In My Mind
All I do is write, while I croon to myself softly. My pages a sheet in a bed made of thickets and stone.
How does one become successful? Relatable storytelling? Putting a spinny hat on my pen cap?
I do not like what is acceptable. I do not write romance for cookie cutter families. I can write scripts with the best of them, given the chance: I could write anything.
Give me two words— I swear it, I could make any idea come to life."I'll do it for free!" I shout at every publishing house like my mouth is a turret upon piles of scrapped cover letters and half-hearted portfolios.
I see those without much to tell besides about anatomy of two bodies slapping together in a garbled up piece of fiction id write at twelve with a book deal or two. I see those with millions made passively as they craft artwork in their multimillion dollar homes because they were born to the right people with the right agency.
But alone? I am the daughter of an immigrant. My words lift the women that love women and that is not enough. I give my fingertips to the cages of those starved and bereaved and still, it is not enough. It is appreciated, but it is not gold worthy.
It does not received awards. It does not receive the love the work I could force through a clenched jaw and gritted teeth could. How do I become a writer, when I write what is not in high demand and which won't be seen? Where does one send their writing, where it will have a punctured throat enough to breathe?
Am I to exist in my mind forever?
To Whom I May Concern
I am not a mother yet, not by a long shot. I shall be an amazing aunt long before I have my own children, however in the interim as I am, I would like to dedicate this to my child.
I am your mother. I am not good, no, but you are the best parts of me- within the cracks in my foundation you have seeked to nurture. Those cracks have long been filled by the brilliance I know you shall bring this world, my son or daughter. And I thought I was above crying- I do not cry for anyone but those who eat alone and animals and even then it is jaunty.
I will make a million mistakes before you become of age, and further several million when you're able to detest me for them. But I will make this world good for you- our world. I cannot ensure the planet, nor the many people good and bad that inhabit it, but inside you will have me, and your other parent, and your loving uncles and cousins and grandma and great aunt and... god, the list is endless, isn't it? You will be born into the world with the endless amounts of support I feel myself welling in thought at.
I will anger you, hurt you, and you will likely hate me and wish you had any other mother at that time. And I understand. We come from strife, don't we darling? But I'll be around for you, when there's a nick on your finger or you simply long to come home.
I am your mother, your confidante, yours solely. You are half my heart and all of my soul.
Brutalized
What do you want? What do you wish for as you watch my accounts? When you have friends and partners and family watch me, like perhaps with your Sunday brunch my usernames find their way into your diet.
I am me online. I am my face, though perhaps mildly weathered from the half dozen years, or what I may be faring that day. Do you laugh at that? At my appearance? At the stupid little glimpses of what I choose to show? Are you searching for more, perhaps? But then, what becomes more than ten seconds? You would only search for the narrative you are apart of. Do you search for my story? Do you wish to know how I tell my story, that you deprived me of when you cut my tongue? Do you wish to know how I have adapted? How I speak of you in my disabled way? It would be amusing your obsession, nearly, if it didn’t bother me so. You rely on a moronic account for public opinion on you. Don’t you know I do not hate you? That I am kind in words, though I am brutal in its executation
Human
What a fascinating thing, humans.
There are 8 billion of them, and yet they're all so different. They see someone on the bus, that they will never see again and worry about what they will think.
How many people do you think live with the same insecurity? So when they see people dancing on the skytrain it is commonplace to find them strange, with a collective conscience.
Have you ever seen the slight smile of someone after they’ve said something they’ve found hilarious, as they await their friend's reactions? As they wait for them to tack on bits of story lore?
Have you ever seen the crinkles in the forehead of someone so dedicated to their passion that it becomes an involuntary reflex?
Oh, to be human. To kiss someone and watch as they flush.
To gift your loved one you have fallen out with something special that makes their entire body light up.
To drink with family, and share secrets you haven’t since you were a child.
Oh how I long to be human again.
Personal Love Affair
I want someone who I can take a photo with, flushed and brilliant in a mall booth that I can tuck away into the billfold of my wallet. I want someone who I’ll pull up beside, roll the window down and with the widest smile call them darlin’. I want someone I can snatch flowers from the road to tuck in their hair, and someone I can tug by the belt loops so our hips are flush and I can count the sun given freckles across their skin.
The words are sticky in my head. Coagulated and unable to seperate beneath the thick, viscous liquor running rampant in my blood. I want to lay on someone’s chest, and feel the exhaustion sweep over me like a touch until it thins me like confectionary spread too thin on bread.
But if the only one who can ever love me is myself, that is okay. I put my hand on my chest, and the one thing- the thing that has been with me my entire life thrums against my palm. And I feel it. That love— so pure, and raw despite the scarred exterior that just grows rougher the more lines on my face I develop.
And I feel warm. Because I am so much love. And that love is for me.
Burn
You smell like sunshine. When your skin is saturated in it and every hug smells like childhood lake days and you thrill me like teenage amusement park rides. You’re warm beneath my fingertips and your lips stay cool, pressed to my heated skin and you burn me. You burn me until I am nothing but freckles and sun spots. My skin is taut, red and soft to the touch. Was the burn worth the warmth that covered me? Yes. I would happily burn my burns for you.
Squeaky Hinges
I want to laugh at her. I want to be able to say something condescending and horrible and shrug this all off. But in that moment, sitting there almost nervous and embarrassed, telling me I was the first person to ever share the night with her and have the privilege of sharing her morning too, I could feel my heart clenching so violently I could almost mistake it for love.
She tells me this over coffee- stale and tasting of the burnt bottom of the kettle and soake up by store bought shortbread I scrounged out from the back of the cupboard. I wince at the charred flavour from one morning that she had sleepily brewed it twice. She scowls as she listens to the cupboard squeak shut from when I never oiled the hinges.
Yes, I could almost mistake it for love.
But that would mean it had ever left. That it hadn't left an indent around my bones and organs. The velvet carress of petals where the many vices of thorns had left me scarred over the years. Where my words were washed and pressed and folded until they lifted.
God if I couldn't feel it thundering in my chest and pounding in my head like it wanted so desperately to be released from my throat and whispered in that bitch's ear.
But that's just the dose of her poison, isn't it? I am soothed by the blanket of A4 paper and the familiar clack of well worn but long neglected keys. Weren't things that were loved meant to change? To be supported? To squeak from time, like old bones?
The vulnerability that my bastard ex-wife had been trying so desperately to feign was displayed in cracked paint held in the body of metal on my desk, and the feeling of purging my words without judgement let me know I wasn't alone in whatever we were connected by.
My ex told me she didn't like my laugh- how it squeaked and how the box springs on my side were too loud. My typewriter never says such things, kissing my fingertips and begging for more and more and-
Well, my mother in law believes there's another woman.
We are inextricably interlinked; despite how resolute I've been told to act like we aren't.