For Country

This is piece I wrote today in class after hearing about a friend who just passed away.
I didn't know him very well, but he was an amazing writer and had a contagiously bright personality.


BY the time I got the news, it was too late, and it's not like I could have done anything anyway, but once you were alive and present and once you were laughing and making us laugh and once you loved your mommas jumbalaya and warm summer nights in the South...but now you can't love anything or anyone because someone ended you with a knife I imagine the neon glow of a blinking sign on a cold hard concrete they made you fade away like the night breeze cools the rice that you used to chase with an already cool beer and I know that I couldn't have stopped them but  all you have now is the earth above and the earth below and all I have now is the pen and the words to write it

Just an object

From a distance, it is  utterly ordinary. Thin and still. One color, maybe three at the most. On its own, useless, not even heavy enough to hold a piece of paper in place against the threat of an agitating breeze. But placed in my hand, or your hand, it is a tool.
It is the tool.
On skin, on paper, on my favorite pair of jeans from high school, the ones covered in slogans and doodles.
Manipulated by human fingers, clutched in frantic sweaty palms. Or calmly sweeping back and fourth. Suddenly words and scrawls are painted across a surface that was once empty.
The pen brings life to the lifeless. As it warms between our thumb and pointer finger. As it rests against knuckle and middle finger. We use it and bring it to life as the words breath life into the page.
Ink flows, words appear, and the pen has a purpose.
Divine and beautiful or angry and erratic.
The words may be terms of endearment or expressions of hate.
The pen is Switzerland. The pen is neutral.
The pen doesn't give a shit of you love or loath.
The pen moves or dries up.
Or leaks and drips and forms little bubbles of blue/black spit across the page as you work.
The pen has a job to do. The pen never stays still for long.
When the words are in motion, so is the pen.

Me Writing about Myself

Having faith in yourself can be terrifying.
Saying YES to yourself feels so scary
I went through and deleted story fragments from here today
Not because I don't want to share with you, but because I want to share with the world

Because.

I have decided to trust myself,
to hope with a heavy amount of realism
that someday
someone
will want to publish words that I have strung together
That means that they can't be sitting here waiting

Just like I can't sit here waiting.

For me,
this act of hope is bravery.
It is part of a series of things that I am doing for myself
In an effort to become someone that I enjoy being
Someone I believe in.

I am staying quiet and listening more
I have gotten rid of the word hate, erased it from my every day vocabulary
I am forcing myself to take deeper breaths
concentrating on the action
waiting for it to become habitual.

I am taking care of myself
Not because I am all that I've got
I have a lot of people
and they deserve the best version of me
And so do I.

Breaking the silence with silence

I have restricted myself to written language today
I havent spoken a single word since I woke up

And it's been wonderful.

The most noise I made was when I ran the dishwasher.
Which is actually considerably loud.

I've spent the day thinking,
drinking coffee, staying warm, and doing this

Staying quiet is a thing that I'm doing just for me.
I'm being selfish and keeping myself to myself
And it's making a little grin stick to the corner of my lips

I'm thinking about all the sounds we make every day
Noises for each other to announce our presence in a room
To remind each other that we are here
To say "you're funny"
or
"I think I'm funny"


It's so nice to just
shhhh
to announce nothing
to no one
for just a little while

Needs and wants

Someone I love dearly forced me to write a poem and read it out loud.
So putting it here is way less scary than that.

I need S P A C E
My mind gets as cramped as my legs
My breath gets stilted when my body can't move
I need to look around and see   Nothing
Hear   Nothing

Every once in a while I need
   to be alone

I need to break away
   from who I am


I need to S T O P
   Stop being a daughter
                     a friend
                     a sister
                     a woman

I need the space to hear my thoughts
 without them bouncing off and ONE
                                           or any THING

Space can be filled so easily
Quiet ends so quickly

It can be hard to Stop and be S T I L L

I need to not be needed
to not be asked to laugh, listen, explain, or answer
to anyone but myself

I need the space empty
and the mood light

Am I alone in this?

Have you ever looked at your life and suddenly realized that it has started to escalate quickly like the fight scene in Anchorman?
One minute you're walking down the street with your friends wearing your fancy suits
and the next thing you know, Ben Stiller is sporting a Mexican Mustache and Brick is killing a guy with a trident?

And nothing does a better job of reminding you how emotionally ill-equiped you are for this than that big pimple on your face
(fyi: when morosely mumbling to myself about the age gap between me and my co-workers, I was NOT hoping for clogged pores to be the solution to evening the playing field)

So being in Grad school is hard because it is a LOT of work
but NOT being in Grad school is also hard because you feel like you're not working towards what you want in life
And cleaning your room is hard because Who Has The Time?
But NOT cleaning means that you can't bare to look around because the clutter is too painfully and accurately portraying what your brain looks like
So you wade around in your own filth with your eyes half squinted shut and pretend it's not there

And pretty much everything stays hard once you're no longer spending your time playing with My Little Ponies
and even that can be difficult because they get lost and its hard to pick your favorite and once you get creative and decide to play with braids or hair gel then there is No Going back
and that ugly braid (or god-forbid the sticking-straigh-up-strand from when you thought that pink plastic needed a trim) will haunt you for the rest of your life

And you vent at all the wrong times (like writing a blog instead of an essay)
And stay quiet when you should speak up (like when you let someone dictate your choices for you)
and hold it in when you want to let it out (because screaming in public is frowned upon)
Until you are loosing track of how long you've been standing in the shower
and you realize that those frustrating sounds are coming from you
as you mentally cross of your list
and edit you list
and add to your list

When did 11am start to feel like late rather than early?
When did 5:30 become time to wake up instead of the Middle of the night?
When did my life turn into one big To-Do list?

And how am I supposed to stay classy when I never had an ounce of class to begin with?

The act of breathing in memories

What did your childhood smell and sound like?

For me, memories of childhood are of blue skies peeking out from between towering pine trees.

Childhood is the sound of girl’s voices echoing and bouncing around me like a tornado of sound.

The sound makes its way to my ears reminding me that I am in a world that we have created

It is a world where we are free to be girls

Free to be weird and loud, to walk with our arms around each other and whisper secrets and share stories about the women that we want to become

Memories of those days flow together in an endless stream of images of inside jokes and insane laughter

 In my memory, I run around in the warm summer air, leaping from rock to root not caring about properly placing my feet or worrying about being thrown off balance and crashing down to the ground

In my memory; I am simply me

I am not too fat or too loud.

I am the size and volume that I am supposes to be

There is no worry of my placement in the world

There is only the joy of playing in the sun and being surrounded by the love of a community of women and girls

And girls becoming women

My childhood was emulating girls who were older than me

It was a female thing

It was about comparing them to the woman that I wanted to be

I was a girl who clung to my childhood while being intensely aware if the fact that it would end one day

That I would be catapulted into adulthood

And I knew exactly what I wanted that to look like

But I have never been able to fully let go of the world that I created and reveled in as a young girl

So every summer, I return and return to hide myself in the shade of those same trees that sheltered me as a little girl

I crave that fresh air of Pine needles and wood

I Claw and Scrape at my memories and ignore the sweat and tears of exertion as I try desperately to keep this world intact

Because I want to share it so that I never have to leave it

 I listen to the breeze in the trees and the voices of girls calling to each other

I pretend that I am still that girl

But I have grown

And being here is no longer the same because my world is not here for me anymore

It is a new world for a new community of women

I have to find a new world to create and to shape

This world is my childhood

I found it and made it my own and

Now I treasure it and how it shaped me

We created each other

And to leave it is to leave behind a part of myself

And make room something new