Each Year I Have A New Resolution And I Can't Help But Have Another. For The Past Four Years It Was To

I don't let myself look up what my school friends are doing now, I'm afraid. Afraid I'll find pictures of a something I missed. I remember us at 11 crowded around a school library computer, you both looked up your favourite wedding dresses most of them mermaid and lacy white, you picked out our bridesmaids dresses and talked about how we would find a colour that at least looked good on us all; I thought powdered blue. I miss being that young, when the only worries where our homework and hoping we where first out for lunch. Maybe you did get married, maybe if I log in to my socials I'll find an invite. Or maybe time has changed too much, we aren't eleven anymore. I wonder if you picked powdered blue or a mermaid dress in lacy white, I wonder if something remains the same.

Dear 2025.

I write this in November 2024, but I know it will find it's way to you in no time at all, you have been approaching faster than I can keep up with.

I ask that you will take it easy and slow, I ask that you let me settle in before 2026 makes their way in. I know you can't control what the people do, but I ask you make the bad days soft, give us only a few.

Sincerely a hopeful heart.

Just before covid hit my brother and I at 15 and 19 found our selfs homeless. I had a choice, my brother would go into care or we could stay together, but only if I took responsibility for him and had somewhere to live. So I applyed for social housing, the guy that processed my case was sympathetic and at some points I was holding it together better than him, do you have any other family? No, Do you know where your mother is? I wish I did, how old is your brother? 15 are you in any fulltime education? Not anymore. He looked at me like I was something tragic and I suppose I was, there isn't a metaphor for what I looked like that works any better than just what his naked eyes saw; a girl abandoned by her mother, her life in a bag on her back completely thrown on how to deal with everything, and all he could do was fill out a form and send it and me off. it's going to be okay.

Somehow despite the odds we where given emergency accommodation and a year later a property to rent, I suspect we where pushed up the list because of my brothers age, we where lucky, some people wait years in hotels or streets all over the country, living out of suitcases and rucksacks.

As lucky as we where, luck didn't cover all the things I suddenly had to know. I had no idea how bills worked or paying my taxes, I didn't even really understand what "taxes" meant until the final notices where piling up in front of us. It's something they don't teach you in school or at least mine didn't. They never taught us how to survive in a world like this, they assume our parents would be there to explain or we'd be much older before it mattered. what's more useful in real life, how to formally address someone in an email or how to keep the lights on or how to find food when a tin of beans is too expensive.

Though I suppose the email ettique lesson was useful for something in the end,

To whomever it may concern, I'm writing to you regarding my payment plans and how I'm choosing to fork over alot of money and won't be buying enough food to live off this month. My regards.

A lot of the time I don't feel like I've matured past 16. I still feel just as scared and even more lonely. They say your twenties are when you'll feel more steady, but I feel like I'm being swung into space and there I float suffocating in the void.

In about ten minutes I'm going to receive a phone call and I probably shouldn't be making a post, because I always start freaking out just before (so rn). but I'm doing this to trick my brain into being semi productive, basically I'm getting the ball rolling and hoping I can cling to whatever motion is left for the phone call.

I usually sit in literal silence for hours before any call so that I can store up social energy and mentally prepare myself, but sometimes I instead start getting more anxious the closer it comes to the call time, and when that happens I just don't pick it up. It feels like there's a wild animal waiting on the other end but also one looking over my shoulder ready to get me if I don't pick up.

So I'm going to just make this random rambling post and hope I stay out of my amygdala. Gosh I hate this lol, I've been through way scarier things but waiting on phone calls always feel like falling down an elevator shaft.

I saw @two-bees-poetry lady macbeth/macbeth poem 🌷and became inspired to try this format called (an okayish first attempt but a fun challenge) contrepulate poetry.

Sometimes this comfort rots. Sometimes this resting mocks me (about the life I want to live).

I stole a bible a few years ago, I browsed the shelfs not looking to steal but to pass the time and then I saw it, black cover and pages edged in gold. I wasn't religious, more agnostic or an atheist that dabbled in Buddhist ideas, I felt the Christian narrative or at least the one I heard about was always about who would pay. How jesus payed for your "sins", and if you didn't believe then you'll pay in the after life, so hold on to guilt and carry your strife , but I also knew that I wanted , needed something. I wasn't looking for misplaced shame only hope and I wanted to have it tangible in my hands.

So with my stomach empty and my shoes hole ridden, I ignored the fashion magazines with diet tips and beauty tricks and filled my emptyness with something close to hope, if only to cope. I grabbed it from the shelf and I left the store. I was too afraid to steal food , I didn't dare even with my hunger, but possibility of having something bigger than life to cling to on cold and lonely nights seemed worth the risk.

During that time I wasn't doing so well, my mother was drinking and taking drugs with her friends god only knows where and the cupboards where completely bare. I would wander around town, I would wait for the days to pass, I would wait for something to meet me in my loneliness. I wanted so desperately for something like god to reveal itself to me, my mother wasn't someone I could lean on and my father wasn't around so I think naturally I wanted something to believe in, to sustain me when food and family couldn't.

Last year my brother and I where almost homeless, we slept on the hard floor in a cold empty room for three years, we spent every day waiting. I would wait for the stores reduced items at the end of the day, wait for the sun to dry my clothes, I would walk for hours round and round, my shoes didn't last long, I tried ducktaping the soles but the pavement wore through that aswell. When I wasn't waiting outside food banks, staring at white walls or writing, I sometimes would visit the church in town. It's a cathedral and I still have no idea what denomination it's under, but I'd walk around and admire the marbal pillers and stain glass windows, I would try to remember how people hundreds near a thousand years ago carved angles into stone and placed their hope in something other than themselfs, that back then a church may have been the only place you could go if you had no where else. I reminded myself of all the people who would have prayed there, that would have stood where I stood and cried, wished and waited as I did. I would light a candle and I would wish for a better tomorrow, I wasn't asking jesus or a god, I was asking the universe, I was asking subconsciously myself to keep going.

What do you think of religion? (Are you religious?)

Its not all men!!!

Your post is so fucked up! And you Did go to Girls school so why bother even sayin boys did go! If there tranns then it's still girlsJust stupidd

I don't even know where to begin with this. I never said it was all men. I know my post isnt positive, it's not meant to be considering I'm writing about the actions of perverse male teachers towards young girls. And yes I did go to a girls school, but not every student was a girl.

Does anyone else feel a bit overwhelmed when a post u make gets more notes than your used to, like there's hundreds of people just suddenly in your room looking over your shoulder at your Mediocr post and by exstention you.