What A Marvelous Feeling It Would Be, If We Could Say Exactly How We Felt. What A Monumental Victory.

they’re just like me, i’m just like them, we’re all the same.

My therapist once told me, “You are the guiltiest feeling person I’ve ever met” and just to prove her right, I took it to heart. An astrologer said, “You have so much water in your chart. What is it like to feel the emotions of every single person alive, everyday?” and I wept because I sensed he was displeased. A teacher told my parents “She’s very sensitive. Far more than the other kids in her class.” I took my SATs at 9 years old, but they encouraged my mother to hold me back because of how my eyes glistened when I heard the word no. She told them to go to hell. So I cried my way through my education until high school when they said “You take everything so personally, you’ll never survive in a company environment. You wouldn’t make a good employee.” So I employed myself (out of spite or…necessity) and then later, I hired 200 people. A boyfriend told me “Don’t be so dramatic, everything isn’t a movie.” Fine, so it’ll be an album then. The doctor said “This shouldn’t hurt a bit.” I tread daily on a minefield that leaves me classifying the variations in footsteps, the tonality in voice, a change in breath. “Is everything okay? You seem mad” is my pledge of allegiance to this tightly wound bundle of flesh. I am cut open, butterflied and flayed, with every single nerve exposed like live wires and, yes, they all hurt to touch. Each interaction is a litmus test of how well liked I am, and therefore how worthy to live. I wake up every morning and the moral barometer resets, T-minus 12 hours to prove to myself that I am not the bad person I believe I must be. Sleep, repeat. An amnesiac nightmare. Prometheus on a rock and the gull in my guts is myself. I once envied those with greater armor, but not anymore. “Why do you care so much?” Guard yourself from the little grievances, but the shield does not differentiate. The space where I am vulnerable to the pain that passes through is an entry point for the microscopic good that others may miss. I live in technicolor torment. If I could do it over again and choose the comfortable grey, I would seize a knife and cut the little keyholes back into my every limb. So the light can get in.

Preach

the absolute power in “you’re killing people” “no, I’m killing boys” cannot be outdone

Acts of Crucifixion, Kechi Nomu

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

— Fyodor Dosteovsky, Crime and Punishment (source)

Sonnet Macabre by Theodore Wratislaw

I love you for the grief that lurks within

Your languid spirit, and because you wear

Corruption with a vague and childish air,

And with your beauty know the depths of sin;

Because shame cuts and holds you like a gin,

And virtue dies in you slain by despair,

Since evil has you tangled in its snare

And triumphs on the soul good cannot win.

I love you since you know remorse and tears,

And in your troubled loveliness appears

The spot of ancient crimes that writhe and hiss:

I love you for your hands that calm and bless,

The perfume of your sad and slow caress,

The avid poison of your subtle kiss.

How truly romantic would that be. 

to love a poet; to be immortalized in verse

This is my letter to the world That never wrote to me.

Emily Dickinson

From a “Vow Of Hate” by Lylah James.

Your mouth tastes of cigar and sorrow,

I like the way my name sounds on your lips.

But your smile will fade come morrow.

It is wintry and I am lonely,

Please come back.

Your mouth tastes of cigar and sorrow,

I like the way you hold me,

Even when I know it is all a ruse – a bleeding arrow.

For you still envisage her when you bed me.

Your mouth tastes of cigar and sorrow,

I like the way you touch me,

So coldly, like the dead wings of a sparrow,

And I have begun to crave your warmth.

Your mouth tastes of cigar and sorrow,

I do not like the way you left me without a second glance,

After your soft caress had been so thorough.

Please come back.

There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in it’s life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest, it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above it’s own agony to outcarol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But, the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain… Or so says the legend.

Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds

I don’t know why but I don’t think I’ll ever forget this.