recent journal page
Tracks
let’s keep it quiet, keep me honest, keep me true
Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I was; and I, who from man could anticipate only mistrust, rejection, insult, clung to her with filial fondness.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.”
-Franz Kafka, from Letters To Milena
it is a brave, and wounded place - loving in despite of your trauma. it always gets painted as one loop upwards: we go to therapy, we get better.
you will love deeper, you will love kinder, you will love more (in spades, in large swatches of caution tape, free and unbidden; the numb finally slushing away)
but you will still sit on the floor of your apartment and feel heinous little snatches of your mental illness. you will unwind over small things. you will desperately want some-kind-of-validation, but know there’s actually-something-else-here, a thirst unable to be slaked, a hunger that causes you to rip open the world so it understand your pain. you’ll think about how you want to leave before you get left, how the hurt will be so manageable if you just steal out the back door and run with your bare feet. you will call it a controlled detonation, your tongue dry while you plan relocating to the city.
but you will exit the car fire of your childhood and you will hold the child you didn’t get to be and you’ll say: shush now. we won’t run, we know how to make our home.
and the child will say: it’s all sand. there’s no foundation. the world isn’t safe to build upon.
and we will stretch our hands and our old back and the hips that keep clicking. and we will say: from sand we made glass. and what else is there to say after that? the world isn’t safe. the world isn’t always kind.
but you have survived it, and it makes it just a little easier, each time, to spread yourself over the water and feel like you are swimming.
Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys
