Writings and Musings

Reel against your body's borders

2026-04-11T01:05:04Z

What happens if I hand you my heart? A terrible gift, really; a thing that startles at its own beating, that bruises itself against the cage it was meant to trust. Not the bright red of youth and hopeful intention but something darker, bloomed black with bruises. Handled too often and rough, dropped too many times, still going somehow despite wound and wear. Still going through luck. You don’t want this rotten thing.

What of instead, a hand? No, those are weak, treacherous in their flexibility, bending wrong when solid matters. They can do clever things, sure; bead and type and embroider flowers over stains, make something delicate out of damage, and slice when pressed, but for sureness? They fail. They hesitate, they shake, they let go too easily. Dropping mugs, dropping chances, dropping heads when they should hold them steady. You don’t want something so unreliable.

What of an eye, perhaps only the left one, or is it the right that doesn’t need correction? Perhaps the right then. A strange globe, cloudy sky and moss and shifting stone, but it curdles what it sees, turns photon to fright. Hold it long enough and it will learn the worst of you too, reflect it back until it marks everything. No, not this.

Perhaps lungs, the way they press and pull, the stuttering hold when they forget their rhythm, when they determine air is earned rather than right. They are not clean things, packed with ash and hesitation, swelling with everything but truth. They filter the breath that hurts, they hold at the throat when they should move, the refuse to expand before a crowd. No, these are useless to you.

Tongue, perhaps. The soft, unwieldy thing that never fits right in its own mouth, a clumsy and stubborn traitor. It dulls what should cut, softens what should be said sharp. It mitigates and elaborates wrong, stays wet and low when it is time to stand. It trips, it stalls, it betrays, and when it finally speaks it is already too late. Too late is too awful of a gift.

Take my veins instead, thin blue maps restless with motion, carrying everything whether it should be kept or not. They circulate the damage faithfully, never discarding, just moving it through me again and again with incessant flow. They remember too much and make sure I do too. The memory of my veins wouldn’t serve you, know.

Or the spine, though that will not do either. It learned too early how to bend, how to give, how to fold itself into smaller shapes to avoid breaking, and in doing so became something that cannot hold anything upright for long.

Teeth, then. Worn down from restraint, from grinding through what should have been spoken or spat out or screamed. They were meant for tearing, for ending things, but instead they dull themselves on silence.

I don’t know what to hand you that hasn’t already learned how to ruin itself, that won’t fail in your grip the same way it has in mine. There is nothing here that does not come pre-broken, pre-spoiled, already halfway to undoing itself before you even decide whether to keep it.

I have no gifts to offer worthy of those destined for exchange, no hand or eye with value enough beyond form, no map enough to hold and no tooth enough to drive away fear and threat. Nothing to hold that won’t disintegrate. I cover myself in a blanket of words and stars and proclaim myself better as a concept. Better in imagination alone. Better that than the grime and gravity of reality.

comments

Hearken for a while

2026-04-07T23:27:10Z

Once upon a time, I stayed up all night with a new Scottish friend, outlasting the marching band’s solo cups and saxaphones. We drove across town at sunrise to the marsh, and from a bridge watched a sunrise with a double rainbow. It was the first time I’d seen that; it felt like something was happening.

Once upon a time I climbed to a lookout at seven thousand feet with a gaggle of friends, huffing and puffing and eating hazelnuts along the way. Pines and cedars spread endlessly below—untouched, untouchable. I was dizzy with a world fading into the blue.

Once upon a time I took my younger brother to Disneyland, and witnessed him meeting the face actor for Elsa. The flush on his face and the way he carried himself in delight, in something like reverence, radiant with it. He’s never stopped talking about it.

Once upon a time, I ate a bitter acorn fallen from a black oak, scraping my teeth through the dry tannins of it, and felt like it was enough for the tree to root in me.

Once upon a time, I found a woman crying in an airport bathroom, her language not mine. I held her while she wept into my shoulder. We did not need words.

One upon a time, I watched a friend light a candle with a bare open hand. No stage; at the back of a bar with a cider in his other hand. He laughed afterwards, and had another drink.

Once upon a time, I held an infant with a terrible cough. She would not stop crying until I sang. For eight hours, I gave her every song I knew, until her breathing softened, her bright cerulean eyes fixed on my face.

Once upon a time, I watched hope move across the face of someone worn thin with pain as a child blew bubbles into the sun. They shimmered like something borrowed from sleep.

Once upon a time, I felt the earthquake turn a series of serious moments into a party with rum and cookies. Something like a celebration of being alive.

Once upon a time, I walked to the wrong beach bonfire, and then another, and another, and saw only strangers lit by firelight, each one alive with joy.

There are thousands of stories. There are thousands for every person, for every experience from every angle. For every imagination and every hallucination, for every joy, for every quiet, for every moment of fleeting closeness to the meaning of being human.

What need have I of divinity? We are here, now. It is more than enough.

comments

But that's how it's been all along

2026-03-31T22:30:30Z

I have always loved hurricane weather, from the edge of it. The way humidity breaks in the air, goes green and ionized before it does. How it rains fat drops, sideways in wind high enough to blow you over. The way lightning splits the sky and the ground over and over. The way it smells like coins and split stems and danger, voices yelling at me to “get inside!” while I spin, spin, face upturned. The wildness of the way it feels, the uncontained. It has always brought me joy, and I revel in any of those aspects, alone or together. The way that the world is something more itself at the edges of these systems, that we haven’t uprooted nature entire from each life and moment.

Perhaps it is a piece of why I am like this. I don’t mean to be. I don’t mean to be wind howling and window breaking, tree limbs cracking sharp. I don’t mean to be the weather that leaves wreckage. I don’t mean to make people measure me in the clean up, raking and assessing with cold eyes. “This was a bad one,” yes. I know, I was in it. I don’t mean to be any of it. Just honest, just whatever kind of muddled clarity I have. Thought is one tide. Feeling is another. They meet in me with all the grace of furniture in floodwater. Most days I feel assembled wrong, a radio catching two stations at once and hissing secret messages through the remnants of creation. I mean force is not the same thing as intention and I have never had a true measure of my own strength. It is inadvertent and I have learned to clean up the splinters in angry hands.

Neither do I hide it. This is what I have done. This is how I have loved. As a catalyst and change agent. As devotional. As someone who pours, and pours, and pours, and never says enough, sometimes even when drowning myself. There is enough – love is endless and no love is wasted and I have nothing else of value to offer. There are fields that green after a storm, and roofs that do not, and I have mistaken endurance for capacity more than once; I will do so again. It grieves me, every error. Every moment of too much is a shameful brand, a nail bent wrong in the building. But like the weather I leave it behind; it is mine, but not mine alone. What leaves me belongs to whomever has turned their face up to the rain.

What I mean is that I don’t mean to insist on change. I’ve just gotten very good at riding the flows of it like a carnival ride that may break under you, all rusted shrieking and a bored operator. I know how to laugh with one hand on a loose bolt, with feet swinging. That is part of the risk, the reward, the heady mix of them. And yes, we can stop off for deep fried oreos but I’ll only play the dart and balloon game because I know the trick of it. I am fluent in the games you will not win, but I will not stop you from playing.

I will not try to stop you, and that I mean entire. Self-determination may as well be sacred scripture, written in shocks of lightning on granite. “You do you.” It is not my life. It is not my consequences, but I will tell you what I see. That hoop is bent in an oval shape; the bottom of the bottles are weighted. The goldfish game is physics, and they are no more in your favor than Blackjack is. But it is your time, your money, your wanting. I do not get to decide what makes a prize to you.

There is too much, and I don’t mean it. There is not enough, and I choose it over and over. The hurricane folded small, into a transparent cube. The storm in myself that you asked to see.

comments

Try it again; try it another way

2026-03-30T23:00:33Z

Focus has been avoiding me all week. Demand on my attention from work, from people, from the processing violence of my own internal voice. From my immune system, activated and frustrated and sinking me into somewhere whispy and fuzzy. Like thinking through cotton, I’ve heard it described. It’s worse than writer’s block, to my mind. To have your thinking be like trying to lift weights you haven’t the muscle for.

Five years and some change into having this health condition at a diagnoseable level and part of my mind is still in the habit of expectations based on a body I no longer have. Every simple thing; eating cooked chicken that is two days old. Going out for two drinks on a weeknight. Staying up late until time zones align. Making plans and trying to follow through with them any way. Shoring myself up with caffeine of various styles and flavors. Saying “twenty minute nap” as though that is something I can still do, as thought that’s something that didn’t end literal years ago.

It’s strange, to have gone from “a little tired” to this, to have to live with so many rules and allergies when before I awkwardly ignored the former and denied the latter. I applied my mind to it, once I had a diagnoses and process. I discovered, made spreadsheets, read like it was a study for it was. My works cited is my existence and the paper is still being written. It is strange to have to second guess myself on every thing I thought was stable. Orientation in physical space? No, I get lost now, even in places I know well. Writing? No, finding the correct word is a battle. Phone numbers? I will give you a string and never know where they came from (true story!). I am always too warm. I seem to always itch. I am always tired.

Once upon a time this wasn’t the case. Once upon a time I lived an energetic light, my candle at both ends; one chaotic plot after another. Once upon a time I felt unstoppable, even when I was terrible, and I would be lying if I said that I am not still grieving that person. Now it is as though my mind is trapped, slowed. A computer with a dust encrusted fan. An engine with three years of denied oil changes. Hands wrapped in thick snowboarding gloves. A thousand other analogies that all say it isn’t working how I still expect, and there is nothing I can do to change that.

Maybe that’s the worst part. If I follow all the rules, if I actually have my medication, if I am cautious and careful, I still degranulate. There are still times when my body says “no” to everything and all I can do about it is sleep. When I can sleep, that is; chronic fatigue and insomnia are hell to have together. Still to my ear this sounds like nothing more than whining. Buck up bitch! Get your shit together and get over yourself!

I am grateful for the things I can still do, for those who love and understand that crashes regardless of the shame it gives me. For those medical providers who didn’t assume it was “in my head” or diagnose me as fat while it remained a problem. For the world that still allows me to have some distant experiences, though further and farther between. No more “sleep when you’re dead” but the party is still there, the people are too. For now.

