Defines You? No.

Joy Sullivan, “Want", Instructions for Traveling West

I don’t want to be the next Rupi Kaur or Trista Mateer. I want to be the first Lila Kane.

Girls when they life starts to sound little bit too much like the fig tree analogy by Sylvia Plath

i woke up at 4am to my cat throwing up beside me in bed. guess this is what married life looks like 😔

my heart lurches into my throat and lodges at the back like a jagged-edge stone. my lungs sprout wings and fly away.

the aching of their absence in my chest is heavy, despite my rib cage housing hollow. my skin jumps and begs to rip free.

i wake, and it is not a dream. my body is running from me, yet my mind will not free itself- it delights in it's cranial prison.

i wake, and your body is still rotting 6 feet under, your heart and lungs and skin and mind no more- but i cannot gift mine.

there’s an echoing in my bones telling me to

leave this place

and not return.

i can’t decide if it’s fear or fire.

my jaw clenches

and my teeth grit

and i can’t seem to stop the rope

from slipping, fraying.

my tether is escaping me

and is it fear or fire?

i need to know

before i decide.

do i leave this place?

this purpose and pay check?

do i slink away like a fox

in the night?

where’s the rope?

hello?

where’s the light?

hello?

can you hear me?

a child’s disclosure

i took notes around the corner

from the chainsaw’s roar,

while the lock was wrenched off

by its teeth.

and i wrote about the fear,

and the tears,

and the injustice of it all.

no safe space to call—

not home,

not him.

i watched puffy eyes,

matted hair,

tremors—

and i thought and thought.

but all i could do was take notes

around the corner

from the chainsaw’s roar,

while the lock was wrenched off

by its teeth.

Write like a song. Or write like somebody else. Write about anything so long as it’s not yourself, and don’t worry, because it’ll still be about you. It all came from you, the potter who could never completely buff away her fingerprints from the clay. Write vaguely, don’t show your hand. 

But you do not want to do anything anymore. You want to lie in bed and watch the crane spin around the skyscraper outside your apartment, until its lights turn off and it rests for the night. You wonder if you were perhaps not built for love. You joke that you’re stupid, but the joke isn’t funny anymore when you tell it to yourself ten times a day. You are no longer funny, you have become Pierrot, a foolish fool. 

You passed a man with his shoe untied walking to his car downtown. You almost told him the news about his laces, but you imagined he’d feel dismayed so you let him pass you by. You want to stick in people’s memories the way they do in yours, but you don’t know how. Maybe next time you walk down the street you’ll untie your shoe and imagine that somebody noticed.

to live without art is to live without breath.