Boysenberry

I wonder what would have happened

if your kindness was enough
for a girl like me?

If I never felt compelled
to leave you
for someone mean.

My hair would still be long,
how you liked it. Sometimes I’d free it
from its coiled bun and let it mop
our cabin floor. This is how
I’d make you laugh.

I’d eat venison. I’d have to. Learn
to love anything whose heart you could stop
beating—like you did with mine.
I’d even watch as you skinned the deer, tender,
like rolling stockings down my butter-white thighs.

There’d always be pie. I’d always be pregnant.
We’d name our daughter something wild
like Boysenberry. Our son, Grizzly.

My writing would be confined
to Christmas cards, or recipes,
or obituaries

for the lives I mourn
each time the road forks,
each time the world says
choose.

by Megan Falley

via nogreatillusion

Church bells sound the same wherever you go. Isn’t that nice?
Lately, when I get my feelings hurt, I remind myself: the world is really big and life is really long. Not short, but long.
The ocean water in Jekyll Island is a particular muddy gray.
The soreness of my sunburn caused an ache in my neck not unlike that of a person who is simply too tired to continue to hold her head upright.
Last week, Ben and I spent four hours straight reading novels: an exercise in disconnecting, in focus, in relaxation. It felt possible to slow down time, to move as slowly as classical music, with whiskey, with books. I allowed myself to pause frequently, to notice little things in the room, to touch the grain of the wooden coffee table, tracing its unique inconsistencies. It felt possible to last for a very long time.
I don’t feel like very many people care about me or are interested in me. This isn’t a cry for attention or help. It’s just an observation about a particular time in my life. I feel sad, yes, but also patient, also quiet, also capable of coping with a profound loneliness.
On my lunch break, I browse the Savannah Candy Kitchen, snack on free praline samples, gaze up at ceiling-high stacks of gummies, meander around barrels of taffy. It’s very soothing and it smells like chocolate fudge.
I have a phobia about cars, about maps, about losing my way, about losing control. I feel like I am learning something I always knew about myself and coming to terms with it for the first time. Sobbing is an acceptable way of coming to terms with something, I really believe this.
There is a small, black cat that sleeps under our car and skitters away in the morning.
I have a tan. My first in years. Today the “real feel” was 122 degrees. I wasn’t even bothered. I feel like a leafy thing in a wet jungle.
I am never going to pay for another manicure again. For a while anyway. What an astounding waste of time and money. Not that I begrudge the luxury, but I’d rather buy wine and white summer dresses. I’ll paint my own nails. Milky pink is my color this summer.
I own a hammock and a baseball hat and a tablecloth. It has been a long time since I last owned any of these things. Also: I have renter’s insurance, finally.
I feel like I am the just the right amount of lost for 29. I know there is no right amount of lost, but what I mean is, I am taking it one day at a time, what I mean is I am not collapsing, I am proud of myself on occasion, I get enough sleep, I am surviving with enough free time to jump in the ocean every so often and what more can I ask, really?

afterlife

aloofshahbanou:

in the afterlife we all finally get to read the articles we “saved for later,” left in our “drafts,” and opened 50,000 tabs for

Tiny Beautiful Things

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

—	Cheryl Strayed, excerpt from Tiny Beautiful Things

drops

I don’t have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.

—	Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

angel

reflections on our mutual history

(R)Nothing like a scorned lover to scorch the earth.