It isn’t that I’m missing out on my life; I already have. I fear that this is instead the beginning of the slide into nonexistence. Like many, that the best days of my life – and the worst – are no longer ahead but already experienced and perhaps already forgotten. That thought haunts me, drags me by the hair to press harder, push myself harder, show up stupid when I can’t show up smart. Show up a problem when I can’t show up well. Write, crochet, talk to the people who still care, who want still some piece of my life to be a piece of theirs.

Try, I guess.

Try.

comments

What you resist persists

2026-03-27T22:55:47Z

This I remember.

When the love you want is not the love you have access to. When the door is closed, bolted, one that once welcomed you with warmth and light. When a door that once entered home now goes nowhere. Steps to a wall. Steps to a blank lot. And you stand there with hands loose at your sides, unable to enter and unable to turn away, frozen in the moment that seems to stretch forever into the past and the future.

This I remember.

A projector spraying color against a wall, memories that you thought were living but now get relegated to recall only. Every moment that feels like a failure, in living color in front of you. Even the good ones, even the most joyful moments now tinged with great sadness, with a great wrongness. You may watch for a while as everything turns a deep blue, a grey, a color of sky going nowhere and no release. You turn it off and sit in the dark, alone with the ghosts of it.

This I remember.

Finding the rage in it. The self-serving fire, an echo of “how dare they.” How dare they not accept the love you offered so clearly? How could they not change with you? How could they leave you like this, this erupted thing, this cinder cone of cooled heat? And did you not try, try over and over and over and for what? To be left like trash from a camping trip. To be left alone trying to hold the rough pieces of your own heart, one you are so out of practice holding alone. Until the rage turns again to tears.

This I remember.

How endless it seems. How no other feeling has room, how no other voice can speak. The way it feeds your hatred of yourself, how it reinforces every structure that speaks to your worthlessness. Your failure, repeated over and over, a cd stuck on repeat. You don’t wonder yet about the path out, no, you’re lost in the listening to your drumbeat. To your own heart, watching it bleed and unable to staunch the flow because you feel deserving of this. Something about you is wrong and this is only more proof of it.

This I remember.

The way it turns to logistics, a kind of cold necessity. You show up. You make the agreements of what splits, how it is split, what belongs to whom. Wearing a mask that can deal because, even now, part of you believes they’ve given up the right to see you hurt. And you see the same mask on them, and you ache to make it better but that ship sailed for Tol Eressëa so long ago you can no longer see its sails. And in the navigating you wonder if this is how it will be now. Ships long gone over the horizon and no blessing of sunset or sunrise, no returning to harbor, foghorns silenced. If this is all that is left.

This I remember.

The moment you feel a spark of happiness, and the guilt that rushes itself in afterwards. The questions of whether you deserve it. Were you not monstrous? Where you not horrific? Are you not unlovable? How can you accept this moment of happiness after all that has happened? So it is shoved down, hidden under guilt and self-recrimination and the status quo of suffering you’ve gotten so used to these days. The mourning of what was and what could have been should allow you no place for it, no corner of light.

This I remember.

It happens bit by bit. You wake up and do not feel heavy. You laugh with a friend. You make food and do not wonder what they would taste of it. And you recover the parts of yourself that you let be subsumed, that you erased to hold peace, that you hid. I am never eating pizza again, you may declare. I am kissing everyone at the new year’s party. I am decorating how I would like and eating salad and being as loud as I want in my own kitchen. This is a part of the healing, finding yourself again, yourself without them. Yourself alone.

This I remember.

Learning how to be alone. Learning again how to hold your own hand, how to sit in the hunger and let it spread, how to layer too many mattresses until you are your own princess, how to lock the doors and keep a space for you inviolate. How to say no. No I won’t fold this self in half again. No I won’t answer to the digs and the drops. No I won’t let you hand it to me. No.

This I remember.

That one day it will just be another thicket passed through, another bramble that sunk it’s thorns under your nails, and the memory of hurt will not be so large. When it is small, you may begin to see the bright parts again. Hold them without longing but with understanding, as you plant your own garden. See your own errors with clarity, and theirs as well, without anger, malice, and even without grief. Time is the distance between who you are and who you will grow to be, and the growing doesn’t stop.

This you will remember

comments

The Bramble

2026-03-25T14:41:19Z

Now that I’ve written about my dad, perhaps it is time to revisit the violence of my mother.

I’ve written about her before, about our current strange relationship, but not just the stories of my childhood. I think the stories are important because, without interpretation, they are pieces that describe on their own the reasons why my nervous system is like this.

The easy to remember stories first then, the ones that are so old that I know the cadence like a beloved poem. The stories of harm. They are less complicated.

Seven or eight, or close enough to count. It was summer, either a weekend during the school year still or those long months when we were out of school. Somehow, my sister and I got it into our heads to use the hose to make a mud puddle near the house. We were very careful to do it outside of the garden, the yard, not anywhere that affected any of the work put in. And yeah, we made mud pies and played and threw it. I don’t remember whose idea it was, but we decided to mark the house as well.

The house was a doublewide with aluminum siding, that my mother had built a proper roof, several rooms, and a porch around. This back corner was still aluminum and uncovered. We used the mud to put our hand-prints on it, as high as we could reach. And I, caught by some desire to exist, wrote my initials as big as I could.

We kept playing for some time and mom came home from work while it was still light. She saw the writing on the wall, literally, and was instantly livid. That’s the thing about my mother – she would snap, be instantly enraged, in a way that was breathtakingly terrifying. Screaming at us she yanked us by our wrists onto the back steps. At a pause in her yelling, she grabbed both our heads and slammed them together at force. My sister’s head turned just enough that her jaw landed in my eye.

I had a shiner for weeks.

There was one I don’t actually remember, but has been told to me. Same general age, less than 10. Family was visiting, aunt Connie and her kids Ashley and Dale. Ashley told me about this years later. I said or did something that made my mom snap, and she kicked me hard enough that I flew down the hallways, lay there gasping and unable to breathe for a time.

Sixteen and I was back at her home, the new home, after the house burned down and after my dad kicked me out. Her new land was offgrid, and we could only use the generator when doing laundry as it requires more power than the solar she had at the time could produce. I ran the generator to wash and played FF7 on the PS1. I usually made sure to be done with it before she came home, and I believe this was one such time. I was also supposed to do the dishes; I did, excepting one pan that needed to soak. It was still soaking when she got home from work and she was livid immediately about this, screaming at me. I screamed back, went to leave the house and go to my room. My room was a reclaimed bus at the top of the hill, a steep walk. She was putting the dishes away and had a handful of silverware, all knives, that she threw at me as I exited. Nothing harmed me – they bounced off, thrown with rage instead of precision.

When I was 18 I did my first (and last, for many years) semester of college. I had no funding due to her refusing to provide her social security number. It was a 2 hour bus ride to and from the college. I ate very little, and she went through a phase where, since I was 18 and therefore employable, she refused to feed me. I would sneak in and steal leftovers sometimes. Cigarettes too.

Back to being a kid, there was one time in particular. My mom had a few artifacts from her college days, a BA in fine arts. Some of these were ceramics. There was one wide bowl I know she was proud of. I broke it, accidentally, some latchkey day. So worried about her response, I hid the pieces under the steps of the back porch. My sister saw me do this, and tattled to my mom after she’d gotten home.

My mom’s soon to be husband, the worst abuser of the lot, was also there. Mom drug me into her bedroom and ripped down my pants and started beating me with her favorite tool of punishment, a leather belt. I realized during the beating, or perhaps after, that she was also showing this person that she could handle her children. The shame at it being not only a beating but being in front of others was enormous. I remember my sister’s eyes, the guilt in them. Neither of us knew her response would be so violent, so egregious. It was one of the hardest beatings I ever took from her.

There were a thousand smaller things. Screaming, swatting, a few quick slaps with the leather belt with our hands on posts, crying. The complete lack of clarity on what would send her into a rage.

Around 4^th grade I tried to run away from home. Over the mountain, in the next town, there was a train station. I made a little plan to hop a train somehow, to let it take me anywhere. These were not passenger trains, but those for materials. In the middle of the night I packed a little backpack with a change of clothes, books, and some bread and cheese, and I started walking. The dogs, damn and bless them, kept following me. I made it all of 7 miles before I rang the doorbell of people my mother knew, labeled as safe. She was so ashamed of me, of involving anyone else in our broken mess. I don’t remember the punishments.

This is enough, right? Enough to see the snapshot of what the violence looked like at her hands. And never only her hands. Husbands and boyfriends of hers. Kids at school. The violence of systems I didn’t recognize as violence until I learned to.

But should this have not been the one place that violence had no hold? I believe so. I make my own house in that way, dandelions in concrete.

comments

Dissolving like the setting sun

2026-03-24T19:16:52Z

I was fine I was fine I was fine I was

Bright faced fresh turned towards the sunlight. I was moving through the tasks of every day; the burnt coffee, the new red kettle, the checking facts, the calling and helping people. Did I tell you I had to get a new kettle? This one is red, a deep crimson over stainless steel, this one isn’t broken; look, it has a maté setting! Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain. She doesn’t recognize the person she keeps defending.

I remembered dancing. I remembered dancing in my kitchen, singing songs from my head, painting lanterns and cooking potstickers. I remembered moving, the body moving, motion answering itself in joy within sorrow, the power of it and how I bowed to that as well. Happy, once. Content, once. Vulnerable to it still I remembered getting fooled.

Oh I got fooled. Oh red faced me, oh, and I let it happen more than once more than months duration and endurance as evidence. I hold on over and over, tighter even when razor wire tighter even when it thrashes tighter even when it draws blood with bite. A past that keeps insisting it is real; I am not. Holding and hurting become the same verb. I don’t know how to hold fragile things.

I know how to hold fragile things.

I don’t know how to trust my hands anymore. They fail before they lift. They are too weak to brace against the weather, to be a bright fist of longing, to hold anything with meaning without dropping it, dropping it, something cracked on impact. I would I could take them off my wrists, cut them down until they are shredded flesh on tile, washing down the drain. What use are these bones that will break at the slightest glance? I can come apart so quiet no one will interrupt.

Breathe. Just breathe. Just inhale just focus on the inhale on the negotiation of the inhale, not the nails between your ribs not the silent scream hiding in your throat not the jerking insistence of your diaphragm. The body revolting in small humiliations and gasping like a fish between calls. Call the next person.

