June's Musings

Mortally Heart-shattered, bleeding from wounds you authored, Your magnum opus Mold grows in spaces where love did once Insects gather and feast it’s sweet rot pervades my senses And I wonder When my time comes to soar Will I fester? Afraid of this life’s fast approaching decadence before I’ve mixed and made magic of it? My stiffening heart made un-malleable by yours My tongue, longing for saccharine morsels Savors only ash and dust The morsels you have brought me In a box labeled “I love you, I’ll never leave”

Grieving my Brother My brother was found dead by gunshot wounds on June 5 of this year. And I’m not sure how I’m going to endure. Everyday I wake up and sink into the realization that this is not a dream. The journey of grief is certainly not linear if anyone’s wondering. It meanders and topsy-turveys. I’ve pleaded with God. I’ve bargained. I’ve manically (perhaps maniacally) searched for the scientific formula for time travel up late one night. (Don’t ask me what I was thinking, I’m grieving.) And I’ve been trying to keep his memory alive with me. I hear his smart remarks when I’m making a decision. I hear him toughening me up when I’m too afraid to go for something. But none of that is enough. None of it is enough. None of that compares with the gut wrenching feeling of knowing he’s gone and there’s nothing I can do to bring him back Everyday feels unreal. Thinking of the violence by which you met your death, the fear and horror you may have experienced. The pain, all of this p...

Desperately anticipating the lonesome narrow roads, bereft of leaves and life’s little crawling things  the twisted, gnarled shrubbery gets caught on my sleeve. lost in the forest, I find myself clinging to those familiar mislaid things Too addicted to the pain they cause,  too terrified of what may come in their absence.

Those of us inclined towards relationships often have the bad habit of hanging on even when we shouldn’t, when things are bad and we know we should leave. This is even more exacerbated with people like myself, who  come from abusive homes, and have a skewed sense of self-worth. I held on far longer than I should’ve. I knew two years prior to our break up that things weren’t right and that they weren’t going to be right. We were never on the same page and had different ideas about what our relationship should be. He wanted my unquestioning trust in his leadership and I have learned due to a very tumultuous upbringing that no one deserves my unquestioning faith. Trust is a foreign concept to me. Needless to say, we were stressing each other out. The stress triggered my arthritis to come out of remission, and my hea lth began to seriously decline, which caused my mental health to decline as well. However, none of that stopped me from being immensely and irrevocably in love wi...

In the mornings, I caught the sunrise in your eyes. You were the morning star, my own aurora, my pharaoh, immortalized in my yearning for you, empowered by my idealization, all powerful in your nature, all consuming like the sun and I gave and flowed and poured into you, til there was no more of me.

In my nearly 16 years of being diagnosed with a chronic illness, I’ve had a few people, perhaps concerned, perhaps in morbid curiosity, ask what it’s like to navigate this illness. Some background: One day when I was 12 years old, I woke up feeling feverish, achy all over, and with just a general feeling of malaise. Days and weeks went by and the pain got worse, my joints began to swell and lose range of motion. Even worse though was the barrage of clueless doctors and endless tests to endure as my family and me tried to figure out what was happening to me. After about six months of confusion and little answers (not to mention, excruciating pain), I was finally referred to a rheumatologist for children who diagnosed me with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis (now called Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis) of the polyarticular type (meaning many joints are affected, not just one or two like in most cases). In the time it took finding my diagnosis, I had lost most of my mobility, independence a...

Being convinced these machinations in my head are good legitimate ideas. That might be the worst part. Being unable ultimately to trust yourself down to your core. Convinced of two completely opposing ideas at once, mind switching like the clock, tik tok.  What am I worth? Am I more than my actions, my ideas and ideals? My identity being so warped from what there really is, the thing I give to people, the one they see.  I fear I have become made of wood, each morning I stiffen and creak. Every day I await the chopping block.  My mind is poisoned by my thoughts, I know not which are friend or foe. Lately they are all I see.  “We are all conglomerates. Some of us just feel more one than others.”  I want them combed out, detangled, hot grease dripping, a stove eye on high, a hot comb glowering up at me. I want them processed and pulled through, til by some miracle or someone’s mama’s persistence, they resemble something straight.

Insatiably I search for that feeling Compulsively cleaving to cloying closeness, craving comfort In the form of hidden touches  And muted moans in the backseat And Dripping with anticipation of the promise of makeshift pleasure  I find when I touch your chest I feel nothing My stomach, not alight with electricity and flying insects All the while this numbness building Spreading like a sickness As I bring you to your pleasure That passionate release I yearn for remaining hidden from me Til feeble from hunger and thirst I stumble into another pair of arms Blissfully unaware of burdens those arms  May be holding Wondering Why I feel like an empty vessel, Longing to be filled Driving my universe towards the notion Delving into places Love may be hiding  Finding it not in the spaces Everyone said it would be