#sparrow speaks
What have you realized recently?
At sixteen I decided, I will be happy when I am in college, when I am in my own space, when I find a community that does not judge and a family that I chose myself. At nineteen, in college, loved and accepted, I decided, I will be happy when I find a job that utilizes my skills and passions both, rather than one alone, a job that I choose free of external pressures. At twenty-one, working in an industry that valued my intelligence and creativity and adaptability and efficiency, I decided, I will be happy when I find my own apartment, when I can display my own books and listen to music without headphones, suffering no one else’s messes but my own.
In this decade, wantinghas become habit. Strivinghas become habit. Ambition, hunger, knowing I’m better than this - all, habit.
At twenty-four, sitting at my desk with fandom prints adorning the walls and crafting supplies strewn across the coffee table and a vase of flowers wilting slowly, it is tempting to fall prey to habit. To decide, happiness will come with professional recognition; with marriage; with higher education; with international travel.
But happiness, too, is a habit, practiced each time I stop and light a candle, or play video games with my friends, or read a book, or vacuum so I can enjoy walking on crumb-free hardwood. With time, this, too, will become a well-worn path in the garden of my contentment, provided I take care to walk it on occasion.
How can you tell if you are healing?
In my bullet journal I keep a mood tracker, a grid of empty squares systematically flooded with one of six colors corresponding to one of six states of well-being. This is a new concept to me—tracking my mood. Keeping a record; the luxury of remembrance.
Who cares to remember a childhood dripping red? Red ink tallying the days I managed to move from future to past; red-hot rage shoving my shame and desperation into the pit of my belly; red on my mother’s lips as she cut me to size; red palms hidden in clenched fists as I waged silent wars against the tide.
I used to dream of blue: skies, flowers, painted walls. Of purple and pink: candles, wine, flowers in vases, oversized sweaters. Green: hiking through forests, ink on my skin. Of goldenrod and magenta and lilac and silver; a life without red: prismatic. Happy. Healed.
Today the sky was swollen with rain clouds and and my flower vase sat empty and disappointment burned fiery in my veins. When I sit down to assign today a color, I will pluck a red pen from the pack. Life is not so easy; wounds do not disappear without a trace.
But today was also pink (wine poured into glasses adorned with hand-painted roses) and green (my favorite shirt layered over a cute bra I bought last week) and purple (melted candle wax solidifying in a repurposed jar on the table) and orange (fresh fruit piled haphazardly on my kitchen countertop), a rainbow enhanced, not marred, by the red within it. Today was a kaleidoscope. A reminder that scar tissue is not a testament to an injury you failed to avoid; it is a record, bold and red and marked, screaming I survived, and I built myself up, and I’m all the stronger for it.
Did the pain
soften my edges?
or was it simply the anvil
on which i molded my being
into shape?
I wish I knew how to speak to you in a voice you could hear
Must it be a breakdown always, a tsunami making shrapnel of even the most deeply rooted foundations, to confront a corner of your psyche? Let me put away the bulldozer and turn instead to a trowel, fistful after fistful of dirt brushed away until the skyscraper tilts and topples. Let me turn my inherencies into sand castles moistened by the ocean spray, until the parapets crumble softly into the keep, ready to be molded anew.
What can you never go back to?
dreamless sleep. my hand without the weight of his in it. black coffee and dreary mornings, the relentless insistence that i was okay okay okay
for years i walked with an arm curled around my stomach, protecting the softest parts of me, wearing paperclip chainmail and hoping no one would get close enough to tell the difference. and then he shone a light right through me, exposed all the holes i didn’t know i had and got to work patching them up.
it is easy to explain away the holes if you don’t know you have them. there is less of you than there should be because it’s what you deserve. because you would buckle under the weight of more. because if you are smaller then others more deserving can be bigger. and if your shadow is fragmented, if the wind whistles as it flows through your body, then maybe it’s just your own kind of magic.
but once the holes have been identified, the papier mache excuses peel away and you’re left only with the exposed wounds, and the throbbing of your skin when he brushes his fingers across them. here, i wish this coffee tasted better (and why can’t it?). here, hold me hold me let me shake apart in a way where i can be put together again (go ahead dear, i’ve got you).
where do we go from here? the patching up hurts, even done by hands as gentle as his. but the whistling wind hurt, too, before. perhaps it would be easier to pick up my own needle and thread and join him instead of pulling at the sutures. perhaps it would be easier to let myself emerge.
4.1. Number one
2. Mirror
3. Strawberry
4. Paralysis
5. Understudy
when i wake up there is sunlight dripping
across my face down my hands
like maple syrup
with its sticky golden rivulets
dripping
pooling
soaking into the hollows of my bones until i am so filled
to the brim with golden honeyed sunlight
that i cannot move
when i wake up there are dreams bridging the beams of my brain
my own personal cobwebs
hazy milky white in need of a proper dusting
looking so much like spider silk but stronger
somehow
waiting for sticky sunlight to trace its way along the grain and
eat through the glue
that keeps me from moving
Sometimes love is blind faith, standing hand in hand above a ravine and imagining freefall, buoyed up by the wind until you’re hurtling toward the sun, and wondering who will catch you if both of you are falling.
But sometimes love is the quiet comfort of knowing how to navigate the fluorescent aisles of your favorite corner store, certain as the sunrise that when you turn the corner, what you need will be waiting for you.
insp.@nosebleedclub‘s musings about love
My tarot card deck from @pinkiemme came in today and once I can breathe normally I’m going to post pictures of it because HOLY SHIT
See you on Sunday, lads.