I was fine I was fine

This wave of loathing for every version of me that had faith, this rogue wave pulling into the undertow. Easily fooled and easily foolish and believing, girl, believing in the power of right and good and the magic of all together now. Hope like sun damaged skin. Believing that any step may have effect, may shine a light from each bruised organ. That maybe there is change, that maybe you can touch the right part of the elephant to describe it, that maybe you aren’t to your knees in surf with your back to the wine-dark sea. Believing in the shore you aren’t allowed to walk on. That is for people who aren’t traitors, for people who can swim through themselves, for those who haven’t let go. That is for people who aren’t drowning. Drown then.

I was fine.

comments

Chuck Issues part 3

2026-03-21T03:02:20Z

For no more particular reason than those previously described, I didn’t really have a relationship with my dad as an adult. Not out of choice, really, but out of focus. I was homeless at 18. By 19 I was in transitional living. By 21 I was a “functional” alcoholic. It’s difficult, in years like that, to maintain relationships with people who already look straight through you. Further, a friend of mine says that “people will always remember the version of you they had the most power over” and that seemed true.

So we had what I dubbed a capitalistic relationship. Once or twice a year, I got a decent gift from him. A laptop. A digital camera. A good pair of boots. Something I specifically needed. In exchange, I talked to him a couple times a year and he got to brag about being a parent, about his daughter who survived homelessness, trauma, who went back to school, who found stability and community. He only came out to visit me once, in 2013 when I graduated with my Master’s degree. He posed for a few photos, then mostly got high with the stoners.

Things kept changing though. He kept sliding further into Christian nationalism and grievance, down that familiar algorithmic mineshaft into middle-aged fascism. He got really into Damn Turd Pol, the orange fascist. He got all antivaxx. All of exactly the things you would expect. By the time I got married in 2021, he didn’t come out for it. Couldn’t be bothered to come, or even join the live stream. And for a number of years his business had been failing, shrinking, for all the reasons small business in the US fail and shrink and probably his own unique reasons on top of it.

On my birthday, he overdosed. I found out a day later, when his wife, Judy, called to tell me about it. The whole story was fraught. Judy is a nurse, and a pretty great human. She saw him go to the bathroom, come back, and then just stop breathing, lips going cyanotic. She called 911 and administered rescue breathing. The EMTs administered Naloxone, and took him to the hospital.

And then so, so much came out. His phone, full of various messages to various women, some paid. (For the record, I hold nothing against sexworkers! But it was very hurtful from Judy’s perspective.) Deals on the phone. You recall, perhaps, that “sleeping around and doing heroin” was why my mom and him split? Same case now. I’d said something about how maybe Judy should spend some time with my mom, because they had more in common now. But it was really just offering her a lot of support, as she worked to get a divorce, get him out of her life altogether.

About a month later I talked to him, asked him about it. He never owned that he was doing any of that, just complained that Judy was “limiting” him in some way. That he hated being trapped in a relationship with her. It was so fucking whiny, honestly, but I put on my social worker voice and face and mask and spoke to him from there. He talked about how poorly he was doing in so many different ways. How life no longer seemed worth living; the details escape me because I am so familiar with the shape of them. I asked the hard question, the one I have both training and responsibility to ask: “Are you planning on killing yourself?”

Yes, but only a vague plan. So we worked on a stabilization plan. Steps he could actually take for safety. Because this is what I do, professionally and personally. I got him to put numbers in his wallet, extracted promises to call, extracted varying degrees of what he would do for help, who he would call next, where he would go. The whole thing.

I didn’t understand for months afterwards what that conversation had cost me. But there is a reason why it shouldn’t have had to be me. The daughter I am should not have had to make a suicide safety plan for the father he was.

In talking to a friend about it, one of the things that stupidly stuck in my craw was that he’d OD’d on my fucking birthday. I said he hadn’t even remembered. That friend tried to assure me that “all fathers know their daughter’s birthdays.” I don’t think that’s the case. I think he could have died on my birthday without once remembering what it could have meant to me. Still unseen.

Still unseen hurt more. Some part of me kept trying to make meaning of it, as if nearly losing his life might force some kind of honest reckoning. It didn’t. Maybe nine months later I told him we needed to have a real conversation. He was no longer in any position to maintain our capitalistic relationship, and I was very clear that we would need to pull the skeletons out of the closet, dust them off, and actually bury them if we were to have a relationship for the rest of my life. Look I was clear, so clear, about the stakes. Show up, actually talk, actually be honest. I’d had smaller versions of this in the past, ones that he shed off and wouldn’t meet me in. The stakes this time were access to me, to my life, to being a voice in my milieu.

I sigh with frustration when I think of that conversation. He decided to have it at a Les Schwab while getting his tires changed. I told him about the many things that hurt when I was a child, the things that still left scars. I told him I understood he and mom shouldn’t have had kids, that maybe he was doing the best he could but still? I needed acknowledgment and apology. Tell me that you understand this hurt me. Tell me that you’re sorry. I think, at the time, I would have accepted the lie. Instead he told me he’d asked forgiveness from his god, and god had forgiven him. To me, that’s asking the imaginary man in your head. I’m real, aren’t I? Wasn’t I owed at least the dignity of being asked?

I never got it. He just got irritated during the call, then made up a story about something happening at his business he needed to go deal with. He promised he would call again in a few hours. I cleared my schedule and waited. He never called. He texted me three days later, wanting to pick it back up.

I didn’t let him. I never spoke to him again.

It should feel something certain, something righteous, but it doesn’t. I’ve been letting myself playact that it does. Instead, some old machinery in me still produces guilt, as if one more perfect explanation might have unlocked the father I’d never had. I know the guilt doesn’t make sense. The anger does though, and that keeps showing up. The anger won’t lie for him. I didn’t deserve any of this – not as a kid, not as an adult, not as a daughter.

And I buried all of it, back then. Washed my hands of him, though I got the occasional update from my sister and Judy. He kept doing worse. Kept doing poorly. Kept destroying himself in that selfish way that made it plain ruin was the only long-term commitment he knew how to keep.

Then, earlier this year, he went missing for a few weeks. My sister is convinced he has some kind of dementia and is clinically worried about him. Having spent much more of her childhood with him, she has a somewhat different relationship. Him going missing brought all this up. See, I have a script for if someone goes missing, someone I care about. What I think, what I do, what I rally. This wasn’t someone I cared about; it was a stranger I happened to share DNA with. The script still wanted to activate, because that’s my role, but I didn’t allow it. And everything about this came flooding out, came knocking at my brain. All my reasons why.

He’s fine, by the way. I don’t know what happened and I don’t want to know. I figure someone will alert me when he’s died. That sounds monstrous to say aloud; I’ve seen the faces of people who hear it from me. The careful sudden schooling of features. It is not monstrous. It is self-preservation. There are only so many times you can bleed for someone who refuses to acknowledge the wound.

No one with sense would read all this, these three parts, and think I should have a relationship with him. And I know that closure is a gift you give yourself, not one that the universe hands to you. But in burying my past with him and moving on, I didn’t actually go through everything, find the scars and the wounds and remember their names. Some of those wounds have festered to rage, and rage I learned early to turn inward. I shelved it, instead of actually pulling it out and forcing my hands through the clay of it. I still don’t know how to deal, because frankly the violence in so many other areas of my life, so many other relationships, have made this take a backseat.

But I…

I deserved to have a parent who was there. Who cared. Who did badly, maybe, but at least fucking tried. Not someone who kept choosing the weakest version of me to speak to. Not someone who kept choosing absence and calling it parenting. Not someone who wanted absolution and was unwilling to pick up accountability. I deserved at least a parent who failed honestly, not one who disappeared behind excuses, appetites, and alibis.

My sister has a kid now. I paraphrased to her, something like “isn’t it amazing to have a kid just like you, and find out how incredibly easy you were to love, and to give them that love?” I think she cried a little. It was never only me. It was so terribly unnecessary for either of us to be so hurt.

Maybe I was easy to love. Maybe I always was. As a child. As an adult. As a daughter. It’s hard not to get stuck there, in the unfairness of it, in the casual cruelty of it. In the anger and grief of it, for relationships I never got to have.

I don’t know what to do next. I don’t know what my next step is. I know I have to do it alone, find whatever meager closure I can gift myself, sew the wound myself. There’s anger in that too, in having to become my own witness, my own stitches, in again having to become my own parent.

And love; love in the ways I was not given. Love in the way I learned. Fiercely, eyes open, heart forward.

comments

Here's your breath and

2026-03-17T12:41:24Z

Hello my little ember, my little strange, unyielding thing. Hello my little undefeated spirit, you with your bloody knuckles and bruised fists. Hello you tiny, sharp thing. No tube of bark and careful moss to keep you from pit to pit and yet you persist, heating in the spines of books, curling page and old glue into your breath. Quiet promises and louder hope, and louder still, fear. Plans and plots and schemes, caffeine and the pouring of words like a river rewilded from fingertips – all these things feed you. All these things have kept you. So too the scars, so too the old wounds reopening, so too the visitations of ghosts believed buried.

None of this is the fuel you want but it is the fuel you use. You seek a word, over and over, as if it were true fire, no matter how many times you’re given. And have you not been given? In playfulness, in logistical inevitability, in aged devotion, in mundane reverence, in sharp recognition. In this life and other lives, in so many uncountable yesterdays. Still you keep your acuate heat with the wish of it, the wish itself enough to move from tomorrow to tomorrow to tomorrow.

What of tomorrow little ember? When can I snuff you, when will the emptiness of hope be finally enough to dampen you into ash, to seal you under loam and sand? Iron and nails if needed. Cement if needed. A river to drown; an ocean to drown. So many tools have I and yet you persist in each tomorrow, little ember. In each today. What is it that you remember, that I do not? What ancient insistence lives in you that survives each season of famine, each shuttering, each frantic, remembered brick? I have starved you with silence and denied you air; trapped you in a maze of stone-faced hours and errands and must-gos and to-dos, and still you glow.

I am tired of your tenacious light. Tired of being made tender by force till I haven’t a cruelty remaining, except toward us. Tired of each ghost you lift by the chin from the dark, each old name pressed like a bruise. There are numb ways to live. Easy ways, finished ways, ways of untroubled sleep, ways of quiet mornings, of acceptance of what must be. Ways of locked doors, of kingdoms with an utter absence of ache. You with your guttering audacity, you with your heated refusal of simple mercies, you, with your strange bright spark, keep me in refusal of them.

