Cautionary Tale

How the hell did you end up here?

You used to wrap yourself in fairytales like a blanket, but it was the cold you loved. 

Sharp shivers as you uncovered the corpses of Bluebeard’s wives. 

Sweeter goosebumps as Prince Charming slid one glass slipper over your little toes. 

Perfect fit.

But by the schoolyard real princesses floated by you on fall winds. You saw the gulf between you and the rich girls and vowed to stop believing in fairytales. 

But the stories were in you. 

Deep as poison.

 If Prince Charming was real, if he could save you, you needed to be saved by the unfairness of everything. 

When would he come? 

The answer was a cruel shrug and a hundred fleeting moments. 

The sneer on Stevie Smith’s face when he called you fat cow. 

Uncle Jeff’s hand squeezes your ass in the Thanksgiving kitchen. 

The accusation in your father’s eyes when you told him what happened. 

From every boy masquerading as a man that you’ve let into your body, your heart, you learned you didn’t have whatever magic turns a beast into a prince.

You surround yourself with the girls you’ve always resented. 

Hoping to share their power. And you hated yourself. 

And that diminished you even more. And then, right when you thought you might just disappear, he saw you. 

And you knew somewhere deep it was too good to be true. 

But you let yourself be swept because he was the first strong enough to lift you. 

Now in his castle, you understand Prince Charming and Bluebeard are the same man.

And you don’t get a happy end unless you love both of him. 

Didn’t you want this?  To be loved. Didn’t you want him to crown you? 

Didn’t you ask for it? 

Didn’t you ask for it? 

Didn’t you ask for it?

So say you can live like this. 

Say you love him. 

Say thank you. 

Say anything but the truth. 

What if you can’t love him back?

- you

The Fickle Morning

And so the birds start their screaming

Because you let go of my hand

And old words lose all meaning

As the shadow of the dark night descends

Fickle morning, you are a liar

Look how you made a fool out of me

Mistook my love for desire

Assumed I need you to set me free

Fickle night, I know that you're scared

I know, because I am too

Scared of hurting someone else yet again

The way I've been hurt by you

And I don't want to touch you in the dawn

If I cannot hold onto you through the day

But as the sun slowly sets

Your love for me decays

Little Thing

Whit's fur ye'll no go past ye

Tales of my intrigue have probably reached you, Loch Ness,

you remain a constant muse to this hot mess
‘Till we finally meet one day
and you take my breath quite away,
I'll daydream to the melodies of your land
of Scottish folklore, romance, and scran.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger : The year leading up to turning 29

An abandoned teddybear sitting under a tree broke my heart.  

A heightened wall broke my heart. 

A spoiled favorite dress broke my heart. 

The child hugging his parent's legs at the airport broke my heart. 

The crunch of the autumn leaves as I trudged along the sidewalk has broken my heart. 

The vagueness and enormity of silence broke my heart. 

The infinity of rain pouring down my face broke my heart. 

Watching the life dissipate from a friend broke my heart. 

Witnessing the almost birth of a child broke my heart.

It is amazing how a multitude of things both random and specific break my heart sporadically, little by little. And every time I find myself feeling small and inconsequential in this big madhouse called the world, I remind myself how incredible things are right there inside me. 

It finds the resilience to hold itself together just enough to be broken again.

Funemployed for the first time in 4 years!

Loud and proud: I quit my job earlier this month

And before you ask—I did it without a plan b

Wow! I hope you have a ‘plan b’!” “hey, congratulations, but… what’s your ‘plan b’?” “big news! So, do you have a ‘plan b’?”

In the immediate aftermath of my decision to leave my full time yet remote job as a Project Manager for a US company, a big move indeed, friends and family have been reacting with a barrage of sometimes incredulous, sometimes appreciatory exclamations, but practically everyone has been overly concerned about my next step, to the point of hurriedly soliciting me into jumping right back into the work force. Something that i should have done, according to them, probably the next day after my exit and said goodbye to my colleagues. “no, i do not have a plan b” has been my unequivocal answer to people here and across the pond.

 Why should I? Plan B sounds like back-up plan to me, and having taken that major but exhilarating leap of faith that is leaving a full time gig that had become not fulfilling nor challenging, why should one settle for anything less than a newly minted ‘Plan A’? 

