an explanation for the tree on my arm

The best thing we can do is move forward from the pain. It’s only logical. But logic has never made sense to me, and I suspect the same is true for my family of bears. We sit and marinate in it, as though perhaps if we wait long enough, it will all make sense, and it won’t hurt at all anymore. Moving forward means leaving things behind, and I’m a pack-rat of the heart.
The other day, I was trying to rationalize a rash decision, like I am always trying to do, and which everyone always knows I am doing. I told my mother “I like trees. They seem so patient. Like they can’t go anywhere. And their okay with that.” There is something comforting about the permanence in trees. They stick around unless they are cut down or uprooted and even then they make a silent scene, something so awful it could make a person cry, or wretch, or whatever they are inclined to do when they’re upset. I am no tree now. But that’s what I want to be when I grow up. The chances of me growing up in this life time, they’re not so good. But when I die, and all that death wisdom soaks into my bones, all I want to do is be buried, and decomposed in to dirt and be mixed in with leaves, and worms, and other little things that live underground and to somehow, through all of that become a tree. I take comfort in the fact, and this is the only comfort I have for the thought of death, that when I die, I will be returned to the Earth whence I come from, be part of something bigger, and more beautiful, and more purposeful and functional than myself.
I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to get attention, though I don’t think I realize that is what I am doing most of the time. I am doing my best to look for a new goal or perhaps not look for a goal at all but figure out what I like for the sake of liking it, not for the sake of impressing someone.
Did you know that people can stop loving you? You can say the perfectly wrong thing, just once, and it is over. “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” what a crock of shit. I did that once, ya know. Maybe more than once. But only once that I know of. Said the wrong thing, spent months trying to swallow it back up, the ‘cause of a half year of stomach aches. Mistakes are tough on the digestive system. In return, they erased me. So I had to erase them. So it didn’t hurt so much. But we can not swallow or erase things. Just like your stomach gets full and the paper gets thin, people get tired. If you get broken once, can you ever get pieced together properly again?
I am beginning to believe there is no such thing as “moving on” in the sense I always assumed people meant. It is more like learning to be at peace, for a majority of the time, with the things that have happened or the things that have not happened or the things that will never happen at all. So you better find the love of your life fast, because the older you get, the more you have to carry, and it gets harder to know a person through and through, and it gets harder to explain yourself, because you have all these things, these memories, these, these things branded into your heart and your bones, and how do you sort through them properly to explain yourself? I am scared that I will be this way forever. It is not really a bad way to be, I suppose. But I can tell that it will get lonely. Lonely like being swallowed by the sea. Sometimes, it just doesn’t matter how hard you try. I am wondering if redemption is even a possibility ever. You can’t take back things, even if you didn’t mean them in the first place.
It seems like I’m stuck on this one thing, but it is not just one thing, but many things, perhaps all of the things. We all have our own personal terrors, and whether one person’s is worse than the others is really not the point, because our terrors seem big to us, because they are what we know, and they ARE important, even if they aren’t in the scheme of all the terrors ever heard of.
The trees are a comfort. I can hear them trying to sell me something, just by their existence. They’re whispering some sort of secrets with their leaves, and it is the only thing that convinces me that someway, it will be ok, even if I can’t understand how now. So I’m sticking with the trees.

confessions

(number one)
i am in love
with the idea
of fickle love

of one night stands
and fuck buddies
and other
emotional
disasters

but
my life is
not
like the books
i read

and
i am not
reckless
enough
to satisfy
my cravings.

(number two)
i am
a narcissistic
bitch

who wants
to be loved
by anyone
that is willing
to listen to me
when i spew forth
my nothing nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing


and who tries
to turn
her lackluster life
into art
by writing
shitty poems
about nothing
nothing
nothing

bet i had you
fooled.
(bet.
i.
didn't.)

(three)
i just
want
to write something nice

like a book
or a poem
or a scribble
on a bathroom stall.

i’m not nearly
as bad as i think i am
but perhaps

i’m worse.