Say I let you live. Say I cup my shaking hands around you and blow on the spark, give it fuel, keep it in moss, say I name you favorable instead of failure, what then? Will you burn gentler, ask less of me? Will you be content with bookspines and inkbone and the kindling of ordinary days? Or will you go on wanting the great blaze, answering fire, word made flesh enough to warm your starved and stubborn heart? Were you made for contentment, little strange, unyielding thing? I think not. I think you were made for the furious insistence of not going out. I think you wouldn’t know how to make room for relief when you were made for light enduring where it should not endure. I think you were made to be a lantern in a ruined heart still capable of heat. Despite myself, despite our-self, it wakes each day red and breathing.

comments

The ache of unfinished things

2026-03-10T00:59:55Z

Last year I started crocheting a blanket: a rough thing, a new thing, protection against the cold, against the apartment with no heater. Black and bright rainbow, hearts shaped more like jellybeans than hearts. It is still in a bag beside my bed, the hook embedded in it, work only paused. It waits, and the new skeins wait in the cupboard.

There is a lot where I used to live with perfect cement stairs leading up to empty grass, level despite grass. The ground remembered the house that should be there. Beside the stairs, decrepit bushes, planted once and never kept, nonnative and still trying, barely surviving without care.

Unfinished things ache. They go on holding the shape of an intention after the life has gone out of it. A promise does not vanish when it is abandoned. It remains and remains, growing stranger with time, receding even as it stays where it was left. Whole little worlds go missing this way. Whole universes, left standing open.

The last message from a dead friend. The card in my wallet that says: Good judgment comes from experience (which comes from bad judgment). A single earring I never wear. Books sleeping for years with bookmarks midway through. A suitcase with clothes still folded inside.

They are frozen pieces of time. They are things the world forgot to finish. They are ambered, dust-touched, waiting through entropy.

As I will be.

comments

Unsent Letters v.3

2026-03-06T21:26:44Z

Every path leads home, so long as you walk it.

There are roads that exist because generations walked them needing the same hope, the same gentle valley, the same certainty of place, of belonging. Desire wears its own trails into the world. Longing does not move only through the heart; it slides and presses with footfalls into earth. Habibi, even ruins remember the shape of shelter. They were built from need, that most human and social need: to gather, to warm, to be held for a little while against the unthinking cruelty of the world.

In this place, I am not only invited. I am architect. I build the fire. I stir the soup. I watch the birds and listen to the rain rejoicing on the roof. In this place, I am not alone in my suffering, which is another way of saying I am not alone in my life. Here, the ordinary becomes sacrament: steam from the pot, mud at the threshold, smoke caught in cloth, the small domestic liturgies. The doors needn’t be mouths full of teeth.

The old walls on the hill were not built to imprison, but to gather. To keep out the old wolf at the door, the tearing one, the one who hunts. It is hungry still. It always will be. But you need not become a hungry ghost, haunting ruins just to protect yourself from hunger. You are charged to nurture your garden. You are called to choose the view from your window. You are allowed to sharpen your spear and still call it home; vigilance is not the opposite of tenderness. A sheltered life is not an ignorant one. It is simply a life in which love has been given walls and a hearth and somewhere to set down its bowl.

Even with shaking hands, you can turn toward it. Even bleeding. A house is not only walls, but the collected dust, the scrapes along the floor, the stain on the wall, the loose board, the smoke-darkened beam: all the small proofs of here. It is the visible evidence that someone has stayed long enough to leave a mark. The foundation is there. Dig. The solid you need exists. Even quicksand goes only so deep. Even fear has a bottom. You leave marks already. Your ribs already know how to shelter and shrine.

Build your house, habibi, but first believe you are not the rubble. The ruin is loud, but it is not law. Panic is an old landlord. It settles into the body like splinters, cracked beams, plaster dust in the lungs, but it is not law. The creaking of timbers is only the long memory of trees, not a moral judgment. Collapse is not confession. Damage is not destiny.

You are not the ruin. You can crawl from it. You can build where you are. You can build farther along the path. You can travel lightly for a while, carry your house on your back, sleep under the stars, let the sky be your first roof and your own breathing your first hearth. The choice is yours, and because it is chosen, it is blessed by your eyes and your direction. The path you take becomes the right one by the faithfulness of your walking.

Every path leads home, so long as you walk it.

My path is made of red cinder, a thousand shattered scoria, the rolling crunch of it underfoot. I have bled on it so many times, through small accidents and larger griefs. It smells like summer and dust. It smells like iron. The heat is dry, and the wild grasses speak with the voice of wind. Pine resin thickens the air until the whole day seems half-remembered, gold with distance, wavering at the edges.

My path is made of the dust of volcanoes, of the earth’s old violence cooled into something I can cross. Motions and eruptions long before my birth. Long before the land knew my name. Long before it knew my blood. There is comfort in that. The world was wounded before me and did not end. The ground broke open and made, in time, this road.

I gather flowers in the woods along the way. Never too many. Redbells, mountain lilies, Indian paintbrush, buttercup, lupine. I gather them for my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother. I gather them as an offering, as witness, as inheritance made visible in the hands. Even here, in this deep heat, in this old ache, beauty insists. Even here, what blooms does not ask permission of sorrow.

Every path leads home, so long as you walk it.

And if the road is long, if dusk comes early, if your feet are bloodied and your hands still shake, still walk. Walk until the valley opens. Walk until the smoke rises from some far chimney. Walk until the light in a high window answers something wordless in you. Walk until the land no longer feels borrowed. Walk until you can say, without flinching: here, too, I belong.

I can’t wait to meet you on your path.

comments

Decorating my Soul with Purple

2026-03-06T18:01:28Z

My Granny shaped my life in ways that still surprise me, though pancreatic cancer took her when I was eighteen. I’ve been thinking about her lately. I will probably write more about her in time.

But this is one memory I carry close. When I was sixteen, she gave me this poem. It changed something quiet but fundamental in how I understand love, relationships, and the people who walk beside us. In many ways it was the beginning of the path I still follow. I still return to that moment.

The painting is a Waterhouse, The Soul of the Rose. She printed the poem with it on cardstock and handed it to me.

The Soul of the Rose

John William Waterhouse, 1908

Comes the Dawn

Veronica Shorffstall, 1971

After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,

And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning
And company doesn't mean security,

And you begin to understand that kisses aren't contracts
And presents aren't promises.

And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head held high and your eyes open,

With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child.
You learn to build your roads

On today because tomorrow's ground
Is too uncertain for plans, and futures have

A way of falling down in midflight.
After a while you learn that even sunshine

Burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate

Your own soul, instead of waiting
For someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you can really endure,
That you really are strong

And you really do have worth
And you learn and learn ... and you learn

With every goodbye you learn.

comments

Sometimes you have to wait until it passes by

2026-03-05T16:20:49Z

The fear of not knowing is larger than the fear of knowing. It is an ocean without horizon, a cathedral with no doors, a night sky where the stars have all stepped back and the darkness keeps expanding like a lung that refuses to exhale.

The fear of not knowing is standing in the middle of a flooded intersection at midnight. Rain hammers the pavement like a million small judges delivering their verdicts. The streetlights glow like drowned suns behind fogged glass. Cars pass as blurred constellations moving through a weather system I do not understand. I hold a map whose ink has dissolved into rivers. The streets twist like snakes under the water. I try to navigate by echo, by the faint geometry of sound returning from buildings I cannot see. My eyes wear sunglasses in the dark. My compass is a heartbeat tapping against bone. Every direction is a rumor.

What might be is a wilderness of mirrors, and every reflection multiplies the monster. The imagination breeds shadows the way abandoned houses breed mold. A closed door becomes a thousand locked vaults. A distant sound becomes an approaching army. In the theater of uncertainty every curtain hides a dragon and every silence is pregnant with the gap between lightning and thunder.

Knowing is smaller. Knowing is a stone you can pick up. Knowing is a key that fits into the lock even if the door opens to a storm. Knowing is the circuit finally completed, the wire touching its mate and the current rushing through with a river’s insistence. The engine turns over. The machine breathes. The candle finds its flame and the darkness retreats into corners, a disappointed animal unable to feed.

Knowing invites action the way dawn invites birds. Even terrible knowledge is a map with edges. It is a coastline where the waves break predictably against rock. It is lightning captured inside a bottle of language. The sky may still be full of storms but at least the clouds have names.

What might be is vast. It is a continent drawn in smoke. It is a library whose shelves hold books that write themselves with every heartbeat. It is a shadow that grows longer the more you stare at it. Possibility is a beast with too many mouths and each mouth whispers a different future, a hydra of futures.

But what is stands with quiet certitude like a mountain; it occupies space and horizon and memory. So I search for what is the way a diver searches for the ocean floor. I descend through layers of speculation, through currents of maybe and perhaps and almost. My lungs burn with questions. My ears ring with the pressure of uncertainty.

Still I sink.

Because the floor of truth may be cold and silent and covered in strange creatures of consequence but it is solid beneath the hand.

And yet I am bound by what might be.

What might be is the gravity of the unseen. It pulls at the mind like a hidden moon pulling tides from an obedient sea. Every step forward drags a chain of possibilities behind it. Every certainty grows roots in a forest of uncertainty.

I walk toward what is while the shadows of what might be stretch out before me like a thousand roads made of fog. The terrible truth is this: the road I finally walk will always become what is.

But until my foot falls upon it the path, even in darkness, I will keep inventing cities.

comments

Misfortune and harmony are but one and the same

2026-03-03T18:28:34Z

I am the filter. I make the decisions and I hold the outcomes. I choose what passes through and what is caught in the mesh. I stand at the door and decide what enters, and because of that, what settles. I am the lock and also the key, the cell membrane barrier, the antibody.

The residue is mine. The ash in the sink, the wing-dust on the sill, the soft particulate that gathers in corners no one else sees. The mistakes are mine. The harm is mine. The shame is mine. I keep the ledger in my own blood.

It is integrity.

It is also a kind of sanctioned erosion.

I once told a friend, “People are my most consistent and subtle means of self-harm.” Usually this passes without friction, like gnats hovering over fruit. This friend asked, “Explain? Because I’m not sure I consent.”

So I have to explain.

Which means I have to disassemble something I’ve been saying for so long it calcified. I don’t remember when it began. Only that it feels structural now, load-bearing.

I will look directly at a red flag. I will name it, out loud, to the person and to witnesses. I will trace the tear in the fabric with one careful finger. And then I will continue wearing it. I will embroider on it, small stabs, make it something beautiful, make it something to be seen, make it something to have with pride.