And while I chalk out my Plan A, I am looking forward to working on some personal interesting projects while I travel. If anyone has any ideas please feel free to send a shoutout or just a hi :) 

The true lies we tell ourselves

There are lights on the tree and there’s water in your eyes, even though the soft glow of everything through a window as you drive past makes you happy. 

It’s a happy kind of sad, it’s a sad kind of happy. 

Are you happy now?

The Usual Suspects

Relax,  its okay.

I’ve been here before

I know how this plays out

I can guage whats in store

Relax its okay

Don’t be shy

You know you want it to be about you

Yet you claim you cannot see me cry

Relax its okay

Take another piece of me

Everyone else has tried. 

And then they say, ‘You belong here, not there’

I belong to where I have been

Filled with stubs of tickets spent

Passes of my boarding and indentations of me in the seats I've slept in

I am the overstuffed and I am the poorly sewn and totems from my travel spill out when I dance

I am the nomadic collector of memories and moments,

 of sticky hands grabbing fragments of wander lust. 

And I am hiding them beneath these ribs.

Follow me and you may find them

I leave bits of my self in the footprints I step from.

Here. There. 

I do not belong where you want me to. 

Intentional Dissonance

It’s a feeling she misses. 

She made lists of things she wanted to feel when she was younger, big things, small things, ice, snow, the sand at the beach, someone else’s hands holding hers, feeling her, feeling them, a feedback loop of feelings, which is what happens when two people make love. 

She wanted to feel things that made her  feel safe and scared and things that ripped her heart out of her chest, things that made her want to go home and things that made her want to travel, things that made her  proud and things that made her regret her choices and she, like all people, slowly ticked these things off the list in her head as she lived, as the world turned until soon, there were very few things left to feel.

Hello 

She believed the last thing she would feel, would be nothing, as that was nearly impossible to feel unless you were dead or hadn’t been born yet. She wondered what it’d be like to not be able to wonder

Cuddler Vs Sprawler

Do you know how often
I speak to you
when you're not here?
Sometimes even when you are here but oblivious.
How often I
Mouth words and phrases to the space you should be filling?

And evertime you push my hand away from yours or disengage your feet from mine...
do you know how my heart breathes out a heavy sigh at the ways it is deprived?

The things we do to protect the people we love.

The Flaw in Being Flawed.

Most people don't cheat because they are cheaters.

They cheat because they are people. They are driven by hunger or for the experience of someone being hungry once more for them. They find themselves in friendships that take an unintended turn or they seek them out because they're horny or drunk or damaged from all the stuff they didn't get when they were kids. 

There is love. There is Lust.

There is opportunity.

There is alcohol.And youth. And middle age.

There is loneliness and boredom and sorrow and weakness and self destruction and idiocy and arrogance and romance and ego and nostalgia and power and need.

There is the compelling temptation of intimacies with someone other than the person with whom one is most intimate.

Which is a complicated way of saying it's a long damn life.

And people get mucked up in it from time to time.

Even the people you marry.

Even Us.

And sometimes, even years later...penning down about it ends with a flick of a tear .

Circumstantial Passive Belief Triggered by Circumstances

In me are the bones

of a better person than this.

To Be Or Not To Be..Available

It is interesting how easily we forget that existence and availability are wildly separate. 

You may exist for someone, but only your availability to them when they need you differentiates whether they are a stranger, an acquaintance or a beloved.

And it is  Never a state of being.

It's always a choice.

To Be Or Not To Be

August 2018 - Sighnaghi,Georgia

The one thing more important than existence is availability for another. 

The conundrum lies in,''To be.. or not to be'.

The Wedding Song

Vs

Hot Mess and Proud

To feel intensely - symptom of weakness, or the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate? 

 Is the empath who is broken, or is it the socienty  that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled?

From the Pages of the Book I Will Never Write

Two lost hikers

In the rain

With wet matches 

One gives up thinking, I have been too cold and in the dark for two long

The other goes, I have been too cold and in the dark for too long to not try every damn match.

Warriors

I see the dents and the worn edges of your heart.

And I want to run away since it reminds me of my own.

But a stronger voice inside me knows that If you would let me, I would never let you fight another battle alone.

My Forever.

I may be little.

But not my heart.

Not my love.

My mind may be impatient

but not my heart

not my love.

And in this world of cheap wine and fast love,

While some people don't endure.

Some feelings just do.