We sit and watch peach sunsets turn on a riverbank in Southern Africa. Tonight, we are not the same as we were when we climbed the old templed hill of Poseidon, nor when we walked the grounds of the grand mosque. The letters we write ourselves show us the shadows of our former selves– shards of intentions, pieces of resentments– now, somehow, all soldered together to make a stained mosaic– a window of insight worthy of a place of worship, an relic of self that seems to demand worship itself. We look on in awe, sheer wonder in our ability create and trace the grout around, and through, and over these once rough edges all the way back to the start, the initial pattern that would ultimately lead us to here, now: the moment we watched the oranging sun drown against the silhouetted trees of the Delta. What new shadows will this cooling sky provide us? Where will we take ourselves from here?
About Abandonment: A Lyrical Rumination /
Does it feel like a father leaving his only daughter in a house that was once a home that no longer has running water. Does it rumble like a furnace hungry for oil. Does it look like an electric bill three months past due. I want to know what shape the fear of loss takes. What body does the fear of losing and losing again comedeer when it has already consumed the body in which it was created. I sit with young women, over hot cups of green tea, to unpack what has already been properly packaged for storage, for a day when we are all less busy than the busy we are now. It is hard to imagine a life without it. Both the it of being busy and the it of what is abandonment. The two, for us, are mutually exclusive. There cannot be busy without the intrusive thoughts of what has happened and what could happen, again. Again, we are too busy to cancel the what if out and replace such an if with anything else. Instead, what if sits like a child in an empty house, waiting for her father to come home.
About Mental Health : A Lyric Essay /
At some point, someone in your life needed to tell you that being able does not mean that you are able. That yes, there will be days where you feel too fractured, unable to move past the pain. And yes, maybe, there will be other days where giving yourself the small joys of life will be as easy as it is to breathe but somebody needed to tell you that those days are far and few between— like connecting flights in the midst of a global quarantine. I wish someone told you that most days the pain is enough to keep you tucked into and under seven layers of quilted blankets— imagine it— mid-summer heat and broken air conditioning. There is no escape.
Someone did. Now that you pause and think about how you got here. Suffocated by the stench of yourself, loathing. You remember your college roommate during your senior year. You were writing your thesis when she came back from class crying. She tried to tell you that her head was being held in a shallow pool of water, that she couldn't pull herself out despite how hard she tried, there was no escape, not even a light to signal a way out. At that point, you couldn’t understand how she could feel so helpless. At that point, you had felt close to death but not like that. Not in the way you would consider a toxic lover, abusive with their affection. You felt death as if it was already a part of you. Numb to what you would consider the costs of existence. Now that you are drowning the way she did, you understand that it is not about being close to death but about being. Being with a pain that is really a longing, an absence— like an empty wall waiting for a work of art to be hung, to cover its’ vacancy, to feel alive.
But you are: alive. How can that be? How can you be both existing and simultaneously fighting to feel existence? How can your head be held underwater if there is no hand to hold it down? How can it then be your own hand that pushes you deeper into the seemingly shallow pool of unprecedented sorrow? Nobody told you about the nuances that come with watching yourself refuse yourself the ability to let go. To remove your hand from the back of your head, your face from the pool. Nobody told you this. How to eject the water from your lungs without fear of the water somehow returning because you know it will, somehow, return. Yes, the water, your hand, blankets in the summer, this pain of not being able to but still being able. Yes, to say this is a killer, a silent reaper, would be to say “I told you so”, because I already have.
I have already told you there is no escape.