I don’t see people as singular. I see webs. Silk strung between fence posts. Tension maps. Small tremors radiating outward. No one is an island; everyone is a network, a swarm pattern, a migrating sky of cause and effect. If I can see the threads, enough of them, how do I justify cutting one? What am I, against an entire architecture?

I understand why people do what they do. I can almost always locate the origin: the lesson, the fear, the inherited script, the bruise under the bruise. And part of me believes in the integrity of others: that if harm is named, correction will follow. If someone tells me I have hurt them, I change immediately. I cauterize. I molt. I make repair where I can. Not always well. Not always best, no, I am not saying anything exceptional about myself. Only that I try.

But I carry a blind spot a shadow on the xray: if I know a thing, others must know it. If I believe care is structural, then surely others do too. “I don’t know how to tell you that you have to care about other people.” Intellectually, I know this is not universal. At a deeper level, I still expect it to be.

So if something hurts me, and I understand the web that produced it, what harm has actually been done? Harm done to me feels like background radiation. Microplastic in the bloodstream. A baseline measurement. There is no new total, no invoice generated. Suffering feels preexisting, ambient. I was raised in particulate air. Ash and papier-mâché. Built of materials that burn and hold shape at the same time.

What is one more cut layered over scar tissue? What is one more wound in a body already crosshatched? Against the scale of everything I can see, my own blood feels negligible.

So I will let you hurt me. I will accept it carefully, tenderly. Like oil arriving at the shore. Like dust settling where dust already lives. I will not fight it unless I am told to fight it. I will stay longer than I should. I will hold the fire long after it has burned me, the snake long after it has bitten, loving the light and the scales.

Because this is how I hold everything. The fragile things. The luminous things. The things that tremble. I do not change my grip depending on whether it wounds or warms.

It is as much who I am as bone and nerve. As the socket of my eye. As the reflex to reach.

I would put my hands into your broken glass and call the blood holy.

I do not let go.
I endure.

comments

Into the beams you've gone

2026-03-03T03:30:50Z

My skin forgot winter. My bones remember.

The frosted breath on the inhale - I can still tell you when it is about to snow, the taste of the air. The glittering clarity of glorious starscapes, ineffably far and immeasurably wide and utterly indifferent to the basking of light of this one wet eye. The bite of it, on ears and nose and lips, a lover. A tap tap tap at the window, wanting to get in.

The wet cold that will seep into your gloves, into your boots, into your hair, into your lungs until tremulous ragged breaths are all allowed you. Warm under blankets, alive under blankets because they trap the fever, trap the thick lung rattle, nose alone peeking out to breathe. Shallow, tiny, delirious creature. The wet breath. Hurts.

The drop and flash of crust giving way – Fall! Shock! -- and shiver, water too fast for leaden limbs. The crawling out, frozen mud bank sliding slick under heat of hand and boot, red on finger (cold is blue cold is blue red is hot) and tears making hot little trails down face. Crying loud. Being left. Heavy with winter weight, shiver yourself home. No help comes. No one comes to save. Stumble yourself home. The certainty certainty certainty that we will never be warm again.

The fire you build. The one you cannot.

My bones remember.

comments

Rabbit Heart v1

2026-02-28T03:56:06Z

It’s been rabbits for longer than I can remember. It has moved in phases, like the moon, apparently swelling and thinning and returning again, but the persistence of rabbit medicine in my life is as permanent as that heavenly body. When people ask why, I gesture toward mythology. I mention the rabbits we raised. I keep it factual. I don’t dig into the deeper stories because that feels like handing someone a warm, living thing and trusting them not to squeeze. Vulnerability has teeth. So of course, here I am, putting it on a public blog. “’Cause it's so easy / To say it to a crowd / But it's so hard, my love, / To say it to you out loud.” Let me tell you about rabbits.

We raised them when I was a child. At our height I think we had seventy-two, mostly Californian, white-bodied and pink-eyed, some with dark ears and noses and feet, as if they’d been coffee stained. They were mostly for food. They were well kept and healthy, and I learned animal husbandry before I had language for it. I learned to check eyes and teeth and fur, to run my hands along a spine and feel for what didn’t belong, to trim nails and scrub cages. I remember the obvious sweetness: baby kits pink and nearly translucent, no bigger than a thumb, their skin so thin you could nearly see the pulse beneath it; the way a grown rabbit settled into your arms, compact and warm, teeth grinding softly in contentment. But I also remember shoveling manure into old feed bags, the smell sharp and green and oddly clean, carrying the weight of it to my grandmother’s garden where tomatoes would later split their skins in the heat, fed by what the rabbits left behind. Even then I understood, in a wordless way, that nothing in that cycle was wasted.

The rabbit hutch was a long, narrow room attached to the garage, and the garage itself stood apart from the house on the other side of the yard. The woodshed was attached to it as well, and in winter the walk between them felt longer than it was. Inside, the hutch had its own climate. Warmer in cold weather, thick and almost humming in the heat. Rows of wide cages lined the walls, and high on one side were wooden windows that could be propped open when the season allowed. It smelled like hay and green and rabbit, something that might upset a city mouse but which was safe and clean for me.

One night, a doe was kindling and struggling. Birth isn’t a gentle thing, and bodies do not always cooperate with their own design. My mother led the work, and I became the runner, moving between house and garage as fast as I could manage, lungs burning in the dark. It wasn’t true winter yet, but it was clear and cold. Water, cloths, saline, a box. I don’t remember everything I carried, only the urgency that the survival of the doe and her kits depended on my speed. The back door of the house had three wide panes of glass set into wood and opened into a large (to me) interior porch. There was no latch; you just pushed and it swung. I took the three steps as one, shoved through, ran back, shoved through again. On the third or fourth trip, coming out, I pushed hard and found glass instead of wood. My hands went straight through it. The sound was enormous, a crack and crash that seemed to split the night in two. Shards fell across the porch floor like sudden ice. I remember the cool rush of air through the opening and the stunned pause afterward, the way everything held still. I looked down at my arms, certain I would see blood. There wasn’t any. Not a scratch, though both arms had passed fully through a shattered window. In the hutch, the doe finished her work. The kits were born small and slick and alive. We named one of them Shattering Glass.

My mother named rabbits after events and moments. One of our best does for years was named Smoldering Diapers. Yes, really. I know that in many families, they don’t name the animals they eat, but that always seemed like a thing that was dishonoring to them.

Of names, I had Chateau. Like a lot of kids from nowhere, I was in 4-H and did more projects than I can now remember. As an aside, I hated raising pigs so much that for years after I left my mother’s house I wouldn’t even eat pork. Not so with rabbits. Chateau was my show rabbit, a French Angora in shades of thunderstorm grey, wool so dense it swallowed your fingers if you pressed your hand into her side, soft as a dream. Her name came from the only French word I knew at the time, borrowed from a children’s story I can no longer fully recall; that the word felt like something grand and distant and important. It felt like a place where things happened. So I gave it to her.

She required daily brushing and had her own cage, lined and tended with a care that bordered on reverence. None of the rabbits went hungry, but she received the choicest greens, the freshest refills, a water bottle dosed with vitamins when I could manage it. I spent hours with her in my arms, learning the architecture of her body. The steady weight of her against my ribs. The faint grassy sweetness of her wool. The way her ears angled back when she was uncertain, forward when she listened.

I remember one summer afternoon with particular clarity. I carried her out to the lawn. Now whatever you’re imagining with a lawn, set it aside. This was a square of wide-bladed grass and clover wedged between the house and the garage, worn down by rabbits, by my sister and me running barefoot, and occasionally by my mother crouched with lawn scissors, trimming it by hand. A raised wooden walkway ran between the buildings, with stone-edged garden beds on one side. More beds pressed up against a tall, old pine that marked the edge of what we generously called the yard before it gave way to driveway and dust. Toward the front stood a line of young cherry trees, their leaves thin and bright against the sky. The air there always held resin from the pine and the faint metallic scent of sun-warmed tools.

I would set Chateau down in the grass to train her, brush her, socialize her. Sometimes I brought other rabbits, babies mostly, other angoras that needed the practice. But it was always about her. Show handling required precision. She had to tolerate inspection, remain calm, hold her body correctly when set on the judging table. I would pose her just so, smoothing her wool, feeling for symmetry. Then I would let her wander a little. She would nose through clover, disappear into the green, and I would make a soft tch-tch-tch sound with my tongue. Every time, without fail, she would lift her head and come hopping back to me. Immediate. Certain. As if there were a thread between us only she could see.

When I showed her at the Fair, we won Best in Show. It was the first year my 4-H region had included show rabbits, so I didn’t just receive the ribbon and the small gold pin. I was given a plaque as well, a wooden board mounted with a small golden rabbit caught mid-leap, my name engraved beneath it. I hung it on my wall, just over my bed, as for me it was the proudest moment of my childhood. One I could cling to when everything went to shit (which it did, with frequency). It wasn’t only because we had won, but because we had earned it together with tenderness in a place that tried so hard to scrub that tendency from me.

There was never any consternation about raising rabbits for food. To this day, men in bars, upon learning that I adore rabbits, will grin and say something like, “Yeah, and they taste great too.” As if that will undo me. As if love and consumption cannot coexist. I usually tell them about my favorite dry rub for barbecuing rabbit, or how to make a proper hare pie with a thick, peppered crust, or about the time we mixed rabbit and bear into sausage, hand-ground and packed tight. That tends to quiet them. The mythology they expect is sentiment, something that will reduce my power; what they find instead is fluency.

I was not involved only in the raising and keeping, but in the killing and eating as well. We were taught it was to be done with respect and gratitude, and I took that into myself with a seriousness that bordered on religious. The tender heart of mine did not fracture at the act; it fastened itself to the ritual. My mother killed rabbits quickly, cleanly, in a way that preserved both dignity and fur. She would grasp them firmly by the ears, lift and swing in one smooth arc over her head, and break the neck in a single motion. It lasted less than a second. A life of care, then a brief and final interruption, and then the work of keeping the rest of us alive. There was no spectacle in it. No cruelty. Only the sharp line between before and after.

She never became expert at treating pelts, but she tried. I wore coats edged in rabbit fur. We stretched hides and attempted to soften them, rubbed them with brains and smoke the way old books suggested. We made medicine wheels and small talismans from the better pieces, tying and sewing feathers and beads into the leather, turning what remained into something that could hang near a door or rest in a palm. Nothing was discarded lightly. Even the bones were sometimes saved, small white architectures cleaned and dried in the sun.

