Poised Uncertainty

(Source: dignityindiscomfort)

I thought it would be different. 

I had made so many plans. I’m good at making plans. I had the cliche slap across the face followed by a loud huff as I stormed off (you’d follow me begging to be forgiven). I had the traumatic accident which sends me into intensive care and has you pressed up against my bed, gripping my hand. I’ve had scenes of us coincidentally locked in the same icy cold room (we’d huddle, you’d give me your jacket). I’ve had us bumping into each other lost in the most of dangerous alley’s (you’d rescue me). Or the countless speeches I have made. There have been many speeches. Each one laying out all we were up until it happened. How much you meant to me, and how little i meant to you (you would deny this, of course you cared). It always, always ended with me crying into your shoulder with an assurance from you that things would go back to how they were. Hah.

It was none of that. It was none of that because it doesn’t matter to me any more. YOU don’t matter to me anymore. And it’s sad. And I’m sad. And when you shook my hand today, such a formal gesture considering all we’ve done, I couldn’t even look you in the eye. I didn’t want you misinterpret my tears. They were not for what you thought they were for. Funny, you weren’t looking at me either. 

Today, you finally apologised for all you have put me through. And you have put me through a lot. I think you meant it. You had that face you have. The one where you scrunch up your nose, as your eyes glass over. You look like you’re in pain, or watching someone in pain. Maybe you are.

You said sorry. You said that you had told her about me. Really? You told HER about ME? You said that she had told you to stop. She said that you should talk to me again. She sounds nice. But I don’t need her pity. 

There were tears, but they weren’t into your shoulder. I can hold myself up. I don’t need your jacket. I don’t need you to rescue me. I don’t even need you to care about me.

I just thought it would be different.

“In Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound”. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards, it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.”

-Hermann Hesse

She had an effortless beauty that made me question things. I was always questioning things. But this, this really pushed me over the edge. 

‘Yes, we live in a sexist culture, in which women have no good choices when it comes to our bodies. We live in a sexist culture in which women are valued primarily as sexual objects, and at the same time are shamed for our sexuality. It seems to me that we have two choices as to how to respond to this. We can try to navigate the narrow, essentially impossible shoals of these contradictory expectations, and try to find that perfect, socially acceptable line between slut and prude. 

Or we can say, “Fuck it. There is no way I can win — so I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want. I’m going to wear overalls, or I’m going to wear high heels. I’m going to have sex with twenty strangers in a night, or I’m not going to have sex with anyone. I’m going to dress conservatively and professionally in public at all times, or I’m going to sell naked pictures of myself on the Internet if I bloody well feel like it.” 

And in saying, “I can’t win, so I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want to do,” we can create the beginnings of a victory. We can create the beginnings of a world where we really can win. We can create the beginnings of a world where we’re a little more free than the women who came before us… and where the women who come after us are a little more free than we are. We probably can’t create a perfect world, where women’s bodies aren’t commodified in the slightest (not in this generation, anyway). But we can create a better world: a world where women’s bodies and minds belong less to the patriarchy, and more to ourselves.’

“Maybe I haven’t really forgotten you, maybe you’re the last person I think of before sleep, maybe you’re the first that I think of when I wake up, maybe you come to my mind every now and then, maybe I feel like calling you just to know how you are, maybe I have a wish to show up to your door just to know if you’d open it for me, maybe I still want to give us a chance. Maybe. But no, I chose not to have you any longer in my life and maybe that might be enough to forget you. Maybe.”

Momentarily I am able to grasp my thoughts. To push them all into a single woven basket of normality and sense as words trickle from my mouth. I did not mean to let them go. I do not want them to know. They answer anyway. I understand you they say as they nod their heads in robotic unison. They have no idea. Their attempt at compassion sickens me. Their futile, selfish needs of self worth and gratification will never be met by showering me with pity. 

                                    You feel sorry for me? 

                                                            YOU feel sorry for ME? 

I may not be able to see very far. I have not yet learnt to use my eyes. But I sure as hell know how to listen. I hear loud and clear the thin sheet of ice that surrounds your hearts. If you really understood what I was saying, if you really felt what I feel then my ears would be deafened by the sounds of shattering. That ice would not have time to melt, it would break apart with such ferocity sending splinters into every other organ. Pain would overwhelm. Blood would fill your eyes. Ice would penetrate your skin from the inside out. You would feel it everywhere.

                                                                No. 

All I hear is frozen silence. Do NOT nod your head. Do NOT pretend to understand what you can not even begin to comprehend.

“To write. An act which will not only “realize” the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (the guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being “too hot”; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing…) - tear her away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination, this emancipation of the marvelous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak. A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.”

"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful” people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it."

David W. Orr  (via grrrlstudies)

(via sister-bell)

I all but gnaw at the ropes in which I am tangled in. I struggle and I squirm as hot fluid escapes from the corners of my eyes. It is no use. I can not see what it is that binds me, there is no light. Yet I feel the strength of a thousand cotton fibers working in unison to keep me still. To hush me. She knew the extent of my capabilities, she knew that I had not realised them just yet. In my sleep she bound me with thick invisible ropes knowing I could not break through. She wrapped me in these ropes so that in my final moments of desperation I could come to understand all that I could have been. She wrapped me because she knew that on my own I would never have seen, and thus never truly have lived. In the cruelest of ironies she tied an unbreakable knot, so that I may experience at least once before that moment of death the extent of my power. She smiled as she watched my movements slow, tears now trickled from her own eyes as she saw my understanding. Realisation pierced me like ice. Was it too late? Her heart filled with warmth as my head bent in defeat. I closed my eyes and surrendered my battered soul. She walked over, got on her knees, wiped my tears with her strong aged thumbs and untied the unbreakable knot.

“Can You Imagine? 
For example, what the trees do 
not only in lightening storms 
or the watery dark of a summer’s night 
or under the white nets of winter 
but now, and now, and now - whenever 
we’re not looking. Surely you can’t imagine 
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing 
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting 
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly 
more shade - surely you can’t imagine they just 
stand there loving every 
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings 
of the years slowly and without a sound 
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind, 
and then only in its own mood, comes 
to visit, surely you can’t imagine 
patience, and happiness, like that.”

—Mary Oliver (via cigrette)

(Source: dignityindiscomfort)

I have a major vice. I am overly ambiguous. I flower and shelter and stain honest words. I scratch and squeeze and suffocate words that have been nothing but good to me. I have a phobia of raw words. Raw naked words, whose worth does not depend on the mindset of the reader. Words which just are. It is not yet possible for me to present these to you on a perfectly white plate with no garnish. I need the garnish. Why? I am terrified. I hide behind faceless language terrified that the words will read the way I mean them. Terrified that you will understand. Terrified that I will understand the meaning of them myself. I don’t want to understand. Once I understand, there is no more hiding behind strange synonyms and abstract metaphors. Once I understand I must face all there is me and that’s a scary thought. What if I don’t like what I see? What if there’s not enough? What if the raging forest that I imagine to be in my heart is nothing more then a single weed? What if I’m not a deep vessel, but a shallow vase? THAT can never be unseen. I can never go back. I must continue to hack and mutilate my truth with a knife made of overly punctuated existentialism. There is comfort still in this poetic mask I have made for myself.