Undecided Basket Case

Something happened today. And last night. I’ve been craving problems to solve. There’s always been an ego attached to things I used to be able to do. A refusal to start further back lest I insult what I once knew. I picked up a ninth grade math textbook book. And felt joy in learning long division, which I’d forgotten. The long division, but probably the joy too. I wrote something a few days prior. For the boy whose baby I would’ve had.   For him: I was pregnant. I’m not anymore. I miscarried. I’m heartbroken. I don’t want anything from you besides a witness. This is me being selfish.  The festival sucked. I expressed boundaries consistently about only sleeping with you if you weren’t seeing anyone else. I know you were drunk. I know I was under the influence. I wanted to sleep with you. I was naive and thought you choosing that too meant you were honoring my boundaries. I felt so stupid and so exposed.  Then when we kept talking, I realised I never had an accurate grasp ...

  I feel sick today. I hate labels. But I know I’m demisexual. Every encounter that’s ever happened without love makes me want to puke and scrub my skin, like I’ve been violated by the oil of someone. And it’s this awful tangle in my head because sometimes I say I want it because I’m screaming to be normal. It’s so childish. Who cares. Let it go. And I cry and I cry and I cry.   You don’t have to.  He said that to me once.  You don’t have to.  Rape in a way feels cleaner, because it wasn’t my choice.  I don’t know if no longer caring for an imagined audience is a good or bad thing. I don’t know if I’ll survive the next bits. I want to bring such sweetness to another person. People have read to me before. I want to read to them, with a head in my lap and a hand in their hair. I want to climb trees and sit in a deluge, soaked in a summer rain. Like it’s not been said before. Like it hasn’t been done before. Fuck sex. It’s feral, and not in an all consuming an...

  There’s a rage within me. Isn’t it funny the power we hold when decisions narrow? I’ve always been good in a corner. Maybe this all happened because for a moment I was less desperate, though the end result is not so. It’s ugly and clawing, like the spasming of a felled doe. I’d much rather be the one to shoot the arrow. There’s this tar stuck to my kindness. Kindness survives. Even when teeth are bared and knuckles white. An anguish tainted fealty. Loyalty to something that may continue on when I have not felt it so easy.  In friendship there’s safety, in softness a place to land and grow. I still value these things. But I’d like to be so viscerally angry that my eyes set ablaze. That my heart becomes fire rather than this sputtering dying thing. I don’t think survival has to be pretty. But to be warm, to dream. Rather than to sleep.  Thanks Shakes. I think I smoke to not only remember the dead but to die. I realised that looking at my knife. He said he learnt to enjoy ...

My favorite word: visceral  Old women are beautiful. I’m in the emergency department today. Ironically, not an emergency. I’m one of those bane on the system types, but my gp told me to come in so here I sit. The seats are blue and grey. It feels like they always are but I can’t remember the amount of times I’ve been in one of these. An old lady is telling her loved one that her friend fell, she says not to worry. She glances at her friend and says: it was quite a way to make a statement. She laughs, not strained, but free. Not callous, just gentle in the only joy that can be found when acceptance is well and truly past. They gossip after the phone call is done. Talking about daughters and mother hens. There’s a beauty in that I think. I’ve watched people assume that the elderly are resigned. Like it’s sad. But I watch her laugh and natter and I don’t see it anywhere. I love aging. I feel more solid every year. Not compacted to the point of unchanging, or drowning an inner child, j...