Barbecue was her favorite way to prepare rabbit. We had a pit dug into the earth with a cast iron grate laid across it, ironwood burning down into coals that smelled sweet and resinous. The dry rub was simple and fierce, salt and brown sugar and paprika and whatever else she had at hand. Summer nights hummed with crickets, the smoke rising blue and steady into the dark. We would sit outside with our plates balanced on our knees, skin smelling of smoke and OFF, swatting mosquitoes and licking charcoal from our fingers. It was ordinary.

For a while my mother apprenticed as a journeyman butcher under a man named Tom. He was skilled with a knife and unskilled with himself. One day, while she was processing rabbits, he wandered over, already drunk enough to mistake arrogance for authority. Like so many men before him, he decided he knew how to do it better. He picked up a rabbit and began beating it over the head with a baseball bat. Everything you have heard about rabbit screams is insufficient. The sound is not delicate. It is raw and tearing and fully alive. He kept swinging. I remember the blood, the fur matted and dark, and one eye protruding like a grey grape from its socket. He never killed the rabbit. My mother did. She stepped in and ended it, quick and precise, restoring in one motion the line he had shattered.

This next story is the one I circle. The one that does not soften with time. The one that has followed me longer than any ribbon or plaque.

There was a night when, for reasons I still attempt to justify and cannot, I forsook the lessons I had been given early and well. I was seventeen, wandering the nowhere of another unincorporated outpost in the hills with a boy I will call M. I knew him through my high school boyfriend. He was only a year older than me, but he carried himself with the loose authority of someone who had already decided what kind of man he meant to be. He and J had a plan to call in coyotes, to take one for fur, for proof, for that sharp-edged fascination with selfhood that seems to live inside a kind of boyhood I never inhabited and do not fully understand. To do this, they took a rabbit and hung it in the woods like a piñata. They hit it with a bat to make it scream.

They brought me because I was the “rabbit girl.” In the logic of rural socialization, it was a kind of initiation. Could I be useful? Could I be hard enough to stand with the hard boys? I won’t stretch this into a larger thesis about the persistent, grinding loneliness of my childhood. It is enough to say that it was real and it shaped what I believed I had to endure to be wanted. I felt I had to prove myself.

The woods smelled of pine resin and the dry of summer. The rabbit swung slightly from the rope, alive and wide-eyed. I knew better. I knew the line between swiftness and cruelty. I knew what respect looked like. And still, when the bat was handed to me, I took it. I took a swallow from the proffered flask, the burn of cheap liquor bright in my throat, and I swung.

The sound of a rabbit screaming is not theatrical. It is raw. It tears at the air. I hit it again. And again. It screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

I do not know what they expected from me. Hesitation, maybe. A weak blow. Something that would confirm I was soft in the ways they anticipated. Instead, something inside me tipped and went wild, desperate and jagged, all akimbo and far too energetic for what was required. When I stopped, they looked at me not with admiration but with horror. The ritual had slipped its bounds. Whatever they had imagined, this was not it. They called it off. Said it wouldn’t work. Said we needed to end it now. They went back to J’s house and drank beer and I trailed along. I do not remember what they did with the rabbit. I do remember that they didn’t question my presence after.

I did not take the rabbit home. I did not cradle it or end it cleanly or try to undo what I had done. I let someone else finish what I had begun. That is the part that lingers. Not only the violence, but the abdication. The way I stepped outside the law I had been taught and did not immediately step back in.

I still carry the nickname M gave me that night. It has followed me longer than the plaque with the golden rabbit. Longer than Chateau. Shame is persistent. It is deep-rooted. I have been trying to make amends with the world, with the spirit I tarnished, ever since.

I have had many adult encounters with rabbits, though I have never kept them again. Friends have, and I have helped with care, with the steady, unromantic steps of husbandry I learned early. Checking teeth. Trimming mats from wool. Reading the small signs of distress before they become catastrophe. I have helped with the processing too, when asked, and with pets kept indoors like small monarchs, fed greens from ceramic bowls and allowed to reign over living rooms. I think that is part of why I have never taken rabbits into my own home again. That, and the simple instability of millennial life. Rented houses. Shifting work. Futures that never quite settle long enough to promise the daily constancy they require. Rabbits demand attention. They demand presence. They deserve it.

Instead, I carry them differently. I wear them inked into my skin. I stitch them into scenes. I am learning to crochet well enough that one day, if my life steadies, I might keep another angora, for wool and the quiet ritual of brushing, the slow accumulation of softness. I wear ears sometimes. I am, to many people now, simply the rabbit one.

But the mythology is not costume. It is not aesthetic. For me, for the human animal I am, the knowledge, the memory, the pride and the shame live side by side. The swift mercy. The permanent pit in the earth. The golden rabbit leaping on a plaque. And the night something inside me went feral, desperate, too charged and unraveled to remember the law I had been given.

They are all present. They do not cancel each other out.

I will talk about Rabbit, the archetype and the threshold and the trickster, another time. This entry is smaller and more human than that. This one is about the body I was given, the lessons I was taught, the ones I kept, and the one I broke. The rabbits persist. So do I.

comments

Unsent Letters v.2

2026-02-25T14:10:19Z

Right now it feels like everything is falling apart.

It is like cleaning a room until it no longer resembles a room; drawers emptied onto the floor, piles of spilled constellations, furniture in a disarray of accusations, closets a haphazard confession of forgotten intentions. It is dismantling a house as well. Lifting floorboards to find the rot, removing hinges, pulling nails that resist as if they, too, prefer the illusion of permanence. It is sledgehammer to walls and concrete (and freeing, no? The destruction of what no longer serves) and dust like personal snow. It is the opening of an engine and removing piece by piece by piece, setting them out on cloth and seeing the heavy, precise architecture of motion suddenly silent.

There is a moment when the machine looks irreparable. When the home looks like a catastrophe. When the room looks like any next step will be the wrong one. In that moment, you may despair of ever rebuilding, repairing, organizing. From the wide view it looks impossible, doesn’t it? Insurmountable. All these intimate pieces of a life laid awkward, the dust kicked up, hands covered in oil and grime. How, how to ever? How could anyone? How could I?

The work to take apart, to knock down the tower of blocks is often quick, brutal, energetic. The work to rebuild is patient, measured, intentional and you see, that wide view, how long it will take. How careful it must be. Your hands shake.

Despair is always a liar.

Your own mind, magnetized to future ruin, tangled in shackles of past and imagined weight of future, will not remind you: time does not await your permission. It moves as rivers move – forward, even when they curve. Even when they seem to circle back in eddies and reflections, the river never climbs upstream. We experience the spirals and the seasons but despite fear’s loops and lesson’s recursions we move in one direction. Breath by breath, wound by wound. Entropy is not the enemy; it is the law we rebuild under.

The time will pass and in that passing, you will rebuild. Block by block. Shelf by shelf. Belt around pulley, timing restored, tension adjusted until the engine is brought to life again instead of stalling itself. The time will pass regardless and you may pass it deliberately, doing the small merciful things that make meaning from your chaos. The time will pass regardless and you can choose what to do with it. Sweep. Sort. Tighten.

You can choose, too, to sit in the half-built room and light a candle. You can choose no path; not to build at all, but only to look without seeing. But what resentment of self, what loathing would allow that? What beast would you allow to freeze yourself in place?

Maybe this is what loving yourself looks like. Not the untouched house, but the willingness to kneel in the scattered pieces and begin again. Again. Again. To learn. To do the hard work of hammering and bolting and sorting. To hold loosely the hope of outcome, the ideal version, and focus on the step in front of you. The next step.

And then the one after that.

Take them afraid. Take them unsure. Take them because you are still here and that is enough to begin.

comments

Twelve Minutes (Cast)

2026-02-24T05:00:31Z

At the water’s slapping line, barefoot to save shoes from the mud-slick. Better grip, toes in. Worms make for poor sacrifices; the guilt of piercing still living blind creatures who are all sensation. Cruel, to be sensation first, to know the world only as pressure and wet and texture, and to die by barbed insistence. For a fish, for food, for another day’s meal. Teach the meek hyper-empathetic girl to fish and she will, but the guilt will be in the meat. There, curling like living cord on the hook, swallow the shame and cast. Wait. Reel. The river runs its brown-green shoulder along stone, combs through reeds, gnaws at the soft edge of bank and keeps going. Summer lays its buzzing over everything, insects thick as static, birds calling like they own the light. This isn’t about catching for a moment, it is about becoming part of the river, part of the scene, part of the moment ---

A tug. Here. Hold steady. Reel. Not too fast. Coax it. Firm and gentle at once. Too hard and the hook tears free. Too soft and it runs. No one eats if you lose it. Step into the river. Just one step. Feel the mud give. Step into anticipation.

When the lines splash outward there is no sky left, only descent, a hundred silver arcs collapsing at once, hooks bright and impatient, barbs aiming for warmth. Exposed flesh and they take it, sink past skin into thigh and shoulder and the soft seam beneath ribs, into breast where nerve blooms white, into scalp where hair tangles around steel, into the cartilage of ear that gives with a wet pop, into lip and the thin hinge at the jaw. Constellations ignite under skin, pain flaring from a hundred bright points as the lines go tight, not one direction but all of them, forward, back, sideways, down, the body made into a compass of tethered meat. The barbs. The barbs. Gods they pull. Grind, split, turn and seat deeper, catching bone and refusing release release release. Resistance splits seams where red wells and runs, narrow runnels, heat leaving in threads. Mud shifts, footing goes, the lines hum with strain and the hooks answer, sawing, worrying, holding fast in the delicate web of muscle at the throat, breath snagged on steel, another step torn from tendon and given to the pull and the body tipping forward into water, into—

Tug

There’s a tug on the line. Come back.

None of that happened.

Reel, steady. Refocus. You have to feed them. Reel in the fish. Drop it in the bucket. Pierce the next worm with fresh guilt.

Cast.

comments

Chuck issues part 2

2026-02-22T19:35:38Z

Since writing the first part, little moments keep surfacing the way stitches work loose from the lining of a coat, exposing holes unrepaired. These little holes do not exist in a timeline that makes sense to me, in the broader narrative, but are receipts for the same wound found again and again.

