Tag: journal

may/june 2022.

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may 15 — watched the lunar eclipse tonight. the moon looked bruised and bloody, hurt by the dark. i felt like that last, slivering flare, clinging in the face of consumption. a remnant, singing brand of light, white and gleaming like a new tooth in a whole sky of darkness.

may 26 — hair is shorn off. a nation of fury and spitting venom and grief, unimaginable grief. too heavy. some days it’s hard to imagine goodness in the world at all, that last, faint, trembling ember in the coal pit.

off to colorado tomorrow. back to my selfish reprieve deep in the mountains, hemmed in by reminders of a world left untouched. a hypothetical earth where there’s only beauty and silence.

june 4 — my loneliness is a comfort, in many ways. it’s the only constant i’ve come home to; that resigned return to the circle of my own arms. something new, please. a sharp thorn or a fresh breeze or even a new kind of hurt. love shouldn’t feel sisyphean, should it? what would i know of it, anyway?

june 14 — a truant summer has bedded down into a muggy, relentless heat. a white haze hangs over the city like wildfire smoke, slinking between the buildings and the cracks of windows. as thick as a drowning. i feel like i’m relearning lessons and relearning them, again and again and again. stale revelations about love and loss, exhumed and buried and exhumed. waiting for something to stick like a housefly in honey. waiting for stillness and assurance and — mm, i don’t know, conviction, maybe.

i’m waiting for something i have no name for. i imagine it making eyes from me across the bar. striking me like a crack of lightning or a heart attack. i’m waiting for something that has perhaps already happened to me, to an old version of me. sometimes i feel like i know less than i once did, like i’m unearthing capsules i already plundered and buried. maybe i am indeed moving in reverse.

i still come to the well of the world and drink from it. i’m still searching for something in the depths of it, in the dark-bellied depths of it.

nothing more to say. the heat feels damned, a thin layer of hell. too hot to think. i’m always imagining myself through funhouse mirrors. unable to render any other image. maybe if i keep absorbing the beauty of the world around me — if i look for it, seek the grail and find it — i’ll reflect that too.

january/february 2020.

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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.

october / november 2019.

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snatches of journal entries from october and november

4 oct. — it’s fall. need to write a full, detailed entry, but so tired tonight. the moon is sharp as a crystal, edges so whetted they could slip between my teeth. i saw the last of summer thunderstorms this week, seething white downpours giving way to fleeting rainbow arcs. the air is cooling, woven with smoke and damp.

i’ve been journaling a lot in my head. i feel very keen and awake, like i was sleepwalking before. i feel like i was always unconsciously living toward some imaginary end, dreading the long span of the rest of my question mark-shaped life, but i don’t feel that way currently. it’s been an odd shift in vision. turns out i might be onto something with this cocktail of intermittent therapy and 10mg of inconsistently taken lexapro. or maybe it’s something more spiritual and existential relating to the gradual formation of my fullest self. but probably not.

this week i was writing love letters to the rhythms of kansas city, trying to embrace being where i am. trying not to over-romanticize moving on to the next action. shedding some emotional deadweight as i leave apathetic friends in my rearview. trying not to give into the cloy of nostalgia that draws me, always, back in.

31 oct. — it’s halloween. the night stinging and singing. crisp like teeth into a cold apple.

i still have so many corners of the earth to upturn. i wish i could describe the natural beauty of asheville; i found myself thinking about how time waters down our memory, that all we retain is our impression of how somewhere can make us feel. i remember being perturbed by this notion even as a child. it would keep me up at night, possibly because i was skittishly skirting the edges of some larger existential realization.

the smokies, with their ridged spines like slumbering beasts, furred with amber and copper and pine, hazed with blue off to the horizon.

i’m sort of drunk, so i’m tired, but i’ve been wanting to journal for several days now. i’m not quite sure where i am right now, here at the last gasp of october. i’ve been tentatively easing into myself, accelerating in my self-certainty. i spent so long choked with self-hatred and habitual misery, self-flagellating because i didn’t know anything different. i feel like there’s finally some warm light beaming out of me, self-compassion for all my old weathered selves. sympathy for everyone i’ve been. maybe that light’s been there all along.

29 nov. — at the same time, i find myself brittle with a lack of conviction. self-sabotaging out of boredom, apathy, laziness. i’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. not in a morbid sense, really—just more of a heightened, peripheral awareness. the inherent nature of an impending winter, i guess.

this year has been so weird. i’m almost 26, still so uncertain. knowing myself, later on i’ll ache with nostalgia for my twenties, but i can’t say i’ll miss this debilitating sensation of being caught between two, possibly three, possibly infinite states of being.

journal entry: march 17, 2018

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march 17, 2018 — It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and I’m alone.