(four)
we never had much in common
anyways.

except
and overwhelming
desire
to be in love
with something
tangible

because art
and music
and words
don’t give you kisses

and ideas
forget to tell you
that they love you

and dreams
forget to call you
the next day.

(five)
it will get me in trouble. i'm tired of being in trouble.

(six)
i’m thinking
of taking up smoking
because i love the idea
of destroying
expectations

and also
i think
it would drive you
crazy
which is kind of funny
because you
want me dead
though you’d never
really say it
quite like that.


(seven)
my mother
keeps saying
it’s depression
as though
she’s not surprised
that i’m falling
apart

and my brother
and i
make jokes
about how shitty
everything in the world is
and then watch a movie

and my father
asks “whats wrong”
because he is out
of the loop
and he loves me too much

and i wonder
if this is what it’s always like
when you grow up.

even words can't make music

GIVE ME MUSIC!" (blood curdling scream) "how do i make this sound come out of me?" (whisper)

my fingers don't do what they're told, my hands flinch inappropriate beats and my ankles get tired, the bass drum grows dim.

i like to play the role of the indie hipster girl, but it's incomplete without the sound. "WHY CAN'T I MAKE THE SOUNDS"

she drifts in and out of daydreams and sleep is too real for her taste.

dance dance dance dance, thats all she really knows how to do and it isn't much. she loves to watch the real bodies flail, she's in love with all the people, all the dancing people that she knows, they are all she wants to see ever.

harmonies harmonies harmonies, she always sings the harmonies much to everyone's dismay, she breaks the songs with her persistence.
she could sing for days, if the days would let her.

don't you see she's hungry? she looks harmless but i bet she's vicious by the way the tears stream from her eyes.

she's knows a girl named after a bear with a voice that could break your heart, has broken her heart, she wants to steal the sound away, from this sweet bear girl, but instead she just cries. it's the only way she knows how to release all these things.

there is always something more. she wants this. she wants to impress people with mere sound.

all these damn bears she knows make pretty sounds, their roars are magnificent.

'what makes us beautiful?'
hours minutes days years decades centuries eras life cycles.
we are all one song, we are all many songs but she just wants to make a song.

she is filled to the brim with silence.

mason jars

yesterday i cried a handful, and today another one and i though maybe i'd put them in a jar and send them to you because they aren't really mine. and then i thought what if we always sent our tears to the people they belonged to? how much more true would we feel. we could each have a closet or a small room where we store our jars of tears from various peoples. and then, when the sunlight hit them just right, we would get pretty little rainbows. and the sound, oh the sound! we could make with our little jars of tears. little tinkling rhythms.

tastless secrets

every morning she wakes up, shakes her head around, hoping that her thoughts are like dice, and she'll get a new roll everyday. she licks her lips, she sits up and hits her head, she smiles at herself. she laughs at the things that are hers, her things. her family, her wordless secrets, her happiness, her sadness, she owns these things and she doesn't let anyone else touch them. it's a troublesome thing, a lonely thing, to be so selfish one might suppose, but it is just as sad to share. she swallows her pills, she pushes away her confusion, she reads, she walks, she tries to pretend she doesn't feel the things that are always there. when she was little everyone always asked her not to grow up, joking about finding a doctor that could keep her little forever. they didn't know that this would make her so sad later. no one loves you when you're grown up.

she cringes at the sound of the ties breaking, the ties with the people that loved her when she was three. she cries as she feels the ties tugging at her skin, little pricks all over, because everyone is far, far away, and they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but she was already too fond to begin with. she's on a hunt for new people to add pricks and pins to her skin, and someday everyone will pull so hard that she will break into a million tiny pieces and she will be able to be a million different things and she will be happy.

does everyone change as much as i do? she asks herself each day, because she music is the only tie to her feelings, it reminds her how she felt, and where, and when. there is never a why. why is the worst sort of a question. she is happy when she realizes that she still has a regular, overwhelmed with life sort of sadness in her. not everything is lost.

what if sadness is her happiness? what troubled life, what a paradigm.

