Poems: 9/13, 4/20, 7/2
Three journal entries, mostly unedited. Very maudlin at points, sorry! But I do get progressively more content!! Is this how you do Substack?
September 13, 2024
It is too easy, here, to forget about spring. I guess that's a good thing, though, it's what I’ve been wanting. I don’t understand how we can do this kind of thing. So much and then, one day, nothing.
In summer, it was sharp, but it gave me company. Here, there is a hollowness, something missing as my wounds heal— skin stitched over a gaping thing. I am trying to tamp down the desperation to fill myself with things that aren’t me.
April 20, 2025, Easter
I saw a duckling in the park today, its mother had her head underwater, white belly, yellow-orange feet up-reaching. The sun was out and it was warm. While I was sitting on the grass, painting trees and waiting my eternal wait for divine inspiration, someone took my picture and reminded me of sweetness. I could not thank her enough, because I am not good with words or realizing beauty ‘til after the fact.
There is music and the smell of weed in the park and it's like I’m home, but I always struggle to feel as though I am, at all, without anybody seeing it. “If a tree falls,” and all that jazz.
Soon I will call my mom and say Happy Easter, and then try (and then stop trying) to study and be good. The breeze is getting cold and the shade is creeping up on me, so I think it's time to go.
July 2, 2025
I’ve been home for a while now and it feels good, like the top of a nice long breath, held for a second, floating. I blend right into every place here, fading into these walls and streams and the coffee shop that won’t give me a job, until I don’t know where I stop and everything else starts. It's a comforting feeling, to know that there’s a place for me here.
From the window in my bedroom I can see that the way trees breathe is the way we do, and I make my rib cage come up just to feel like them. Up, up, up, up! Hold, heartbeat heartbeat, and down again.