-----

The jeans

Recall, perhaps, that my father was pretty steadily middle class, so first: this should not have been an issue. Second: despite the poverty of my mother, this style of thing was never an issue with her. She had many failures, but she understood the basic premise that children are visible; that you look at them and the looking changes what happens next.

It was the 90s. I wanted so hard to be an alt kid. I wanted JNCOs the way some kids want a horse; not because you can logically justify it, but because it feels like a doorway into a self. That never manifested, but denim was still the order of the day, and I have always worn my jeans until they are falling apart. This was no different. Wide-legged; hems shredded and scuffed. One pair ripped all the way up one leg and I managed it by twisting the loose warp around itself, a pathetic little rope trick; improvising a tourniquet for a garment.

I asked for sewing materials and got one of those tiny hotel kits. You know the ones; a thimble of thread, a needle that looks like it would apologize if you asked it to do anything difficult, a button that belongs to no known universe. It was like handing someone a single match and calling it central heating. I couldn’t do anything with it.

My mother would never have let me go to school in jeans ripped so far there was a shredded line up to my thigh. My father didn’t even notice.

Surveillance is a kind of love; one I did not receive; an ordinary kind that notices the hemline. An ordinary kind of care.

-----

The cold sore

I got HSV1 from family and the first eruption was horrific. I couldn’t eat. No doctor, because it wasn’t worth it; not worth the time, not worth the money, not worth the mild confrontation of asking a parent to behave like a parent. I was given a stick of coconut balm, which I’ve learned since was the worst thing to do. But it was very on-brand: the home-remedy version of care; symbolic, cheap, and incompatible with reality.

The embarrassment and shame of that huge thing on my lip, taking it over. Pain and swelling so bad I couldn’t eat. It’s stuck in my mind like a goat-head burr. School was never great for me, but situations like that made it significantly worse. You carry your face around; you can’t set it down on a desk and walk away from it. A child learns quickly what kinds of suffering are legible to adults, and what kinds are treated like inconvenient weather.

My suffering was a tolerable cost as long as it didn’t demand competence, time, money, or confrontation. I was expected to absorb it like a sponge absorbs spilled coffee; quietly, fully, and without staining anything that mattered to them.

-----

The single time he smacked me

He hit me once. Compared to my mother’s beatings, it barely registered as violence; it was more like the punctuation mark of annoyance. I was, and still am to a lesser degree, a very messy human who did not learn to clean as a kid, so my bedroom was a mess. I had a fan on, oscillating, and it kept blowing papers that were crumpled on the floor. It was the middle of the night; I woke thinking there was a rat in my room because of the sound, in the way that only makes sense in a semi-dream state. I couldn’t figure out what was making it, so I kept getting up, flicking on the light, checking, repeating; fear and sleep making a little closed loop.

I guess he noticed because he came in upset. He told me to go to bed and, I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he didn’t ask what was happening or notice that I seemed scared. He didn’t investigate; he didn’t orient to the fact that a child was awake, frightened, in the dark. He reached across the bed and whacked my backside; clearly meant as punishment.

It was awkward because I gave him no response. I was just confused. We held eye contact in that strange dead space where the script expects a child to cry or flinch or apologize; and I did none of those because I couldn’t even locate what rule I’d broken. Then he left.

This is the performance of parenting; not guidance, just irritation discharge. Not connected to me as a person. Like a vending machine that sometimes kicks you for pressing the wrong button, but never tells you which button is wrong; you learn to stop pressing anything at all.

-----

The hotel and the pool

We were traveling; I don’t remember where. Road-trip style, where we were supposed to be quiet as much as possible; small, contained, low maintenance. We stayed overnight in a hotel. Dad, and possibly Jen though I’m not sure, in one room; my sister and I in another that wasn’t even next door or nearby. We were given free reign, which sounds like freedom until you remember what children actually are in public spaces; they are bright, naïve signals; they are easy to read.

Of course we were in the pool. There was a team there; baseball, maybe. A group of adult men traveling to a game. And 14 or 15 year old me was trying to flirt with them. My sister was as well. That is not “kids being wild”; that is kids testing whether anyone is watching. Kids are always running little experiments on the world: is there a fence here? Is there a lock? Does someone care if I approach the edge? We find boundaries in this way. I still find boundaries in this way.

What happened in that pool and in the hotel room of several adult men on their way to a baseball game they were playing is not a story I am going to render into full detail on the page, because the point is not the pornography of harm. The point is the absence that made it possible. It went on for hours. It was not quiet. It was not subtle.

How little attention do you have to pay to your children to not notice something like that? How does a parent behave as if safety is optional, as if it is a luxury line item you can cut from the budget when you get tired?

A child can interpret neglect as permission. Predators interpret it as an open door.

-----

The exercise rule and the snapped disk

Both of my parents hated my weight. My father attempted to enforce rules about exercise instead of rules about eating. It was very him: a plan that was “logical” on paper and required oversight he was incapable of providing. His rule was that I was to exercise for as many minutes as I used the internet or played video games; a rule that required tracking, follow-through, and consistent correction. A rule that demanded that he be present in a way he did not know how to be.

It was governance by decree; a law written for a country he refused to live in.

He did, however, snap my Diablo game disk in half because it was demonic. That part he could do. That part did not require noticing me over time; it required one burst of righteous energy and a simple action you can complete with your hands.

My needs are framed as moral issues or logistical ones; never as the need for deliberate interest in my becoming. It is the difference between tending a garden and arguing with weeds. He argued with weeds. He did not learn the names of the plants.

-----

And now, to what? What is the meaning of it?

To stitch my own jeans with a hotel kit and call it resilience; to smear coconut balm on an infection and call it care; to interpret a single smack as parenting; to mistake neglect for freedom until freedom turns predatory; to have my needs treated like moral failures and my joys treated like contraband. To be raised like a houseplant left in an office building; watered only when someone remembers the plant exists, blamed for drooping when no one checked the window, occasionally yanked from the pot when someone needed to prove they still had authority over it.

“What do you want me to do, Diamond?”

I’m starting to have an answer, and it’s one I keep seeking in eyes and hands and voices; in people whose wounds take different shapes. The answer was never “do.” It was “be.” Be consistent. Be present. Be interested enough to notice the hemline; the hunger; the fear; the point where danger gets comfortable because no one is watching. The thing I wanted was witness. The thing I still want is witness. And witness is the one kind of care I can’t convincingly give myself, no matter how skilled I get at treating the injury.

A friend once told me my voice lives in her head sometimes, saying, “J, sometimes you just have to hold your own hand,” and that it’s become a kind of guiding star for her. I have been holding my own hand since before I knew what to call it. I learned to dress my wounds; to keep moving; to act intact. The irony is that when someone else witnesses; holds; participates with that same deliberate care, some part of me refuses to believe it. I am the rabbit that never stops scanning the sky for eagles, so busy watching for the strike that I miss the clover at my feet.

Reparenting isn’t only about giving your inner child the pleasures they were denied. It’s also the slower work of structure; containment; being held in someone’s attention long enough that your nervous system stops arguing with the evidence. Our internal selves form around what our parents taught us care looks like. So of course it’s not surprising that I struggle to deny myself anything now, or to reliably perceive my own internal experience at all. My interoception is poor across the board: hunger, thirst, pain, joy, the subtle shift from “fine” to “not fine.” The cost of being unwatched was never only what happened to me. It’s what my body learned to stop reporting; because no one was listening anyway.

This lesson wasn’t pain. What this parent taught wasn’t pain. It was futility.

comments

Unsent Letters v.1

2026-02-20T23:39:28Z

Build your house, habibi.

I lived most of my life in earthquake country. I have never been afraid of the earth shaking, of it moving with that sickening strangeness, that sideways lurch of certainty undone. The shudder reveals; like the bass at a concert, like a drum at a gathering, like the pulse in a throat, like a bell that cannot be un-rung. The ground does not rage but releases what it has been holding. Whatever is too hard, too proud of its angles, splits along the fault lines it pretended were not there.

Too hard is brittle.

I learned this year — this year — that diamonds are brittle. The hardest natural material, yes. They resist scratching, abrasion, wear, hold their brilliance against friction. But they are not very tough. Strike them at the correct angle and they cleave decisive, along planes already written into their structure. Six – funny. A number of carbon and a number of healing. They do not crumble; they separate. Precision fracture. Refraction undone by knowledge of where to tap.

Buildings are similar. The solid cement box feels safe because it does not sway. It declares itself permanent. But when the plates move (and they will, habibi, they always will) when pressure finally releases and the ground shudders and slides beneath it, that box cannot negotiate. It resists, and resistance becomes rupture. It sinks into its own new chasm. It crushes what trusted it. Great slabs of it tumbling down, and meat becomes memory. Too many find out too fast what nothing awaits them.

One can build differently. Wood that listens. Bamboo that has become hollow first, that bends. Flexible joints that admit motion before it becomes violence. Walls light enough to tremble without tearing. The house sways and survives because it does not mistake stillness for strength; it takes oscillation to survive. It takes recursion to return. You have heard “be water.” Have you heard “be bamboo”? Have you heard “be willow”? Bend, bend, bend for bending is not a surrender. It is resilience manifest in structure.

Habibi.

Let the old structure crumble. Let what was built of pride and guilt and fear fall into its own geometry; that collapse is not your death. Every earthquake those of us who learned to walk this unsteady earth watch those to whom it is new panic. The shaking. The way it seems like gravity no longer obeys the rules you believed, but I assure you. We’ll always assure you – press your back to the wall. Hands over your head. When the shaking stops, follow us out.

Build better. It is data. It is instruction. It is the earth reminding you that rigidity is not devotion.

Build your house.
Build it expecting the plates to shift.
Build it so that when the ground rolls — and it will — you roll with it.

Habibi, build your house.

comments

The Response of Flesh

2026-02-20T18:58:50Z

Entirely a self serving post about self harm

( Skip like stones )

comments

Do not forget your place

2026-02-16T04:22:10Z

CW: body horror, visceral processing( Skip like stones )

comments

Sometimes the night cuts through me like a knife

2026-02-13T03:49:46Z

“You could be worse.
You know you could.
And yet, you refuse to be.
What an act of faith in yourself.
What an act of love.
With the skin of your teeth you pull all of this weight forward.”

It is stubbornness entire.

I don’t want to consider forgiveness. That feels like the most honest place to begin. I don’t want the softness of it, or the absolving tone people use when they say it like a balm. I have been offered this like a blessing, like a verdict in my favor. Sometimes I almost accept it. But something in me resists the warmth. “Forgiveness is warm.” That line is true. It’s the only part that feels true. And I don’t know if I deserve warmth.

