Latest Posts by jean-elle-writing - Page 5
There are parts of me, like patches in a quilt, that don’t seem alike at all, that aren’t quite right sitting next to each other at first glance. But I promise they are. I promise my silliness does not contradict my seriousness, I promise that all of me is better together than ripped apart.
There is something so shameful in trying. In putting forth the effort out in the open where the onlookers look and dig their forks into my darlings. My creation dies in the end, regardless. Whether they relish every morsel or idly masticate while their eyes are drawn to the street walkers, just like all that came before her, my idea is eaten. And I am left alone to wonder if a piece of my soul had any flavor worth talking about.
If there is nothing worthwhile in me, how do I go forward from here? How do I live as a creature and not the woman I thought I was?
The girl I was and the woman I am reconcile in tides. Coursing warm waves and biting cold foam, dancing in circles. Becoming one another, and abandoning one’s self in permanence.
There is a kinder world within all of us, but we must agree to be as kind as it is to see it.
That was when I met him. My undoing. He was like a father to me, but I was not like a daughter to him. He knew this. He knew what I saw when I looked into his eyes, and he did not look into mine, drawn into the gaps between my blouse’s buttons like black holes for morality. I was always to blame for his touches. I had always thought of myself as a girl, as a person, but really, I was a place. A place for innocence to die.
I cling to the anchor because I think the ship will drown me.
I crave the familiarity of the salt water over the cold whipping of the air.
Because I would rather drown than change, I would rather stay stuck in the same place for the rest of my life than breath the air of tomorrow.
Melodic, melismatic is she. Her song is her figure dancing in air, steam rising ever out of reach.
Sirens often eat out of hatred, not love. So when the sailor girl asked the siren if she found her appetizing, she shook her head with a tight lipped grin. The human took it as rejection, her eyes falling to her hands and picking at the callouses she found unsightly, not understanding she had just shown her affection for her. That hiding one’s teeth was a gentle act of favor the merfolk used.
I wished every day was summer when I was a little girl. No school time, just bikes on the pavement. Sun chasing our shadows, never quite able to keep up. Sweat collected on my forehead like a tribe of parents watching me worried as I popped wheelies with no helmet on. The wind brushed my hair wild. I wished every day was summer when I was a little girl. But I’m a woman now, and the sun has caught up to me in the shape of fluorescent bulbs. It has taken my shadow. I swivel in my office chair and lean back to feel childhood’s wind-
I feel nothing.
I can’t have children, I’d have too much love for them. I’d bring them up scared of the world like I am. Scared of nothing and everything at the same time.
I fear looking into my adult eyes and not recognizing myself.
If nothing else, I will always have my misery. Like a child that does not grow old but cries and cries in her cradle, only silencing in my arms. She is mine, and I am hers.
Why is it whenever I am alone I slip my hand beneath my black wool jacket and find any wound I can and open it again, to bleed, to bleed. Is it really my destiny to bask in life so little and ruminate on the scarcity for the rest of it? Is my stomach shrunken and my heart empty, am I a vessel that cannot be filled and can only watch as others are?
Her photo bends white at the creases, opened and closed a thousand times, my memories dull and taper away. I think of her. And I wonder what parts of her face I’ve forgotten in my desperate plea to remember every freckle on it.
I adored living as a shell of myself. I held echoes in my chest where my heart used to be, and laughed in tickles as the words of others caroused my rib bones. Nothing at all was serious, nothing mattered the littlest bit to me. Until someone I knew recognized me. A girl I went to elementary school with, with sharp blue eyes and now dyed brown hair; she used to be blonde. I used to be too. Everything feather heavy caught weight on me, my skin was saddlebags, my heart beat for the first time in eight long years. It was a rapid hurried thing my heartbeat, like it had just woken up from a bad dream. The girl, well, a woman now, ogled at me with a sort of cold consternation—she looked sorry for me. My hair sort of tangled, my outfit worn since last night must’ve been so starkly different from the neat hand-raised-in-the-air-eager-to-answer-a-question girl that used to sit next to her in Mrs. Jones class. It hit me then that something did still matter to me, not present me, but to my childhood self. Little me was still alive, she still cared about what Jasmine thought of us. She used to cheat off of our math quizzes for god’s sake and she’s sorry for me? How could I ever be something I’m not in peace when there are lingering living memories trooping about, forcing me to remember who I was, and acknowledge what I’ve become. I adored living as a shell of myself. Nothing hurt so badly as it does now that I don’t anymore.
When the vine burst through cooked earth, and curved to and fro toward the sun, I knew growth was not linear, nor was it impossible to come back from the dead.
