I live my life through the words I write
I’m no longer interested
in holding back.
No more keeping things in my head.
I will write them all out,
release them all,
put everything I have into this story,
leave my whole heart out on the table.
There’s nothing for me to be afraid of
except myself
and I’m done with that.
No more holding back.
It’s often when I go to sweep the floors
that it comes back
in a wave
to crash over me.
How I haven’t swept the floor
in over a week.
How, even then,
I am barely collecting anything
in the dustpan.
How all I can see in the dustpan
is dirt, mostly.
There’s no more dalmatian hair
clumping together in the dustpan
or sprinkled across the floor
within minutes of putting away
the broom in the closet.
There’s no more dalmatian hair
because you’re no longer here.
And it crashes over me,
the wave of grief.
Hearing from your intuition
the answer
to a question you want to ask
just to hear the answer
from someone else
is the same as
holding a coin in your hand
assigning heads to one option
and tails to another
flipping the coin in the air
and realizing
before you catch it
what you’re hoping for.
Stop seeking validation.
You already know your answer.
Go and live it.
The day where I slow down
becomes the day when
my anxiety builds, and grows,
consumes my body,
stands in the spotlight
it presumes to have lost
for too long.
But I know it well,
its patterns consistent,
I anticipated this would happen
and I have tools, strategies,
to help shift the spotlight away
and reclaim my power.
Breathe.
Move.
Talk.
Breathe again.
Shower my anxiety with the love
it expects not,
showering my body with love
alongside,
love will keep the cycle spinning;
this will not last forever.
Another book devoured
within hours.
The joy I experienced
within Lucy’s world
had me skyrocketing
to corners of imagination
and learning sensations of my body
seldom visited
or experienced.
Living out what-if scenarios
in detail
through until the end,
mirroring the tangents
of my own imagination,
I found someone:
a writer, a character,
who thinks the same way I do.
The emotional journey
I traveled with Lucy
both resembled and outshone
similar journeys I have embarked upon
alone.
Solace and comfort and
inspiration
from a single story
of two possible realities
winding and intertwining
together
messy and imaginative
and meant to be
each in their own right.
Maybe whichever path we choose
is the right one
for us at that specific time.
And maybe
life has a way
of interjecting paths together
even after we think
we have left one behind.
– Inspired by the book “What Might Have Been” by Holly Miller
Noticing
my wanting
to cross items off my to-do list.
Noticing
my yearning
to announce a project as complete.
Noticing
my fear
of diving into waters of vulnerability
when I feel fragile.
Noticing
my tendency
to want to do the easy things
rather than the hard and messy things.
Noticing
my hesitancy
with meeting new facets of me
and letting the old ones go.
Noticing
the discrepancies between
what I claim to desire
and the actions I take.
Noticing.
For most of my life
I have struggled
and do struggle
to see the forest
rather than the trees.
The split seconds
the brief and beautiful moments
where all I can see is the forest
the unified whole
seem so fleeting
when my gaze habitually resumes
onto individual trees
my heart shatters
at the let down
at the loss
at the implied regression.
Pause.
Breathe.
Zoom out.
See the forest
beyond
and within.
It’s always there.
Can you believe it?
Can you believe that here
is where we are now
compared to where we were
before,
back then?
My counselor,
her name is Marcela,
assigned homework for me
during my last therapy session.
She said I had to go out
buy a notebook of visual appeal
alongside a high-grade pen.
The idea was to stimulate my creativity
with a notebook I liked to look at
and a pen I liked to write with
to make the experience enjoyable and enticing
to draw me in
to create for the sake of creating
to help me re-connect with this part of me
that, at times, seems to be fading.
So
one day after work I went to the bookstore.
I looked for a journal to catch my eye.
Funny how, at the same time,
my mind automatically eliminated some
because they looked too expensive.
Or,
I would find one that looked pretty
but my mind would convince me it wasn’t right
because of the size
because of the binding
because of the line spacing
because of the ‘fanciness’
because of the price.
If any journal held these qualities too well,
I told myself,
I would feel inherent pressure
to create content of high esteem, high value,
worthy enough to live between its covers
thereby creating more pressure
and likely, shying away from
scribbling out thoughts
for the mere purpose of releasing them.
What should have been instinctual
and taken seconds
took me minutes and minutes
standing in front of the journals
wrestling with my mind.
At last, I landed on this one.
Different than any I’ve had before
a thought-provoking cover
and on sale.
I chose a package of pens
I knew I would like
even though I could clearly see
the dozens of unused, good-enough pens
waiting at home.
A new journal
a new pen
starting a new journey
while I was away from home
in the mountains
looking for a reset
seemed fitting.
Connecting the stars within me
into constellations
bringing me back to myself
one page at a time
ink and words flowing.
I like to believe
that I have come to embody the notion
of change being the only constant
we can depend upon in this world.
As much as I, at times, resist change,
I like to believe that I have come to appreciate,
and understand, and welcome it.
And yet,
it feels near impossible to accept
how life
can change in an instant –
not just in theory, but in reality.
A few days away
was all we had asked, and hoped, for –
to escape to a different landscape,
reconnect in a change of scenery
and regroup,
for what we envisioned lay ahead of us.
One phone call came,
the vibration of which we barely heard,
and everything changed.
I could count it in days – 2 –
or hours – 50 –
between hearing the news of,
‘something doesn’t seem right’,
to when we were at the veterinary clinic,
taking away his pain forever
and saying our final goodbye.
I never knew my body to be capable
of breaking, of shattering,
of collapsing in such intense grief and pain,
the way she did that day
and yet, remaining here, to carry on.
I cried until my body became dehydrated.
My body caved in on itself to protect the gaping holes
left behind.
I talked through my feelings,
reminisced on stories and photos,
and mourned the opportunities lost.
After a while,
I tried to carry on,
thinking of what he would want for me,
but change is the constant
and I’m brought back down to the couch,
to rest and recuperate and heal my run-down body
despite my best efforts to keep going.
Eventually,
what you are running from will catch up with you.
Life will force you to stop,
sniff the smells on stop signs and bushes,
tail wagging,
and remember how important it is
to savor each moment.
We will never have ‘enough’ time,
so we need to make the time count
while we have it.
Dawning Words 