for nought

But I’ve never heard words like this in the night (Where does such tenderness come from?) with my head on your chest, rest.

Trauma is weird. It takes up the whole body: you sweat it out. It lives in your skin and in the depths of your intestines and between your legs. It shakes and dizzies and bends you double. Trauma can’t be compared: it doesn’t matter that someone else survived the same thing without a scratch, or that someone is getting by in a different way. Your body has its own rules and you have to follow them. It took me a long time to understand this.

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

It ends or it doesn’t. That’s what you say. That’s how you get through it. The tunnel, the night, the pain, the love. It ends or it doesn’t. If the sun never comes up, you find a way to live without it. If they don’t come back, you sleep in the middle of the bed, learn how to make enough coffee for yourself alone. Adapt. Adjust. It ends or it doesn’t. It ends or it doesn’t. We do not perish.

Persephone ate the seeds because on land she was a flower but over death she was a queen

cut my mouth on temple floors / asking for the best thing I stole back from the dead

Isn’t it just amazing what the people we’re in love with can do to us? That the simplest act of affection, the tiniest brush of their hands against our skin is able to leave us behind panting and lost for words while we wouldn’t even realize if it wasn’t them? Don’t you think that it is nearly unbelievable how another person can affect us as if they were addictive?

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.             Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green             in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn             mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you             like a sparrow stunned with falling.

sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.

I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.