A sudden calm washed over me
I felt no need to rush
To the finish line, to the next milestone, to anything ever again
My heart quieted for the first time in a long time
And beat gently in my chest, the way a child’s hand is held by her mother’s.
I want to live a thousand childhoods. I want to know how cold the water gets in the backyard rivers of country houses. I want to feel the texture of marble on kitchen counter tops and eat everything the private chef prepares. I want to run in grass miles and miles long with my sisters. I want to know how young feels in every skin there is.
I felt a twinge at first in my stomach, like I’d eaten bad crab, only worse. Like I’d eaten two bad crabs. Horrendous to even imagine. As my god unraveled me by an invisible umbilical cord leading back to him, my skin loosened and bones leaned on each other like the limbs of a wooden puppet. Weirdly hollow, with a sudden cacophony of clatter, I simply disappeared. I come to you now as a memory. A ghost, maybe. Or a cloud of events so positively stupid and unyielding that not even a god could get rid of it. I’m sure you’re wondering how I pissed off a god I so dutifully doted on for years on end to the point of being turned to dust, I must tell you, the reasons are long and each grow more foolish than the last. It began the day I blamed god. And he blamed me back.
There was a worse fate than death, I found, as the god I once worshipped laid his hands on my very soul.
To be unmade.
That is the curse of living, that we choose what is familiar and not what is good.
I often love men I know I have no future with. I build castles in the sand near rising tides, and I watch lovingly as they are eroded away by reality. I don’t know why I make things that don’t last. I’m afraid to have something that matters to me I think, that could hurt me more than I want it to.
His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, in love with the way his own ideas tasted.
Sorry I don’t write to you anymore. I’ve been meaning to, surely. But I just haven’t gotten around to it. Every time I try I see the blood dripping down your face, from your hair slick to your forehead. It didn’t even look blonde that day, you barely looked like yourself shambling toward my car like that. A part of me hoped so badly that it wasn’t you, or that you didn’t recognize me through your haze. But it was, the voice croaking in its throat was coarse but it was yours. The creature on fifth street was my best friend.
I know you don’t remember much now, and letters like these are probably meaningless to you. Who bothers to read and write when they’re.. becoming what you’re becoming. Maybe you’re finished becoming..I hope not. I hope there’s still time.
Do you remember before all this? It’s all I can think about. Things were so normal then; I didn’t appreciate that enough. I didn’t know I was going to lose it all to the awful man who did this to you.
I need a new wardrobe—I’m running out of time to be young and beautiful. For people to see me and not just look at me out of some mundane politeness. I need to be everything I am right now in these fleeting moments, or it’s like they’ve already gone.
The truth is I have nothing worth writing about in me. I don’t connect with other people and that’s where good writing happens. I’m often in other people’s arms, I’m enwrapped in their laughter, but I don’t let them anywhere near me. I want so desparately to be loved as the mangled creature that I am but I’m too ashamed to show anybody my real face. So I hide it. And I make people laugh, I make them laugh so hard their sides hurt. And I feel the closest thing to love that someone like me can have. And I hope it is enough, because I don’t know how to have more than that and still feel safe. Maybe there isn’t a way. Maybe truly being loved is supposed to be scary. And I’m just a coward.
Our screams were never songs. Is that what you’ve been hearing all this time?
-Diary of a siren
The siren caressed the sailor girl’s cheek gently, like a receding tide brushing its long fingers on the sand reminiscently.
“You never wanted to hurt me, did you. Why? Won’t you starve? You’re thin as bone,” the sailor girl asked, letting her eyes roam over her wet skin as she bobbed out of the dark water.
The siren shuddered at the comparison, and whipped her hand back suddenly. Mermaids were competitive, the more meat on a girl the higher she rose in their ranks. To be thin as bone meant one was nothing but that, a carcass without value, without muscle, sinew, or flesh.
“I am more than bone, but you. You are thin and sick even though you rove the land where food grows on trees and you hunt for nothing, and yet, you come to me to die. I will leave you disappointed. If I have to suffer this life, so do you.”
Her short dark hair seemingly melted over her face, as the sunset turned to night and shadow enveloped her entirety.
“I, I meant no harm,” the sailor stuttered, unaware of her misstep.
“Your people never do, and look what that leaves us,” she spat, and turned her head, now a dark hungry pit, toward the docks where a siren hung by the neck.
“My people? Is that what I am to you? Some violent human eager to noose you,” the sailor girl’s eyes carried hurt, and she nursed her chest’s wound with a calloused thumb in circular motions.
“I wish you’d broken my heart with your teeth and not your words,” she said, and retreated from the shoreline with a flush cheek from where she touched her.