#creative processing

I've gotta do the swallowing and the screaming and the "honey, baby, Ivy, sweetheart.”

It's been a long 24 years.

It's been an on and off bloody rough patch that I’m only just beginning to learn how to stitch up.

Remember all those times you used your love and vulnerabilities as a weapon?

Remember when you believed nothing worse could happen?

All the panting on all fours in front of locked doors and the humans behind them submerged in their drunken stupors?

Well, I'll bring those versions of the my past selves up close to my chest to warm them.

Can you warm them?

I can't warn them.

I've worn them out.

It doesn’t feel valid.

Like you have to find similar love pains to suit your process to make sure you’re allowed to feel this insatiably sad.

Its 50 degrees out.

You put the scarf on anyway but now it’s even more difficult to breathe. it feels like it’s suffocating you even though it’s wrapped loosely around your neck.

It’s the knots in your throat that you can’t swallow or cry or smoke away.

Sometimes my body is a bullet casing but no one ever sympathizes with the bullet. Imagine what it must feel like  to rip through another human being  so easily, at such an alarming rate. 

Sometimes the clouds are claustrophobic.  Sometimes they are exactly what I need to feel held. Sometimes I’m am taken aback at how beautiful I look after I’ve been sitting in my apartment crying all damn day. 

I wonder if my next door neighbors can hear me. I wonder if the weight of my aching seeps through the thin walls and drapes over their furniture.

The damage done by smoking is so silent. So silent until your lungs begin to collapse. The same way they collapse when you show up unexpectedly, and it’s still such a quiet cave in.

It just feels, it just sounds, so groundbreaking on the inside.  

I’m happy I didn’t waste any more of my time pouring myself into our non-relation. Our close, but nothing too. Our arms length away even within the holding. My love, your lacking. 

These stiff joints.  Even with the exercise, even with the stretching, they are all bracing themselves for the break down. Bracing themselves because I usually find someone else to fall into within the aftermath.

Now, bracing for embracing themselves. Myself.

Curled up on the couch like this is where I live now. I’ve lived this shade of life before. I’ll live this hue of life after you. I spend the weekdays sprawling my insides out on my living room floor, bedroom floor, bathroom floor.  Only picking up the necessary pieces. Leaving the rest. Laid to rest.

Then come the weekends; spent stretching my legs across wide floors to fill the bellies of the West Hills.

Weekends spent hoping you won’t stride your way through the doors of my second home to fill your hands and your stupid fucking North Star belly with putrid liquids.

This is where I live now-- the precipice.  I’m sick of being ripped wide open in my safe space. 

I have never been violent but I want to split your head open. There has been this rage settling, no, crashing. No, crashing then settling on the brim of my rib cage; between my bottom lip and my teeth.

It terrifies me.

Almost broke my knuckle over it last night when I missed the soft of the couch and hit the frame. 

I am only too heavy for you because of your lack of weight training. I am only too heavy for you because of your constant reminder to yourself of the things you think you do not deserve.

But who am I to tell?

I am only human and I’m sick of being condemned for that.

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