You're already in there; I'll be wearing your tattoo (I'm already in circles and circles)

Rabbit, rabbit, Autumn.

*

Tonight, we hung out with the family next door for the first time since moving in. I took them some tomatoes and butterflies over the summer, and the woman, Erin, said she felt badly that we'd never really connected in the two years we've been at the house. So when their boys were settling down, they asked us over for some wine and we took over bread and some garden flowers. She was like, "I see you running all the time, what race are you training for?" and I was like "oh I don't run races I just run for me," and she was like "I've run seven marathons, you could if you wanted to." My maniac brain is pretty intrigued.

Also, it was cool to be reminded that people aren't always what you think or expect. I always assumed we were pretty different types of people, but it was laughably untrue: they both had MFA writing degrees, and ran, and liked the same history books I did, and they'd watched the same TV show I just started. I'm too old to still be categorizing people, but I do. You'd think my experiences would have taught me better than to trust on my impressions.

*

I've had kind of a bad week--more dreaming, as always, tired, and then I have to go all to cville tomorrow. I took my emergency anxiety meds for the first time last night in six months, and then I hated today, how everything slowed down to a crawl, and everything like sharp fractures of glass for my analysis. The only way I started to feel normal was tonight, sitting on my front porch, writing garbage.

I didn't die and I ain't complaining, I ain't blaming you

Tonight: folding laundry and listening to Modest Mouse like some kind of 2010 me.


*

I mean you had me on my knees

I'm a tough and capable woman who can handle her shit. But sometimes there's just nothing for it. I run, I read my story, I get off, I eat, I drink, I listen to music. There's just nothing for it.

turn these diamonds straight back into coal

This has been the most successful year of my life so far when it comes to my work being published. I just found out I got another two poems in this week, and yet, for the life of me, I can't think of a single thing to include in the writer's bio that every single publication or contest wants from me. What does a person say? What do you include in a brief paragraph about yourself?

I'm Jess from the Shenandoah Valley. Suddenly this year almost everyone in my life has spontaneously begun referring to me as "Jessie"--a name I have never gone by but like because it's different. I don't know what I'm doing. I dream exclusively about OLED driving circuits, touch substrates, interface processing or the same recurring nightmare I've had for six months replaying my litany of interpersonal failure. Everything has changed and everything is different and I have almost no use for myself anymore. My hair is almost to my ass. I am all of Nithavellir. I make a lovely trifle. I am a ruin of my former self. I can cook and I'm good at running. I know how to define a space. I suck good cock. I grow good pumpkins. I have to still think: worth it. Like Satan, I am an angel of light.

But I will probably just list my other publications.

When we're found, oh we'll kiss that ground

Every night, I come home and listen to my Gregory Alan Isakov record and make a beautiful dinner and clean up and go for a run and then take a shower and think over and over again to myself: at least your tits look amazing seriously you dumb fucking bitch your tits are finally so good.

I'm remembering last fall, and having one of those moments where I realize a time-travel last fall me would in seriousness not believe any of my life right now and the things that are happening.

*

I wanna write about my gettysburg sex/ghost vacation but I'm just this side of still catching up from it all. I'd say "I'm feeling kind of odd tonight" but that's literally what I've been posting for months and I should probably think of something else to say eventually. If I ever had any readers, I'd lose them. Tiresome sad girl.

Here's something though:

Where Col Lewis Armistead fell, the furthest any Confederate ever got on Pickett's charge, running to see his friend on the Union side. I know I've written about the story on here before and what it means to me. The scroll monument is for him: to mark where he was mortally wounded. He never saw the friend he was trying to find, so their last words to each other would remain as they had parted during peacetime:

"Goodbye, you can never know what this has cost me."

But I like some of the last words he said to the Union soldiers who came up to him after he'd been hit on the Gettysburg field a little better. "I'm not surrendering; I'm dying."

Oh, Lo.

you were right about the end, it didn't make a difference

I've been drawing the Tower a lot these days, and again today, on another recurring nightmare day. Today, it seem to say "Learn to be comfortable with your ruin. This rubble. This is it."

Today was my Monday

Despite having the kind of dreams that cause me to wish aloud for lobotomy, I felt pretty neutral today. Instead of the kind of constant mental overdrive that I normally struggle with, most of the day I thought about, legitimately, nothing. It was kind of weird and very unusual for me, but also kind of nice. I think I was extremely dehydrated.

On my morning carpool, I was telling my buddy about having the bad dream again. The morning was hot even at 7, and the mountains were hung all hazy. I told him, "I think it's just my mind's way of getting by. I don't respect myself enough to demand confrontation or closure in life, and then in my sleeping mind, I try to make it for myself but it comes out like this: a recurring nightmare."

And he said, "I had a dream that you were a really unsuccessful werewolf."

Now: a horrible run in the heat.

down in the valley with whiskey rivers, these are the places you will find me hiding, these are the places I will always go

Good time to run off.

I'm happy that it's cool enough for my fatigues again. I've hardly felt like myself without them, and my legs get torn on the thorns.

Late season harvest for dinner.

Long hair; don't care. 

This week's meditation: keep room for what you don't know.

Current status

That mood where you're giving road head on 501 and you take the dick out of your mouth to say, "pour one out for our favorite daughter" when you pass the turnoff for Travis's farm. Then you spend all Saturday in a hospital waiting area.

It's a weird time for me. What weather we're having.

one more for the stars and the eyes of the walls

It's funny how things scar. Sometimes surprising, sometimes the littlest things: I have one from chasing around at Legends and getting caught on a brier. Nothing deep, just a long line of silver on me. It blazes up when I tan, and I'm almost tanner than I've ever been. I have one up my wrist from my bad, tough, dead girlcat in highschool. I love to see it and think of her wicked green eyes.

And sometimes there are the pretty obvious ones that you know as soon as you get them: they're going to stick: I have a scar on the inside of my throat. My calf where that Wampler boy threw me into a fence. Wounds you see and just know how it's going to look down the line.

I just got a new one, and I'm a little proud in my cut-up too-interested way about it right now. I ripped open my knee on a jut of beaver-pointed limb, and there's so much of me gone. I can look at it and know I'll never be on my knees in the same skin again.