softer life

These are photos from the last couple of months.

Sorry if they look distorted, everytime I upload photos they get cropped off :/

I haven't updated this in a long time. I'm not good at keeping up with things like this, I guess it's because blogs are supposed to be like journals & I'm scared of being too honest about things. Usually I don't write unless I am very lonely & I have been writing a lot lately. And when I am happy I am too afraid to write for fear of jinxing things but they manage to fade anyway. Geez. Everytime I try to write things when I know people might possibly read them I feel really melodramatic.

October:

At first, those paper-thin butterfly wings inmy stomach didn’t bother me like they did before. They let me know that I was alive, that things were changing. Appetite diminished, I drank tea and bland things to calm that nervous happy dance in my stomach. Everything went dormant then, suddenly. Not in a peaceful sleep or quiet leaving, but in a door-slamming, kick-you-in-the-gut kind of way. My room became a pile of blankets and kleenex and records on repeat. I am not good at expressing myself in words, in connecting the thoughts buzzing in my head into sounds escaping my mouth. That is why I hide behind a camera—it’s easier that way. I used to write, too, but that feels too honest, too much. Nothing is ever exact, I am always adding and embellishing and glossing over. I thought maybe this slow sadness would sink into my bones and show people how I felt outside—that if I starting looking as miserable in my skin as I felt in my head that they wouldn’t have to ask me if I was okay & wait for a response, because I will always say “I’m okay.” I just wanted to not have to say anything, I just wanted people to wrap me up & tell me that I’d be okay. Soon, eventually. I just need to hear it from someone else because I can’t believe a word I tell myself.

September:

The things I thought would make me feel better, the lights & drinks & hands & music & strangers, they did for a while. But after the sobered-up drive home I come full circle, still the same person I was before, and that’s the worst feeling. I will never stop feeling that disconnect, between my body and my voice. It’s like when you were little & you stood in front of the mirror and looked until you just dissolved into shapes & colors and realized that’s not you at all. And then I’d get dizzy and put my palm to the pulse in my neck to remind myself that that pulsing is me, the only real thing about me. It never seemed normal to me, to feel like that. That disengaged feeling might be the stem of a lot of things, the lack of comfort I feel in my own skin, the uneasiness, the lack or excess of sleeping, the pills that make my hands stop shaking. It’s the tethered feeling keeping you to the ground, that’s what I always wanted to be rid of.

August:

This is August.
August is yellow hot humid heat stealing your breath, filling your mouth with hot cotton air. It’s flotsam on the surface of creek water. It’s a trailer park full of rusted satellite dishes and broken playground equipment. It feels like biting your fingernails down to the quick, like forgetting all of your lines on opening night. Like waking up to finding yourself dangling out your bedroom window, your sheets anchored to the bedpost. It’s sleepy heat that keeps you awake because you don’t like who you are in your dreams. You find the margins of your notes filled with elaborate escape plans you have no recollection of writing. You don’t even know what you want to escape from.