“Be crumbled.
So wild flowers will come up where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.”
– Rumi
Author: Christina's Words
“The darkness around us is deep.” ~ William Stafford
“A Sad Child” by Margaret Atwood
You’re sad because you’re sad.
It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.
Go see a shrink or take a pill,
or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll
you need to sleep.
Well, all children are sad
but some get over it.
Count your blessings. Better than that,
buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet.
Take up dancing to forget.
Forget what?
Your sadness, your shadow,
whatever it was that was done to you
the day of the lawn party
when you came inside flushed with the sun,
your mouth sulky with sugar,
in your new dress with the ribbon
and the ice-cream smear,
and said to yourself in the bathroom,
I am not the favorite child.
My darling, when it comes
right down to it
and the light fails and the fog rolls in
and you’re trapped in your overturned body
under a blanket or burning car,
and the red flame is seeping out of you
and igniting the tarmac beside you head
or else the floor, or else the pillow,
none of us is;
or else we all are.
– Margaret Atwood, “A Sad Child”
“Her mind is an unquiet one, …
“Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other.”
– David Levithan
“if only you could see yourself now” by Brandon Speck
if only you could see yourself now,
you’re settling back into a quiet autumn
and you’ve missed the smell of must, rain, and tobacco
kissed into the corners and couches
of the same house you share with seven others.you miss the girl who used to sleep on your couch
who had the skull of the bird she is named after
tattooed across her arm.
you are glad you stopped drinking.it’s 2am and you’re staying up far too late.
you have an interview for a job in the morning
that you will come to hate in 2 months.
you’re not in love the way you expected.some memories turned into broken drawers
that you chose to store all your knives in,
every time you open them, they always come spilling out towards you.
you miss having sex with people you also love.precariousness is now the pillow you sleep upon,
and you no longer have such structured repeating romance.
you no longer have such a structured repeating life,
and I know it killed you that you knew it wasn’t forever.i know i can’t stop you from panicking,
but it will all make sense.
you repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat
until you realized it was too early to build such a life based on repetition.you’re settling back into a quiet autumn,
and you’re stone sober at 4am after a Friday night
while the world starts to make a strange kind of sense,
the same way words become meaningless when repeated enough times.all of this
is to say,
you made it this far,
and i’m proud of you.
— Brandon Speck, “A Letter to Myself, A Year Ago”
* Gratefully 3 years sober, today. Thank you, friends, for reading. -Christy
“I have flipped through books, reading hundreds of opening and closing lines …
“I have flipped through books, reading hundreds of opening and closing lines, across ages, across cultures, across aesthetic schools, and I have discovered that first lines are remarkably similar, even repeated, and that last lines are remarkably similar, even repeated. Of course in all cases they remain remarkably distinct, because the words belong to completely different poems. And I began to realize, reading these first and last lines, that they are not only the first and last lines of the lifelong sentence we each speak but also the first and last lines of the long piece of language delivered to us by others, by those we listen to. And in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same: in poem after poem I encountered words that mark the first something made out of language that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain: I love you. I am here with you. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now. And I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth: I love you. You are not alone. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now.
But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising. Among Emily Dickinson’s last words (in a letter). A woman whom everyone thought of as shut-in, homebound, cloistered, spoke as if she had been out, exploring the earth, her whole life, and it was finally time to go in. And it was.”
– Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey
Words ... for the Time Being 