posts I didn’t write//let’s catch up

1/7/16

I’ll be back.  I’ll be back.  I’ll be back.  I want to promise.

4/17/16

I wonder what a year means, think of me thin like a mirror–don’t you remember living so small?  My cheeks are the bellies of robins full of winter breath.  I open my eyes and today looks like yesterday but maybe a little warmer, the kind of spring where salamanders hide under leaf piles and I search for them like an unsure surprise, spend hours looking, find nothing, know I was likely inches away.  I try to picture a year, six months in one half my thoughts, six months in the other.  I get lost some time in September, am not sure I even made it past may.  I remember the heron and wish I knew the answers, try to place myself under her open wings, the long twigs of her legs, tucked under like a rudder, sailboat on the Chesapeake, a note from my grama in my hand, try to convince myself I’m headed toward something.

[feeling lost, turning 25, shitty relationship, applying to grad school^]

4/18/16

I wish I still knew how to write.  When I’m 25, maybe I’ll write every day.  Maybe I’ll become a teacher.  Maybe I’ll learn to love without being afraid.  Maybe I’ll wash the dishes right after I use them.  Maybe I’ll remember to be Jenny.

4/22/16

it hits me hard in the chest
suddenly, boulder falling then
crumbling

ash around my heart

the world blurs in a pain this thick.  I can’t see my feet walking straight on, my throat choking on each breath wet with fear I fell asleep under.

[shitty girlfriend told me she was pregnant, subsequent breakup angst^]

8/5/16

We learn each other carefully.  I draw a map on your back with my lips and fingertips.  I want to see the places your heart has been, walk through forests of your words and see the light coming through the leaves.  You light up the burnt edges of me and name them beautiful.  Your arms open as wide as this galaxy and your gravity pulls me, weightless still.

Last Friday morning I woke to the arch of you next to me, sunrise kissing your hip, thin sheet draped beneath your spine.  I took in the perfect lines of you, tried to memorize the cartography of your sleep; you stirred a bit and I wondered your dreams, fell back asleep thinking A—-, am not afraid to use your name because I want to trust like a person who hasn’t broken yet.  You make me feel like I haven’t broken.  Do you know how long it’s been since I was seen?  Do you know how whole I feel with you next to me?

[name (ironically) removed for privacy. maybe falling in real love for the first time ever and being scared but vulnerable//learning how to write again^]

 

How have you all been?

Staceyann Chin

Today, I am so glad I am a girl because yesterday my mother told me to write my story. No matter that I will write her in unflattering truths. ‘Write,” she told me, ‘and I hope that book sells so you can afford to raise your daughter with a heart just like yours’… I wish every mother whose daughter survived the burial of these unspoken things would give her permission to say what happened, to write down how she survived the terror of being that small girl in a world that so deeply favors men. I wish every cunt had the courage to bear public witness. I wish every woman had the pen, the clear view, and the support she needs to scream, ‘What happened to me was not my fault! What happened to me was not my fault! What happened to me was NOT MY FAULT.’

–Staceyann Chin

The piece with this quote can be found in this video starting right around 10 minutes.  I wish I could quote the whole thing.  You should definitely watch it.

I saw Staceyann Chin speak and read at Mount Holyoke College a few years ago and she ended with this piece.  It was unbelievably moving and I felt so validated in that moment as a survivor who writes.  When I found the notebooks from right after I was raped, I knew right away I wanted to write a conversation between me then and me throughout my healing journey.  It’s a project I’ve been working on since I found them a few months ago and that is so exciting, healing, grounding, and powerful for me.  I told my mom that I found them and her response was, “You should burn those.”  She thinks I need to set down what happened, move past it.  She doesn’t understand that the violence enacted against me changed the course of my life, deeply affected the person who I am.  I feel so grateful for my ability to write about the effects of sexual violence, abuse, rape culture, my family structure, being in this queer body/wounded spirit every day of my life.  Seeing Staceyann Chin speak in person, feeling her power in the room, was so grounding in this strength I feel as a writer.

new things justwrite

Update: I have an apartment!   And I have internet now, so here’s yesterday’s justwrite:

My heart is a candle dripping wax onto the floor of my ribcage.  I clutch these bones at night and wait for them to speak to me.  They carry me to the past but say nothing.  I wish they were angry, searing hot against my palms.  I wish they cringed at my touch and retreated down into my core, stomach full of ribs, long bones like violin bows.  Play me under your fingertips.  Teach me to make noise again.  This body is a fiddle with broken strings around its neck, shell collapsing into itself, forgetting how to be touched.  Gather me in your arms and teach me a new song.  In my dream last night, you leaned your whispered voice against my left ear, and your fingers grazed the valley of my neck.  I kept glancing at the sky, blue, full of birds, your breath a dove song stuck in my head.  I woke this morning with a ribcage full of air, my hands soft and asleep on the crest of my belly.  Nothing hurt.