jean-elle-writing

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Twilight miss me when I’m gone, bleed my shadow ‘til it’s grown.

Light don’t follow where I go, my face anew you’ll never know.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

What a pretty little lie we peddle children as loves are ended by mouth, laws are written on paper, and wars are declared in ink.

What could you have if you let yourself dream? If you didn’t squash anything that shone under that worker’s boot of yours?

If you want to know what someone wants, watch what they give away. Love, time, compliments. People think others yearn the same way they do, and they reveal themselves in these little interactions; the way daylight escapes blinds midday.

It’s easier for the caterpillar to die than to grow wings. You cannot choose ease when splendor demands difficulty.

The touch of your coat as you trot on by.

The green of your eyes as you gaze at the sky.

The scratch of your claws as you knock on my door.

I miss that sound dearly

for I do not hear it anymore.

If I pull the dagger out

What will be left of me

I am blood unspilt, nothing more.

I’m not going to hate myself anymore.

I’m like a child, the way my mind works. I want us to look at each other, but I keep covering my eyes.

There are versions of me you’ve never met. I carry so much hatred you never see. It’s like an ornate blade, you could mistake it’s hilt for jewelry on my neck. But it’s there, in the slit where words come out, to silence any iteration of me that could offend you. Any glimpse of a possibility that I could hurt you, I instead hurt myself. I’d suppress and push down and erase and lie a thousand times over if it meant you were pristine. If you could leave this world untarnished on my filth, leave me filthy. Leave me nothing but your memory.

We see each other’s Instagram posts.

But we don’t talk much.

I know what he thinks of the current administration. He likewise knows what I think of it. We play music on the car radio and sing along, not saying the words aloud.

I hear the posts on his phone undulating like neon gelatin, sugary nothings calling to him. A mixed bag of nuts that instagram feed, one post is an ai cat driving a semi and the next a cry against the white identity under attack in America. They’re both for my father. The algorithm knows him better than I do, he listens to it more than his own daughter. Our conversations are rarely in words.

He has women up in his garage, I covered them with grumpy cat pictures when I was only a girl. Make it lighthearted, make it fun, my objection to his sexualization of women. Why am I so eager to cater? I am a woman now. He has maga hats now, Trump ornaments up when it isn’t even Christmas. On the other side of the ornament is a mirror. It’s poetic. I keep turning it around, putting Trump’s face toward the wall and the mirror toward my father begging him to look. He turns it back around. How can I look at someone when they cannot look at themselves? How can I speak to him when we never have?

My age is, youngish, oldish? Depending on who you ask. I have time, and I don’t. The future is so far away and right outside my doorstep, and I’m just sort of here. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting to become my future self and grow out of all this childish shit. I have trouble discerning bad habits and personality traits, what grows from me isn’t all me after all. I have to take care with what I cull and what I cradle. I could become a walking quirk from middle school that I misidentified as wildly important to my sense of self and not just a random cultural reflex. What makes me myself? And how did it get there? What is genuinely me and what is grimly biding it’s time until I figure out it’s a stranger’s voice and not mine?

Nostalgia is not a cradle, but a coffin.

Rest carefully in its lacey black box, and be sure to take care when you visit those no longer there, to not join them thinking all new happiness is lost.

On friendship:

When I spend time with you all, I feel a ball of light pool in my weary palms.

The weight in my shoulders, the tightness in my jaw, releases like smoke out of my lungs.

I can breathe again, I can laugh again.

I take the light home with me, and it isn’t so dark there anymore.

I miss her. Is there anything else to say?

What empties you?

The way I hold my tongue around my maga father as we watch movies in silence, and I wonder why I’m so forgiving of his alcoholism and not my mother’s toxic positivity.

The way I point out the birds eating peanuts my grandmother put out for them, when all I want to do is scream in my grandparent’s faces and shake their shoulders to turn Fox News off and wake up from their stupor.

I want to wake up too. I don’t want to know their hatred so intimately. I don’t want to love monsters, anymore.

