Twilight Miss Me When I’m Gone, Bleed My Shadow ‘til It’s Grown.

I’ll figure it out, I always figure it out. Why not now? What’s wrong with me?

Nothing. Maybe this is a problem that can’t be solved. Not even by you.

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?

What secrets I would tell you if it would not take you drowning to hear them

-Diary of a Siren

Is that why people write? Because no one will listen?

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

I feel pressure to act not as a person, but as woman. To fill every void left by our absence, too little leaders of us, too little comedians of us, too little scientists of us; am I meant to choose what loss to make up for with just my one life?

Time keeps passing, I fight hard for change. It does not yield to me, wind against a mountain. I carry on, I carry on, still. There is nothing left for me to do but die.

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?

I want to live a thousand childhoods. I want to know how cold the water gets in the backyard rivers of country houses. I want to feel the texture of marble on kitchen counter tops and eat everything the private chef prepares. I want to run in grass miles and miles long with my sisters. I want to know how young feels in every skin there is.

D. Alan Holmes, Enlightenment // Signet Amenti // @cryptonature // Alan Wilsom Watts // Evan M. Cohen, "Oceans" // Nikita Gill // @pauladoodles // Julian Gough, "Minecraft End Poem" // Sleeping At Last—Saturn