I don’t know where the body is

I love her, I swear I do

I know everywhere she WAS—the movies, the café, her beat-up sedan, plastered across my wall in a million blurry photos...

She loved me, I know she did

She was in my heart. And I was in hers.

I didn’t mean to hurt her, I didn’t

And then she was outside the library, screaming that she’d never met me. Never loved me.

She hurt me so bad, it was only fair

Never loved me.

It was only fair

Now she’s safe to admit that she loves me. Now she’s safe.

She deserved so much better than my shallow-dug grave

She’s at peace.

It doesn’t matter where the body is, it doesn’t matter

I don’t know where the body is.

She lives on in my heart, that’s all she needs

When I was a child, a woman once told me that the human heart is capable of mustering approximately two billion beats before it dies. Before it expires.

On my twelfth Halloween, I tried to calculate my own expiration date. I waited until all was quiet and dark in the house and pressed a thumb to my wrist, counting the beats for a minute. After saying my BPM aloud to myself, I turned to look at the family calculator and burst into tears.

I am still much too afraid to do what I attempted at 12. I will never cease to be afraid.

Every time my mother embraces me--every time I hear her heartbeat through her grey cotton sweater, I am afraid.

Every time my father’s breath comes in a puff of wintertime fog, I am afraid.

Every time I love someone who will die, I am afraid.

Thick dusk entices the breath in sumptuous rhythms of frigid heat; weary lungs comply, reminiscing with graying memories of flesh and blood and bone and heart.

And when the children laughed, they left tatters of worn vibrance in their wake. Though used and squandered, it never stops beating.

A mind deceives itself along the street, searching for a once-there gaze. A once-there frostbitten glow of knowledge unknown and sights unseen. And yet it never reaches its mark. A spark of heat lies on the tip of the tongue, spreading, burning, killing, choking. The wood splinters along the palms and spark embraces kindling with a kiss of yearning death. It crawls along the skin and never lets go.

This year, I--like many--learned just how often one's plan for the future can become a joke to circumstance. I never expected that March 13, 2020 would be the last day of my conventional childhood. I never expected to graduate high school within the confines of the family SUV. I never expected to pursue my degree alone in my house. I never expected to feel so numb, doing it alone.

But when the numbness begins to creep in and I can't seem to find motivation, I turn to my dream, my aspiration. And it gives me something to cling onto--a reason to be excited about life itself.

So, here's my dream: I want to be a linguist. I don't even know where it'll take me, but I want to study language. I want to learn every language I can, and then some. Maybe I'll end up a translator or a professor or a Spanish teacher--I have no idea yet, but that never fazes me. All I know is that I want to live and breathe foreign language for the rest of my life.

As cliché as it sounds, talking about language makes me feel alive like nothing else. It’s a wonder to me—somehow, humans naturally use this intense web of sounds, grammar, slang, etiquette, and so much more in order to communicate. And they do it flawlessly. To me, it's living, breathing art.

Not only is language beautiful to me, but it's so, so important. I believe that cultural ignorance is the root of oppression, and that language is key to combating it. One thing that learning foreign languages has taught me is that language is a window into a different culture. The way the words and sentences are structured shows the history of the speaker population, and things like slang, honorifics, and even vocabulary convey cultural values in a way that just can’t be translated.

In a country where monolingualism is the norm, I feel it’s crucial to perpetuate and support linguistics, because it’s more than just the study of language—it’s the study of empathy.

I also just find grammar absolutely fascinating. Stringing together sentences with new rules that I'm still learning is just enjoyable to me. Especially when I think about actually using those sentences to talk with people.

So when I feel numb or without purpose, I go back to what I love. Even if it isn't in a productive way. If I'm too unmotivated to keep teaching myself Mandarin, then I'll just watch a youtube video on linguistics or listen to a Spanish song. Even if my dream doesn't make me motivated every day, it brings me happiness, and knowing that it will never fade brings me comfort. That's all I need for now. I have my dream, and I'm pursuing it at my own pace. I know I'll get there someday.

All my life, I wanted to outmatch Atlas. I was determined to hold every world upon my back--my world, my mother's world, your world.

Especially your world.

And for a while, I did. I was everything you needed me to be. I wiped your tears, left candy on your doorstep, brought soup when you were feverish. I gave up my first kiss so no stranger could ruin yours. I was so happy to be your pillar.

But when Atlas stumbled, you didn't know how to be my pillar. When Atlas fell flat on his face, your own world became too heavy for you to bear.

I'm so, so sorry I never taught you how.

I'm so sorry that I still haven't gotten back on my feet.

I'm so sorry that I can't hold up our worlds anymore, and I'm so sorry that I can't expect you to help me.

No matter how many times you forgive me, I will always be sorry.

When I was a child, a woman once told me that the human heart is capable of mustering approximately two billion beats before it dies. Before it expires.

On my twelfth Halloween, I tried to calculate my own expiration date. I waited until all was quiet and dark in the house and pressed a thumb to my wrist, counting the beats for a minute. After saying my BPM aloud to myself, I turned to look at the family calculator and burst into tears.

I am still much too afraid to do what I attempted at 12. I will never cease to be afraid.

Every time my mother embraces me--every time I hear her heartbeat through her grey cotton sweater, I am afraid.

