One Star Review
I started writing a novel. I write roughly 800 words a day. It's slow going, and I have to wonder if the burn is too slow - if when we recount stories, ones we'd like to tell others, the candle actually burns in the other direction.
I have to wonder if my novel will get a one star review. If at the end of the day, the novel is for the audience, and not for the author themselves - but is surviving - writing prose that feeds some internal flame, living to see another day - for ourselves, or is it for others?
What if my novel never fills the void? Where does candle smoke go when there's no oxygen to even feed the flame; if a writer writes a novel and no one reads it, did it exist? Where does it go to make itself known?
This is already too abstract, and short, because I'm shot. I'm glad I'm embarking on this journey, but at what emotional cost? In the words of poet and writer Ocean Vuong, in his second-to-last Instagram post (because I'm not stalking him or anything), he says that he has completed his second novel - and that it took something from him that he may never get back.
Here's to leaving it all behind, to never getting back the pain, and the trauma, and instead making our stories of survival ones of hope, of our inner turmoil's flames going in one direction: skyward, where we can see the smoke spell out our dreams.
April 28th
It all comes down to the voices: the ones in my head that accelerate and hit every hard corner of my prefrontal cortex, reverberating against every edge when the brain is only made of fine lines, memories, soft tissue and regret.
April 28th, 2018. Maybe regret is the emotion of that day: me, walking down the street at midnight, crying so hard I had to lie down on the cement, the dandelions that grew from the cracks in the sidewalk coming up to meet my body like a whisper in a crowd of voices, like dirt overtaking the dead.
It's hard to explain to someone who has never been suicidal what it's like. It's hearing every bad thing you can say about a human being and flinging it like jelly at a wall, but the wall is your mind, and you have no where to run - or to even duck and hide.
No one wants to know about the suicidal. It's a stigma, a cringey fact of life: there are people out there who want to die. As Sylvia Plath said: I do it exceptionally well.
Jack, Don, Nathan, Zeb. I repeated these names to myself, the names of the men who had rejected me most recently, and repeated them in my head until I'm sure my synapses were bleeding just trying to contain that sadness, that hurt, that fear of being incapable of someone loving me.
I was such a sob story, right? You're bored, about to click out of this screen. About to press "escape." Here's the thing: I wanted out, too.
I was twenty-five and just about done with myself.
Suicide, some say, is selfish. But how is erasing this sorry mess of a mind selfish? Aren't I doing everyone a favor? The dandelions came up to meet my body like so many little reminders of life, of all the strands of things that unravel in the end.
They say men are more likely to successfully commit suicide than women, and that they typically do it by more violent means: guns, hanging, etc.
"Successfully commit suicide." There really isn't a vernacular about this, is there? Who talks about this stuff?
After the swallowing of a half a bottle of Xanax, and the ER visit, and the subsequent sleeping for twenty hours - really, it's boring and clinical, the aftermath. It's just heartbreak, and regret - there it is, again. And the voices - they will never go away, not fully, not completely.
Self-involved, some say, attention-seeking. But until you've been there, until you're the one on the sidewalk, and being dead and underground seems a lot more appealing than continuing to suffer endlessly, until you're the one picking the dandelion fluff off your arms even hours later, in the ER - until you've been there, you just don't know.
You just don't. I can't explain to someone who wants to be alive, why you might not want to be. I just can't.
My dad asked me the next morning, after I woke up, as I was about to leave home, back to the realm of Jack, Don, Nathan, and Zeb: "Can you tell me what your name is and where you are going, and why?"
I slurred: "My name is _____, I am going to Boston, and I am going to survive this."
Literary
Is there a literary device broad enough, complex enough, to encompass this feeling - one of explosion? I suppose there's ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, but that's not a literary device; that is a desperate attempt at making a point, perhaps most especially on the internet.
In April 2020, I sat down at my rickety wooden breakfast table in a sunny kitchen in California, and opened my laptop. I wrote every day during lockdown, little poems and sentiments that encapsulated my growing disdain, my contained rage. The end of 2019, for me, was like someone had a hold of my life and also a stick of dynamite, and threw the dynamite inside my mind, creating a simmer of smoke that finally exploded into words that April.
I overshared. I thought: no one knows me here. The internet is a strange place. Someone "liked" my first post and I felt famous. I kept at it, writing little nothings onto my keyboard, onto this little white screen of promise.
Lockdown ended. The world moved on from COVID. Sometimes people put that in all capital letters. I just did and it didn't make a difference. I wonder if it was the world screaming, trying to make a point. I wonder if I was trying to make a point. I certainly wrote about it, like there was a contest and I needed to win it. And that is a literary device in its essence.
Grapes of Wrath
There's a popular tweet, made more popular by my inability to shut up about it: A grocer is asked, "Can I try a grape?" by a customer was browsing the produce section.
The grocer says: "I wouldn't care if you lit this place on fire with me in it."
This is everything - I can see the grocer pressing "pause" on his music, slipping his iPhone into his pocket, waiting to hear what fresh nonsense a customer is presenting to him on this particular day in hell.
The grocer's student loans have been piling up. He needs to pay rent. His mom called, she's in the hospital. The trifecta of American bullshit bills has piled up, and he is on call to pay them.
He makes $16.70 an hour. This is above average. He wanted a new Xbox. A new TV. This is now a wet dream.
While the customer asks him about the grapes, he is somewhere else. He is in Tahiti, or Puerto Rico, or at the bar down the street. He is singing karaoke at said bar, drinking his problems into oblivion. A beer in this city costs $8 before tip. That's what he makes in half and hour of work.
