feb. 10 — i’ve been going more numb by the day, like a limb falling asleep. sometimes that happens, when there’s nothing to jog the bloodflow of my life. i seem to atrophy when there’s nothing external to push, prod, tug me into a new shape. i stop moving. a moth in molasses.
i’ve been searching for something to wake me up.
jan. 13 – i’ve been more depressed than usual lately, and my depression can be fickle, taking bored, callous snipes at my most easily accessible insecurities and shortcomings. like an especially dedicated vulture, picking to the bone with its beak.
self-martyrdom is an ugly look, and i wear it atrociously, but for now i’m tired of wrestling for the control panel over my stupid little life. i think i’ll just let the cards fall where they may. a passionless existence is one i’ve always feared on a base, gut level. and yet.
undated — i’ve kept intimacy stored up in hidden nooks inside of me. hoarding it nervously, guarding it selfishly. i’ve been trying to allow myself. despite the fear. and one thing i’ve discovered through an anxiety disorder is that fear never depletes; it’s a yawning and endless well that never runs dry. there is always and always more fear, no matter how far or deep you try to claw your way out of it. but it’s the same with love, and i haven’t found the balance yet, like those synapses overlay each other. i’m well-practiced in donning fear as armor—habitual, reflexive, wry, self-deprecating, deflecting. fear has always consumed the spaces where love should reside, like it’s eddying in stilled pools, dammed off from flowing freely. i do think i’m at least more self-aware, more self-compassionate in that regard than i ever have been.
jan. 2 — my bitterness is all teeth and claws—an acid drip eating away at the core of me, to rawness. like the myth of loki chained in a cave as a snake’s venom stripped away at him, drop by sizzling drop.
anger so wide it could burn my whole world down; sometimes so clean and sideways, like a knife neat between two ribs. it starts warm and sharp, like whiskey in the throat. then pulses, a coal orange and livid.
the moon gourded and belly-up. the moon a pearled, bulbous fish eye, a coppery ring around it like an oil spill. as i drove, i imagined a hook sinking into it, snagging in one of those chalky hollowed craters, pulling it down to me with fishing line until my palms ran with blood.
once a boy cried because the moon followed him home. it was a well-worn penny of a story, offered to me so often, so long ago that it’s faded and thready in my recollections—one of those inherited stories that, for a moment, when you idly think on it, catch it in your hands before it wriggles away, prod at it—it feels almost mythic, almost unreal. know what i mean?
the boy died when he was twenty. i never knew him. sometimes it feels like i did. i still think about him crying over the moon, the tenderness of that preserved shard of story.
what else? i woke up dreaming of the seesaw creak of a dock rocking—the dock at my grandparents’ old lake house.
at least the sun is out. at least the wind is warm.
microcosmic 