I said that forgiving myself felt too close to forgiving those who hung their shame on me. An ocean asked me in a liminal space why I struggle to forgive myself when speaking of my child self. I answered quickly, as if I had always known: because to forgive me felt like forgiving them. I’ve let that answer simmer since. It was a kind of truth, but not the whole one. It was the truth of someone who sees in one direction at a time. The fuller truth is uglier. It isn’t about them. It’s about me and the scale I use to measure worthiness.

I’ve told myself that for those who wronged me, forgiveness is earned. I don’t actually spend time calculating whether they’ve earned it, but it is a choice formed from consistency and correction. I do not forgive those who would not change, not address, not adjust. Those who have are in my life by choice. In the question of whether blood or water is thicker, the answer is choice. We can wrong each other, and we can walk through that wrong together to the field. "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there."

Most of them fall into something far less dramatic. There isn’t just forgiveness or grudge. Forgiveness is an act of love. A grudge is an act of detestation. Most people earn neither. They drift into irrelevance. One of the worst kids to me in school lives a life that has a kind of daily suffering I’ve bypassed. I don’t feel anger toward her. I don’t feel warmth either. Holding emotion about her feels like holding a receipt for something that’s already been refunded. It’s boring. “All it means is that I will let go of the stranglehold your deed has on me, and that I also will let go of my wish to retaliate.” That doesn’t have to be sacred. It can be practical, can just be the quiet sigh of reduction, that I don’t care enough to keep carrying it.

However, when I turn this framework toward myself, everything shifts, goes all funhouse mirror. There are things I do not forgive myself for, and the last year sits at the center of it like a rot. I cannot endure the kindness of others about it. When they offer context, grace, or explanations, it feels like they are trying to take something from me. My shame feels deserved. Necessary. If I set it down too early, it would mean I am the kind of person who harms and then shrugs. I cannot talk plainly about what I did or failed to do without my chest tightening. It has become the necromancer of my mind, raising old bones until the inside of my skull rattles with them. It is scurvy, reopening wounds that had already sealed. I find myself inventorying past failures as if stacking evidence for a trial no one else is holding.

Forgiveness, to me and for me, feels like absolution. And absolution feels unearned. I tell myself I haven’t suffered enough to correct myself. I haven’t repaired enough. I haven’t shown consistency long enough to be trusted, even by me. I am working on it, taking steps every day, moving the blocks every day.

Compassion has left the room, and in its place stand disgust, dislike, distrust. No one else is punishing me for this. No one is demanding penance. So I am doing it myself. I am holding the sentence open-ended. I am telling myself that if I carry the weight long enough, it will prove something. That it will refine me. That it will keep me from becoming careless.

And here is the part that exposes me: I think I am afraid that without shame, I would not be good. I think I believe that my suffering is what makes me safe for other people. If I forgive myself too soon, I will lose vigilance. I will lose edge. I will become the kind of person I fear. So I refuse warmth. I refuse mercy. I call it integrity. I call it accountability. But I wonder if it is just fear dressed in righteous language.

I don’t want to consider forgiveness because if I do, I will have to admit that punishment is not the same thing as repair, though I am taking the steps for repair.

And I am not done. Not done “loading your grief into the chamber of your shame”, as the poet said. Not done holding this. Not done letting it rot me.

comments

One seeks an answer that one cannot grant her

2026-02-08T14:31:01Z

I am trying to write about forgiveness, but I don’t know how.

The character has experienced something deeply traumatic, with flavors of betrayal, with lasting consequence, with pain that is in body, in spirit, in mind, in the narrative. And still it is complicated because the action was not wholly owned by the one who acted upon the character. I want the character to not abandon some part of their self in the forgiving. I want them to address this with a clarity that allows for healing, not ignoring, not erasure; I struggle because I have put too much of myself in this character.

I don’t think I know what this looks like, internally. What guide would feel correct instead of just wish fulfillment. What signal might say “this is how you know” instead of just “this is what you should feel” to any potential reader. It’s important, too, because this is the character’s arc. Understanding that boundaries aren’t punishments, that love can buy peace, that one can be architect and not only witness, that one doesn’t have to hide how much it hurts, that one can trust others to see hurt. The character forgives easily in part for conflict avoidance, in part because they love broadly, and in part because their perception of self is as someone unimportant.

I am not the character, and still I struggle.

I do not see forgiveness as something I say, something earned by another. In every hurt, in every situation where I have been wronged in some way, I see my part in it. I have been told I am cruel, ruthless with myself but that isn’t my internal understanding. The internal understanding is that if I do not hold myself to the flame, who will? It is my responsibility to insure the errors I have made are corrected. It is my errors in judgment that must be corrected, that must never be allowed to exist again. How can I do anything more than offer forgiveness to another when I see the error in me, and cannot forgive myself that?

It is easy because forgiveness is a form of love, something I have in abundance for others, a cup I struggle to drink from myself. It is endless but as though I’m serving at a buffet; offering onto other plates but never placing on my own, aching to invite. Even asking for forgiveness from another, when I have wronged, feels terrifying; unearned without penitence. Unearned without churning out lesson, correction, and suffering. If I caused hurt, should I not hurt far more severely in penance?

Of course, I know that offering suffering to another isn’t a path that engenders trust so I keep it as a locked room conversation, me vs. me. I have come to understand that “I hurt you so I hurt me” is not the gift another wants. It is a selfishness, so I keep it here.

It is rare that I lock the doors to my heart. I have, because it was the right and safest choice, but the pain every time is like tearing unused muscle. For all others even closed doors are temporary, just waiting for a look, for a desire to return to swing wide again and says “yes, here, I’ve never left.” I know it has put me in situations where I have returned again and again to things that would kill me, given the chance, but since the hurt is mine there’s not impetus to stop it. Further, my education works against me. I do not see people as merely one being. Each person is a center of a web of forces and choices, many of which they cannot affect. How could I be upset when the forces are not theirs, when choice counts for so little?

In the past, I had a client who sent me aggressive, abusive texts for months before I addressed it to my boss because I didn’t understand that I shouldn’t have been experiencing that. I had made an error in judgment which made the client’s life harder, and the flinch response whenever my phone made a text message noise was just penance. I understand better the structures now that are in place to protect workers and would make different choices now, but that client was forgiven before we ever spoke again. It is I who needs forgiveness.

I keep saying the word like I know what it means, but I don’t.

For me it is what? The subsummation of self first, the seed impulse. I would rather love you through barbed wire, let every hurt rend, than not be able to love you at all. But I am not only my impulse, so I can enact boundaries with my logical mind. Safety is third but it is on the list, so I’ll try that. And it isn’t penance, it isn’t “don’t hurt me again” it is “at least apologize.”

For ones I love, it is “just say you’re sorry” which is… I see not a healthy way to address it but why would I, so lonely and so social, deny access to me over error?

In the same way that loving easily lets people love me with one foot out the door, forgiving easily lets people hurt me without consequence, and people do not act according to the better angels of their nature.

Ah, but it isn’t only like this! Because there is also the hurt caused to others, and for that I can be as ruthless as I am with myself. Hurt me, yes, there is no matter. Hurt someone else – do it through cruelty, do it even when you know better, and do not acknowledge the hurt or ask forgiveness? Then I will scream and slice as clean as if you were brambles, I will uproot and poison you.

What a dichotomy, and the difference is in perceived value. In my honest estimation, any person I care about is more important than I am.

This isn’t to say that’s the only way I live. I’ve built structures to serve me, to insure safety, to insure self care, to insure my own survival of my own nature. I understand to some degree what I need and will act on it but the pain of separation, of conflict and disruption, is sharp and present and needles through my ribs. However I will dress it up within the structures, the only variable I have any real control over is myself. So that is how I will enact.

The wrongs are like paintings down a long hall, errors instead of relations. Things I try to remember, even as my mind fails to remember how to forgive myself.

[Cero Umano by Gorche]

comments

And the words are wrong but in the right order

2026-02-04T03:59:14Z

The sorries have returned, the doldrums cousins of the furies, tired siblings of “too much” and “not enough.” I thought I was done with them; I thought I’d cleaned them out the way one does cobwebs but I’ve found they’ve returned. Loudly, distinctly, along with other things I haven’t felt in quite some time. They’ve showed up together. I suspect they’re scripted together.

“Sorry” – I’ve said something that isn’t safe.
“Sorry” – I’ve said something that is confusing.
“Sorry” – my sentences are all jumbled together because the feelings are so much, are so big, that I can’t find a single clause to collapse them to.
“Sorry” – I knew that would hurt.
“Sorry” – I didn’t mean for that to hurt.
“Sorry” – I am preemptively worried that would hurt, based on what I know, but it slipped out of my mouth anyway because it needed to be said; or at least, I needed to say it.
“Sorry” – Am I wasting your time?
“Sorry” – Am I too quiet?
“Sorry” – Did I say too much, too fast, too loud again and not actually make it correct or small enough to take in?
“Sorry” – I hate saying this. I hate it on my tongue, the way it spills out, the way it demands reassurance and kindness before it offers either, the way it says me me me.

I know the trick to make the sorries go away – you replace them with thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for your kindness. And they become both more true and more palatable.

It does nothing for the compulsion, though. The one to acknowledge, out loud, that my existence is some flaw that must be corrected. My feelings are impolite demons without etiquette. My dreams and desires are terrors. My hurts commandeers. All ways of taking up space that does not belong to me. All ways of being terrible.

It’s linked to the barbed terror that is anxiety, the one that sits tight at my throat and further below my sternum. A roughly icosahedral virion studded with radial glycoprotein spikes giving it a urchin-like silhouette. This loud mess would beg for reassurance because I have forgotten to talk to it. We’ve been scared for so long. We’ve been subsisting for so long in survival that the kitchen table teas haven’t been occurring. I haven't been doing what I need to do to move from survival to whatever is next.

We haven’t been allowed to say the truth because the truth would freeze me, keep me from taking the next necessary steps. Although I’m out of the woods now, though the tunnel is bright with daylight, everything in me remember the scraping and shadow, the things chasing. Being scared when I need to survive isn’t okay, so it hasn’t been able to speak.

Every sorry is the same thing. “I am afraid.” I am so, so scared.

Now I have to remember how to be afraid with something like grace.

comments