a stage set for catastrophe

“do you forget you are better now? even when you wake up in the cornfields as a mouse and not inside the labyrinth of the bear’s belly? do you see yourself becoming less like vase? i do. it means the cough syrup is working like it should. it means only one-third of you dies when the window shuts now. it means you’ll be holding onto whole again.”

“I stand in the heavy fields like a still life. A misinterpreted dream. I try remembering: What is it that makes the sky look carnivorous? What is it like to be innocent, unapologetic, and my own again?”

“for months, you turn back on yourself like the moon. you lie in the fields & offer your grief to ground but it refuses. night pours like syrup over your chest. tell it how you never want to call the thing that holds you a garden again.”

“It’s not obvious how the world survives. Does it stop on the porch and sigh? Call out to all its new aches like shepherd herding sheep? Exhausted trying to teach them all to grow thorns?”

“Know that those who leave their homes behind often don’t depart quietly, that I’ll probably be more like a foreclosed home in need of repairs than the kind you’d want to settle in. And granted that the human anatomy is a synonym for art, you’ll most likely be spending more time shoving my soul back into my mouth than living with it because sometimes acts of vandalism don’t always show up on the skin the way bruises do. It won’t be long before you discover that I am more of a safety hazard than an escape route, that my fingertips are flint strikers and everything else tinder. So if you are lonely and just looking for home, do not look here. Do not invest in these bones because people are not homes. I am not home.”

“this year, you are a different kind of girl. you preserve your hurt in a honey jar just to see how much you’ve grown. and hey, sometimes comparisons are a good reminder of what it looks like to move forward. & here, there is no need for confessions for being a seeing-is-believing type of person. this is no church & making it this far is enough of a religion for you. this year, you shake out all the rugs in your house and wash your hair twice until it lathers in blooms like your barber told you. but that’s as far as rules go. for the rest of the time, you grip the reins with your teeth because you’re in the middle of writing a to-do list you’re only going to half follow. it doesn’t mean you won’t learn how to eat a pomegranate right or how to hem your favourite pair of pants. you’ll find a way to improvise and find out you’re good as hell at it too. remember last year? last year, you went as far as making a pact with yourself to not look back. but back then you didn’t know that that was those kind of promises. the kind that mimics leaving a ceramic flower pot on the edge of the top step of your front porch in the middle of a big storm. it taught you a good lesson though, so maybe it was worth it. but this year, you are a different girl. by now, you’re a little closer to figuring that life is more like a conveyor belt or the moving walkway in airports than whatever someone else said. meaning: you can look back as long as you don’t go back. so yes, restart. or reset. this is a crying year, a laughing year, a growing year. this is another year to grant yourself a second chance - be it your first, fifteenth, twentieth, or even fiftieth. and i am here to wish you all the best.”