Every time my sister's breath comes in a puff of wintertime fog, I am afraid.

Every time I love someone who will die, I am afraid.

I live like a song made to be elevator music. Lilting and swaying with jovial rhythm; a numb flatline. A stage for small talk between strangers.

I exist like those two strangers in an elevator, each exuding a warm facade only meant to last until the end of the workday; a falsity of tolerance.

I am that falsity. I am every white lie, every pleasantry, every "let her down easy." My mind is made up of each idea I've recycled, passed off as my own. No part of me has ever been real.

So don't take me as I am. Make me better than I could ever dare to envision. Make me the saint or the demon--make me anything you want, so long as you can promise me that I won't fade away.

Don't take me as I am.

when i cook with eggs, I’m careful. I break them in one fell swoop on the side of the bowl, emptying shells and cradling them in warm hands, allowing them a last moment intact before they’re discarded. But an untrained hand knows no courtesy--it taps too many times, too hard or soft. The result is the same; a splintered web of white calcium that falls apart, plastering its shattered self against the palms.

The shells are too innocent--their fate’s a deterministic one, laid out by the one who cradles them from their carton. Whether their execution be quick and painless or agonizing and graphic is entirely up to that set of hands.

How can you tell a good set of hands from a novice’s? Is it the way the fingers shake as they brush the side of your temple? Or the way they rub circles into the sides of your hips while he tells you you’re pretty, you’re warm, you look like Lily James in that hot, quiet stairwell...

How do you tell if those hands are the type to shatter the shells against the side of the bowl when you can no longer see those hands? How can you tell when they fade into darkness against your eyelids at night and warm silence becomes the blue-eyed glow of an empty room?

and when the eggshell inevitably splits all the same, how do you fit the beaten yolk back inside? how do you fall to the floor and gather the pieces again and again, manically fitting the yellow and orange and white and sharp and soft back together into that perfect array of pure ignorance it once had? How do you erase the cracks and keep going forward when you can barely see straight enough to pick the shards up off the floor?

How do you hold them against your chest and pick yourself back up off the floor when those horrible, heavy novice hands and those sweet words and warm glances aren’t there anymore to help you up

How do you pick yourself back up when those promises he whispered to you in that empty stairwell never came true

How do you fit the yolk back in when the eggshells have been ground into powder underneath your own feet

How does anyone do it

#streamofconsciousness #emotion

she sits in the comfortable space of found things--lost in the void of nothing and everything exploding within the chest without looking but burning comfortably all the same

we carry on until the ink staining the fingertips dries

the ink

the blood of a thousand stories and pens and oh this next one shall be imprinted on

my identity forever in the form of midnight scratched on paper

everyone is a jane eyre and a holden caulfield in the same breakable body that never dies--always sleeping and stretching and growing in the unconstructed hum of contented nothing

"are you bored yet?" they ask. or maybe it was just the old melody ceaselessy echoing in the dark warm space where we all wish we could breathe

But consciousness never truly breathes.

and yet here I respire in sweet cotton driftwood without my stained glasses where the light flickers and we let it because We Are Not In Control. I haven't felt safe since birth but we ought acknowledge the vulnerability and find solace in the canyon with our shadows

my pen cries for ink again and again but never predatory

collects my thoughts and musings but never parasitic

only the page and hand remember careless inkblots long forgotten by the clever memory, which protects itself so playfully in its hollow space.

why so hollow?

oh how i wish there was an answer

No caption contests necessary

if only there were something to travel at the speed of thoughts and make us all feel comfortable again! we hate to be at the mercy of the world but does it ever grow old? i wish to hear my own breath more and tangle less musings of the mind

and yet i am nothing without my musings and my grip

did we stay up and watch the sunset?

i wallow

i wallow

we all need deeper breath if we are ever to find our solace--as of now, where do all the mosquitoes go? are they like New York Ducklings in eyesight of the melancholic taxi cab, only present for sorrowful allegory?

i refuse to be a duckling, even if i already have been; we may lie, but

we all remain Phoebe just the same.

the scornful Tabula Rasa looks down on the best of us

locke is but a fantastical algorithm for thoughtfulness in an era of static beeping

beeping

beating

so very different

i feel warmer now yet my palms are darker; why do we confide in warm masses of flesh if ink stays cold at room temperature?

like shots of poisonous silver mercury on the 21st birthday of the starving artist who lets her page split with tadpoles of stories lost to cloudy memory

and should the teabags run out we will always have those not so human who embody the antithesis of our struggle and shatter us down to our core through melting

can you melt starlight?

if so, i wish to stay in this space forever

unbottled

this space of pretty words and shared breaths and

lonesome watched backs; introspective paranoia that

threatens but never overtakes

which i find POLITE...

chills crawl along the skin as my warm space wanes playfully--yet ignores its world of harsh geometry; never enemies, we evade the pervasive conflict of looming ringtones

creaking outlet or creaking page?

help me find the lesser devil..

cursive is not quite as easy as it seems--thoughts are not simple scratchngs, though they may seem compatible through unreadable lines

i pledge not to read back

there is no fixing the musings of night hour

warmth and fear has grown too much despite the forever appeal of perpetual empty-ness

thank you for opening my chest yet again

good night;

#streamofconsciousness #poetry