‘Than It Did About Him’: A Tribute

We all seek to be absolved.

When I ripped open my college career with my canine teeth, I was looking for it to dance in front of me like a monkey. Instead, I found myself in a hospital yet again. The color of blood, I was told, is never beautiful: it is just red.

Tumblr is where some people my age got famous. It's all I ever wanted. I wrote about a girl named Dolores for a while, got a few likes. It didn't matter that my hundred followers were mostly porn pages, and that my words were being bounced off of robots. So goes the internet: we fall into the black void, knowing we won't be heard, but hoping beyond hope that someone hears us and clicks on what prompts a notification.

Michelle K grabbed me. She had a Tumblr page, the only one of the hundreds I followed that I remember now. She wrote short poems that exploded in angst in so few words as to insult the black rainbow vocabulary of depressed writers everywhere, but in the best possible way. She knew it, and she wrote the truth.

Her words are the mouth moving in the mirror, saying each syllable of pain in exactly the right way.

Her poems are hard candy you savor, light on fresh snow, what becomes a tattoo that completes the missing part of you.

My memories of Michelle K start in college, the happiest time of my life. Her poems, to me, still bleed red. But when I read them now, I smile, because I know where we all came from is not where we are going.

xx

And it has been

one hell

of a year.

I have worn

the seasons

under my sleeves,

on my thighs,

running down my cheeks.

This is what

surviving

looks like, my dear.

― Michelle K., It Has Been One Hell of a Year

"Perhaps the fact that I chased a boy who ripped me to shreds says a lot more about me than it did about him."

Michelle K.

"Some women are lost in the fire. Some women are built from it."

Michelle K., Some

“Nostalgia is a dirty liar that insists things were better than they seemed.”

Michelle K.