Category: A Feeling

Sharing my
humanity

Here, you will find works uncovering and confronting a wide range of personal and shared experiences. Some through an analytical lens and others through emotional, each piece is rooted in healing matters of the heart. Sharing our experiences captures the essence of what it means to be human, and by exploring these we are able to find understanding and connections that remind us of the power in being both different, and the same.

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To Exist as You Are Is Enough

4/11/2024

Change is fascinating.

The belief that there is an ability to alter our being beckons questions of fate, brings assumptions about biology, and requires a reconciliation of accountability, free will, and the uncontrollable forces that influence our becoming. Change implies malleability and disassembly. It raises questions about what creates us and what defines us. Is our character, our actions, beliefs, and behaviors tied to a physical body- to an anatomy? Or is it a product of something more? It is likely a combination, but that is a discussion for another day.

To Love and Be Loved After Abuse

3/7/2024

“I wonder if you are ready for a relationship.”

How simple a statement, filled with sole curiosity and no judgment. Yet, it has consumed a large part of my spinning mind since feeling the first signs of attachment after abuse.

The Art of Forgiveness

10/17/2023

You will not leave this life unscathed.

The world will lay its hands on you in vain. It will cause a wound to bleed until you agree to forget it. It will force your face so far down into the earth that the fallen spot will be forever marked by your pain. The crash will be so loud that it is quiet. You will see the outline of your essence as it irreversibly mixes with the sand it fell on. It’s imprint will serve as an unwanted reminder of what was stolen from you, only to be buried beneath the ground and left to rot. The world will never give you this part of yourself back- but there will be flowers that grow in this spot once infertile.

The Best Loves Are Those Unrequited

9/30/2023

The things we love often don't love us back.

To be more precise: the things we love often cannot love us back.

Your favorite painting in your favorite museum, the short poem you have read obsessively on your mass printed page, the weather that most makes you want to spend the day outside- these cannot love you. Your coffee mug with the perfectly placed chip that your grandma gave you, the sound that comes out when your favorite person laughs, the smell of salt water and sunscreen- all of the things that fill your heart with a fire only love can light. These things cannot love you.

To Be or Not to Be - A Life for You or Me?

8/28/2023

To give my life for yours is a decision I don't have to decide.

I have this constant, nagging urge to sacrifice my life for the sake of someone else's. It has gotten worse with age, and it gets unbearably worse in the moments I am most gratified. It is especially heightened on the days I find glimpses of the pleasure I have spent and continue to spend much of my life looking for. These blessed feelings always seem to slip out of my grip- stuck in an endless cycle of being caught and being lost. This is a universal experience, the push and pull of good and bad. An inescapable consequence of life. That is okay. It is what lets us know what makes these great feelings so great, anyway.

In Death We Do Not Part

8/15/2023

There is a corpse living under my bed.

The air is stiff there. She does not need much to survive, but she needs the immeasurable to die. I see glimpses of her when I pass by the right side of my bed to open a nearly empty closet. The wine-colored nail polish, that I wore for the three years after my fourteenth birthday, will catch your eye first. The blue shoes I threw away nine months ago, as I packed for a cross-state move with impairing uncertainty, will demand your attention next. There is little else that can be seen. I do not know what has cemented her to the past, yet keeps her impossibly alive in the present. I have never found the wound responsible for her unsettling stillness.

The Complexities of Being Sane

8/4/2023

The moments our humanity comes through most are the moments it is unjustified.

Justification, though the word may sound slightly odd here, encapsulates the confusing depths of human emotion. It creates a clear pipeline of experiencing an unaccountable thing and attempting accountability, anyways- but how can you hold a table accountable for crashing against your big toe? How can you force accountability upon the wire that tripped you? Or the sink that won’t unclog? Is your anger fair when the person next to you breathes a little too loud for your liking? Does this disrupt your sanity? Are you sane, really, if it does?

The Sound Heard Round the World

7/6/2023

The world touches you everywhere.

It breaks through any barriers built in attempts to cut its connection. This constant bond will inevitably lead to the pain of overstimulation- and when you beg for rehabilitative silence, to indulge in an encasement of quiet, it will tell you no. It is not an option. It was never an option, and it will never be an option. Whether it's endless scents, an infinite stream of sounds, the sting of a cold touch, or the comfort of a warm embrace, the world does not let you leave without knowing it.

The Pleasure of Grieving

6/22/2023

My grief had a growth spurt.

This past week sucked me into the hole of a feeling that I never seem to shake. It dies only to be reborn and announces itself with the itch of a burn beginning to heal. This grief feels like ice forming around a fire, it sounds like snow falling on water. The collision is seamless, the encasement suffocating. I am unsure where its roots are buried in my body, and my vision blurs each time I try and pick it out from past, present, and future line-ups. There are moments when it grabs me from behind and I learn it is a ghost that is urging to haunt, but then there are seconds when it slaps me across the face and I am acutely aware of its present grip.