you can not ask everyone to love you. you can not ask everyone to love you as much as you love them. you can not ask your mother to hold you when you are sad, and to sing you lullabies every night before you go to sleep. you can not ask your friends to love you forever. you can not ask your friends to love you the most. because we all have different priorities. and it's not a conscious thing, it is a heart thing, and our hearts are the freest thing that we have. you can not ask your cousins to love you the most, because you get older, and you get less cute, and you get less relatable and you don't change enough, but you change too much. you can not ask strangers to love you the most of all the passers by.

you should not ask it of them. you should not be disappointed. you should not ask for so much. you should be humble. you should be happy. you should be quiet. you should keep yourself in line. you should make an effort. you should not want your mother when you are 18 years old. you should not expect things to be easy. you should not hope that people will understand you. you should not lie. you should not be sad, when there are so many happy things.

yesterday, i tasted all the things i ever wished i was. i am none of those, she counted on her fingers. i am not kind. i do not have the perfect warm smile. i can not sing like an angel. i can not make music. i can not create the pictures. i am not self assured. i am not a free spirit. i am not, ever, the things that everyone wants me to be. i am not the things i want me to be. i am not clay. i am not perfect for everyone, at all times.

she ran out of fingers.

she ran out of toes.

she ran out of time.


(in need of some editing)

burning down the house

if it came down to it, she would not be saved from a burning building.
"i'm going to burn alive"
she spends her days pairing them off. "well she would save him, because she would die without him, and SHE would save HER because she needs her in times of tragedy, and so on so forth"
but they would survive without her.
oh her mother? perhaps. but it really depends on who all is in the burning building. this strange metaphor is really just her way of weighing relationships.
or checking her weight in the world.
according to her scale, her weight is very light.
she is loved by many, but she does not come out on top in anyones charts. that is, assuming these people make charts. which they don't.

when she was little she used to think of what she would save.
her dog.
her cat.
herself.
her mother (but her mother was probably too strong to need saving).

her psychologist tells her that this is all very telling. the fact that she is the one needing the saving, and not the one doing the saving meant that she perceived herself as weak. and the fact that she assumed the building would burn all the way to the ground, and not be salvaged by the fire fighters meant she was a pessimist. like it was some big mystery. of course she was a fucking pessimist.

her psychologist was always full of bullshit like this.
she said "imagine the building is your life"
to which she responded "you mean, imagine my life is on fire?" which made her laugh, because it was a funny visual.

it was a rough test of character, she knew that. an unfair test of love, she knew. i mean, the chances of her being in a burning building with everyone she knew was not very likely. but perhaps at her birthday party? or her graduation party? or at her coming home party? (if ever she were to leave in the first place)

which brought her to the irony of the fact, that the only time all these people would be together would be to celebrate her. someone dropped the cake, it had too many candles, it was too close to the paper recycling, which was too close to coats, and so it spreads. and to think, they were all here for her, and she was the one that would burn alive. in chaos, she is lost.

lost, is not being unsure of where you are. lost is when you are unsure of where you are and no one else is thinking about you. then you are lost or drowning or burning. it all depends on which analogy you choose.

she was burning.
alive.

get her some water.


(incomplete.)

untitled

i stuck my music in my shoes so the pick pocketers can't steal my tunes.
"i stuck it in my underwear because no one ever goes down there"
it makes my feet sore
"i've got ants in my pants"
i'm letting it go
"no save it up, don't you want them to hear your sound loud and clear?"
it won't matter when the time comes.

all she ever wanted was something that was her own, something she could share with others so they would remember to love her.
"oh, i want to sing these tears to sleep, can you make music with the light? these things always taste so good going down, but they grow rancid in my stomach"
your eyes are seeping some strange liquid
"i hope it tastes like candy"
it's nothing so sweet.

there is no music to be had hear
what a brick, what a brick
there is no sound to be found round here
what a trick, what a trick

she has words, piles of words stacked up in here closet, where the clothes should be. which word should i wear today?