I don’t mean this self-pityingly—it’s simply an observation. I was walking home from yoga and was listening to the screams from drunken twenty-somethings, the boom of tacky country music, and felt a peculiar alienness, as I have for months now. A strange distance from it all. It used to be that I was in those throngs—drinking green cheap beer with my friends, getting tipsier by the minute, the pulse of the speakers swimming in my ears as we yelled over the music. I feel so apart from that now, like a walking shadow. I seal myself in; brick myself up behind walls. The anxiety has made the process even more absolute. I spend so much time by myself here that I almost forget I’m alone, synced to the cadences of my own solitude. But I always get these wistful pangs for a life more full, blooming with vivacity. You never realize how little you speak by yourself; you only speak when spoken to, or when someone’s listening. I can go a whole day without speaking, cocooned in the singularity of my apartment life; reading, writing, drinking decaf coffee, watching TV.

Anyway, the whole town is out drinking. I turned down a few invitations earlier, quarantining myself with my anxiety so it won’t spread beyond my control. It’s a new moon tonight, the beginning of a new lunar cycle, a new month. I want this cycle to be rich with healing and recovery, but I’m not sure what else I can do. I fight my own mind vigorously every day, wrestling for the control panel. I have to actively keep it in check at all times, send firm and commanding messages, or else the system goes haywire. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I relinquished control, but I’m too afraid to find out.

I feel stuck and restless. I don’t know where I’m going with anything or what my life is going to look like. I feel tired and disenchanted.

september.

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a love for life bubbling on the tip of my tongue like soda water, counterbalanced by tear-inducing apathy. evening air a thin, sticky film on my skin. night air like waxpaper.

(late summer’s fraying, those cicada cadences decaying and soothsaying.)

skeins of jazz music floating up to my apartment on saccharine and solitary weekend nights. and my palm curving around a tangerine sunset through a car window.

plaintively singing mitski in the parking garage, a voice drifting up lonesome and aerial, like a bat in the rafters of an empty church.

—

digging my thumbnail into old wounds until they exhaustedly, sluggishly bleed again. writing love letters to a summer that ended five years ago—craving dead summers even in the panting, muggy, sick heat.

performing burial rites for old relationships and then exhuming those empty carcasses again and again. a lone, desperate figure working night-shifts in some proverbial graveyard.

—

i don’t write about love—i shy away and recoil like some wounded creature, i circle around it, i leave it gaping, leave it a hollow cavern. not sure if my mouth can form the right shapes to articulate it, to whisper it into a still and night-drenched bedroom. to utter it low like an oath. to swallow it on a jagged sob. to swear to it on a sword’s edge and the promise of blood. to recant it, revoke it, spurn it, scorn it. to carefully negotiate it, like a blade to an artery. to level buildings with it, to echo ancient tragedies of it, to pledge scatterings of stars for it. to gasp it, then sigh, then say nothing at all.

to sing it, joyful and aloft, a hummingbird. to hold it clasped inside me, incandescent, a firefly light pulsing in a jar.

journal entry: may 19, 2018

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It’s been a bad week for anxiety. Just now it got so bad that I left the house and wandered barefoot on the road while dissociating. It just stormed at the lake, so it was just the still, dripping quiet. The tapping of rain on leaves and the wet slap of the soles of my feet the only tethers to the material world.

Yesterday on the drive here, Mom and I talked about chance. The chance of existing at all, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time when you die. A freak rockfall, an errant deer, entire lives lost in the slot of a 30-second choice. I remember feeling somehow protected, some odd preternatural sense of assurance, and also an odd sense of ominous foreboding, like the conversation was some kind of harbinger. Two hours later, a deer jumped in front of my car. We lived. But it felt like an odd sign. I’ve felt a weird sense of those lately. Like the universe is whispering something I can’t hear in a language I don’t understand.

Today I watched the storm roll over the lake before the heavens opened up. I faced down the storm, watched it barreling toward me, the silver mists limning the distant trees, and knew there was no way to stop the imminent rain. And still I stood there. Feet rooted. I thought about the inevitability of suffering, of challenge and difficulty. I felt so at peace, and still anxiety won’t unfasten its claws from my body. It trails me from the moment I wake up to the moment I sleep. I thought being home would help with the panic, but it’s followed me from Omaha like a malevolent spirit, or a bad smell.

What else can I even do but keep staying conscious?