and for a while, I live in a world you never marred, a place you never touched. I am free of you, as I am free of all things. In a thousand other lives that exist behind my eyelids, you never broke my heart. The possibilities are endless. You have never fettered my ability to dream, and so you have never truly owned me.

I can fall into the velvet details of a rose, or a slanted beam of evening sunlight glinting off crystal, and it's like you never happened at all. The only things that exist then are myself, and a profound joy in the details of creation. They inspire, striking flint against tinder, spawning so many stories in my heart. In those stories, I find my passion unbroken.

Salvation is packaged abstractly in the subtleties all around us; full is the heart that can unlock its own freedom.