#micro wordsmith

Hate being stuck at home

So much grief

So many people could have helped

Along the way

So many people could have been better

And instead looked the other way

Or worse chastised me for my normality

And now I can't be at all

No matter where you go

Always in view of someone's window

Usually several

Never a place to just exist with nature

It's condoned off

Carefully controlled

All this land and only a dozen different plants

One kind of grass

Three kinds of tree

Square bushes that can't feel the breeze they were built for

It's heartbreaking

Earth is so much more than this

You did so much damage to it and for what?

because the world called you too much

Dear part of me that I couldn't protect

because I was too afraid to stand up

Dear part of me concerned and confused

because we didn't have a narrative to frame the misuse

Dear me

I'm sorry

I owe you an apology

You got shafted by life

And by my reaction to flee

Your pain has withered, cracked

Your voice atrophied

You deserved better

Deserve, still do

For I can not weather

Or face yet the full truth

Of all that you mean

All you could do

Here, my apology

My apologetic decree

She exposes every glaring flaw

Pinpointing insecurity

Promising obscurity

And pain

She smells like the rain

Inhales fear

Exhales hope

Boisterously gentle cacophony

Filling a room

With frantic pride

Rejected, you trashed it

Crassly wrapped

You said

It's not good enough

You said

I deserve all of you

The best of you

You said

Entitlement laid bare

I hid my bloodied hands

Behind my back

Bit my tongue to hold back a comment

On how hard it was to wrap

How much I denied myself to urge

To crawl my way to you

When my legs were

Begging for relief

For sleep

So I limped instead of walked

I'm so sorry

My wholeness is incomplete

I am less of a human

In your eyes

And you had the audacity to cry

When you said you missed me

"The old you"

Well guess what?

I do too!

There is no choice

I have no voice

My health is the whim of the wind

And you're a fucker for putting your grief on me

Without even labeling it grief

It was blame

Gods you make me feel insane

All of this emotional labor

Is torture

This body broken

Battered and used

Holding up

A millennia of abuse

Passive aggressive violence

Weaponized my silence

My existence

I am withering away

And you are only grieved that you have less of me

Virtual diary

If you know me IRL and I explicitly have not shown you this blog, block me. Do not pass go

-Z/A'

The grief is endless

Mine

And my mother's

And her's before

My ancestors live in my bones

They wail

and they moan

Grief

Unrepentant grief

We mourn

Between them and me, she and I

It's the overwhelm of a face

I see a brilliant, shimmering tapestry across life

The thin threads reaching out to tug your face into shape, a smile

The tense of your shoulder, the flinch of your finger

These emotions get soaked up, they linger

Autism creates the kind of intimacy that requires careful distance, least we drown in the ocean of your eyes, the depth of you

But you don't see me, my beautiful intricacy

I'm infantalized, or worse disrespectful

For not looking at you?

For not following unwritten rules bound in illegitimatecy?

You love rules for the sake of rules

Don't see my boundaries as purposefully built flexibility,

dancing around my fluctuating needs,

around my pendulum swing

my rituals leave space for deeper understanding

Autism is the tick, tick, tick, tick, tick 

Down the mental checklist

The tap, tap, tap of my fingertips

The flaps of excitement and fear

My hands tell of my history

My voice weave threads of lore into conversation

I am always, always searching for connection

Sometimes I am stuck in a wordless mire

My mind aflame with all that I

Being wordless is trying to

When I am voice off I must... 

Wait. Wait. Wait.

Until another day when my voice won't fail me

I hear the buzz, the whirr, the rumble of distant sounds you can't detect

I remain connected, grounded to the entire universe

so that you always have something to grasp

Yet you never, ever see me

Why the fuck can't anyone ever see me?

Autism is being stuck behind a glass

Humanity on the other side

A monkey in a zoo

I open myself, pour myself out

In the ways that I dance around what I know you distaste

You aren't aware of your own sensory needs

you see yourself

I see your soul

Our traditions are lost

Rituals that leave space for deeper understanding

Leave space for connection

we need to go back home

and home is not a place

it's a network

grounded in intimacy

that you will never find

Until you honestly, truely