Why does life exist if only to be snuffed out? What purpose is there in the temporary but pain.

They’ve taken her from me. And for that I’ll never forgive them.

Why are people so cruel to you when you just want to make them laugh? Can’t you see that I love you, that I want nothing but light things floated your way? What have I done to warrant your biting criticisms when all I ever wanted was your attention?

-Confessions of a Jester

There is an understanding in burning high rises that only it’s occupants can gather—that the rapid footsteps and baited breath do little for longevity if the staircase is ash and the elevator an oven.

No, the hurried panic is not for survival of the body, but a hunt for another. A body heat almost indiscernible undulating between the flap like flames—like pop ups out of a picture book. You may think it madness to seek heat in a fire, but this is a heat of the soul, a desire to die in embrace. To know a heart beat’s breath against your own.

An understanding that if life must be unkind, you must never let it be alone.

I belong to my animals as much as they belong to me. I am no owner, and they are no beasts.

Oh, I was happy. I was so happy, until I looked down at my reflection and saw I wasn’t me at all.

Share with me your shame, distill your weakness so that I may drink it like wine. Your secrets are precious to me, nothing shocks a man like me.

The Wolf

Most are familiar with the story of the wolf in sheep’s clothing: The sly predator posing as prey to descend on the flock and eat them as they are none the wiser. But the story is remembered all wrong, the wolf didn’t have to wear sheep’s clothes at all. He stood before them as a wolf, with claws pointed, canines jutted, and eyes round in their deep, black middles, and simply said, “You are wolves, too. Wolves are better than sheep. Stronger than sheep. You are not sheep.”

Foolishly, they agreed. “I am better than the others, so I must be a wolf,” they thought. And so the wolf ate the sheep, one by one. Where normally they herded together and protected each other, they stood idly, wrongfully unafraid. They had forgotten that what hurts one of them, hurts all of them. They preferred to be better, to think they were wolves, and wolves don’t eat other wolves—only the less than, only the sheep.

And what do you think happened, as the last sheep stood in the glade, and the wolf approached him with grin bloodied and eager? “My brother,” the sheep said smugly, a moment before he was eaten alive.

And when the night took his knee, and the sun grazed his face with her locks long and blonde as she stood, his eyes rested only on her.

These javelins, these poles sharp at their tips that cascade through me as water, do they hold me up or affix me to the ground?

Would my body be strong enough to stand without them? Would I still know how? The stacking of the feet, the ankles, and the calves. The shuffling against dirt and grain to the steady rhythm of progress.

Why do they call my brother a genius, when he cannot comprehend kindness? When his tongue is tied in any conversation but his own?

Why is the emotional intellect of the women in the room discarded? So often shamed out of me any desire to share myself, my thoughts, upsetting my family feels like embers landing on every inch of skin searing me to silence. The boy gets to be a boy his entire life. The girl has to be a woman the moment he enters the room.

Something bent so far in me, but never broke. I kept thinking if I went far enough in the wrong direction something would pull me back. That’s what they don’t tell you about abandonment. When you do it to yourself you don’t even feel it. You don’t feel anything anymore.

What sort of torture is it to know what one has done wrong and know deeper so that it can never be fixed? Must ever inadequacy be magnified, extracted, and plastered in the infant space beneath my eyelids?

When I think on 18, and the years that have passed since then, I realize how many little deaths I’ve had in my one life. How many versions of me had to abandon my flesh for ephemerality for me to exist, fettering away. Do they watch me, the way runner up pageant girls watch the winner be crowned with sparkling tears gliding down her cheeks to match her sparkling tiara? Do they envy me? Or do they watch in glum acceptance, the way a parent would as their child draws in spontaneous sharpie all over their orderly white walls. Do they think they know better? Worst of all, do they watch in horror, the way the drug addicted’s partner would as the one they love most spirals down deeper and darker paths? Do they pity me?

Do they think of me at all? How lonely it would be to exist in this world as only one version of me.