While he is thinking this, and saying: "I wouldn't care if you lit this place on fire with me in it," he is imagining the fire from within, the one that keeps him coming in for his paycheck.
No: he is actually thinking about flames, about annihilation, about burning.
For this is corporate America, and he is just a player in a bigger game of grapes.
Seasons of Motherhood
I can't title this as a letter, as a "Dear ____", as a painful series of sentences designed to make me reflect and feel pain. My children are cells that have not yet divided into fetuses, into little versions of myself, into generational trauma and sticky fingers that reach for an absentee mother.
I suppose this not-letter has to be abstract, because that's what my children are to me, what my relationships with my mother is - a once and future cloud that erupts into thunder when I'm asked, "Do you want children?"
There is nothing quite like dreams to keep me going, nothing quite like hope to inspire a future with a son or daughter.
Life is hard. It's a series of rejections, sickness, and bills to pay. It is a series of rock-bottoms, or maybe that's just what I've experienced.
Can I let my failures as a human being already cloud my perception of motherhood? Will my children suffer for having me as a mother, for watching me reach for something other than their love when I'm down and out, aching for a substance to heal me when family is right in front of me?
I would want more for my children. I want them to be happy, to experience life to the fullest. To hit rock bottom, and instead of bottoming out, to see it like the seasons. A spring of blossoms, rain that creates new life but does not wash away our lessons learned. A summer that does not scorch old terrain and make us want to obliterate pain, but makes generational trauma come out behind shadows; the sepia light reflecting off only what is there to be physically seen, and not just psychically felt.
I want more. I know there is life beyond pain, and I would want that for anyone, whether or not they share my DNA.
I am going to end this not-letter by saying that I am in love with life, but not in the same way a mother loves her child - in a fragmented way, in an autumn of sorrow, in a winter that lightly coats everything in snow and melts away to uncover the peace I so desperately crave for myself.
DSM-5
you ever open the DSM-5
and think,
I'm not the most interesting person
I thought myself to be?
I'm not someone who hears voices,
or is narcissistic,
or has an addiction to eating mattresses
or even likes to feel pain,
like some of these freaks*
seem to find appealing
but I do count to the same numbers
over and over
trying to find sanity
in where there is none to be found
in any capacity -
which is the definition,
even by these psychiatrists,
of insanity,
of someone
with issues and a diagnosis
a label, if you will,
to cure my malady
I am page number 43
or 52
or 89 -
the list goes on
I am somewhere sandwiched
between the many injustices
that were done to me
*of which I am wholly
willing to claim some responsibility
White Hydrangea
Dripping, a slow heat that suffocated as it lifted you into summer. I was twenty-four and had nothing to prove. I walked through the Yale University art museum while my best friend sat in front of a likeness to Michelangelo, tracing the every curve of people from history. What we didn't know was: we were creating our very own.
There was a white hydrangea plant outside of a church on the Yale campus. It created words inside my brain that hung like the branches themselves: sentences turned to paragraphs while my twenty-four year old self beamed and touched each flower. It was the happiest time of my life.
I was free. I went to bars and ordered margaritas with the abandon of the bees that sucked on the hydrangea's blossoms. I remember that plant, not only because I took copious pictures of it (although that, too), but because it was there only to be loved.
It was ninety degrees and the humidity lurked, turning into ghosts that I can only reminisce about in the present day. The heat seemed to evaporate as soon as it appeared. The hydrangea remained strong, tethered to the earth. It didn't seem bothered by anything, only happy to further illuminate the already piercingly bright day.
Sound Tracks
I used to burst at the seams. My tears ran hot, like blood dripping down an open cut. I sang a song that made me feel at home, and foreign in my own skin, all at once.
I am strong, I repeated to myself. I have values I'd like to uphold. Covid hit, I was yelled at inside a Whole Foods for not following security guidelines. I touched a "dirty basket" and was ostracized. I felt unsafe. I wore an N-95, was made fun of by a conservative guy. Such was life.
The song I sang isn't important. It isn't important for a lot of reasons. The first being: isn't music just an extension of our psyches? Shouldn't it all be celebrated, and not told to follow the rules like a society in ruins?
You touched a dirty basket, said security. Judgement day looks a lot like 2020.
The song made me smile. I am strong, I repeated to myself. I have values I'd like to uphold. I made it through, to the modern day. And I have only luck - and maybe a vaccine - to thank.
The song made me resilient. It reminded me of Taylor Swift - please don't stop reading this. I wanted to feel whole, to be well, to have a mind that didn't rattle like loose glass in a window.
The song made me notice life, in its entirety. It was like a grammatically correct essay, a gun with all its bullets, a lake with swans and full of secret meaning, ecstasy.
It was a way out in a broken environment, a healing touch, a prophecy. Should I keep going? Or is music heard only when it's listened to, and not merely described by a poor writer?
I still feel warm and fuzzy when listening to it. I press my fingers to my temples, bless the feeling, put the "dirty" behind me.
Lit
temptation
noun
the desire to do something, especially something wrong or unwise -
oxygen escapes
the lit candle
by some mechanism
or maybe that’s
carbon dioxide
I failed chemistry
with a 59.9%
grade point average
my professor said
if you pass the next test
I could bump you
to a D minus
the candle flickers
indifferent
temptation
noun
the desire to extinguish
what wasn’t there
to begin with