so I swallowed all of it as I realized there was no one who could kiss away my shit

 I just can't get my heart up on its legs today. Two days of spring in Staunton, and now a winter weekend of cold rain. My life has such small chapters: slipping into my Christmas boots to fill the feeder with greasy black sunflower seeds, walking to the porch to check the drizzle before a run, the deposits of salt in small piles where the snow has melted. I am asked such large, stick-in-your-throat questions about meaning, but my chest is so full of uncertainty and I'm rarely allowed to speak. 

All I want is a few growing things. I ordered seeds and didn't realize until they arrive that everything I've bought is some shade of yellow: pale lemon sunflowers, golden cherry tomatoes, peppers that look like crooked fingers all in a cheerful shade like the inside of a peach. 

I will bring nice, icy drinks to you

 Being back home alone and sad in my teenaged bedroom feels familiar. There's a king-sized bed now instead of my twin mattress with the Ikea princess netting I loved. My mom has put up some icicle lights, apparently in homage to the holiday rainbow lights I strung along my girlhood bedroom. She has also put up some teaching-wine-friendship message text decor, apparently in homage to some friends who have given her ill-suited gifts she must display somewhere for politeness, but doesn't wish to see.  

The flowers I hung to dry are still on the wall, and most of them are ancient and diseccated, leftover from when I worked at the coffee shop in high school. There was a florist in the shop next door, Rosemary, whose name sounded too good to be real and was. It turned out she was using an alias and ended up in jail for the financial crimes her florist business was actually a front for. Oh, but whoever she was, she knew I was 17 and loved receiving flowers. I gave her free coffee because there was no one to tell me not to. A NoVa love story if I ever heard one. Rosemary, if you can hear me, I'm coming. 

Just kidding. 

One miracle is that I located one of my mom's nice, crystal wine glasses brought up by a drunken and miserable me over last Christmas and left carelessly in a corner of the room behind a lamp. It still has my name on it, scrawled in the silver wine pen I bought my mom for her stocking. (Santa did, I mean.) I like to see it: my own name in my own handwriting. 

The glass was overlooked but my mom had helpfully placed other forgotten things from that visit in my room - specifically, the festive, expensive port I had bought and brought when I had envisioned a different Christmas than the one we ended up having. 

I stay up all night reading Calvin and Hobbes and drinking the failed Christmas port. 

Strength to your arm, then

 I'm re-reading Knight of the Seven Kingdoms because I needed something simple and good in my mind for these lonely, listless, disinterested days. I was surprised to find how impactful it still feels when nothing else does. I've read it so many times that it feels like returning to an old friend. I guess I'm a little overemotional, but I keep finding parts that make me tear up. 

*

Egg soon fell asleep beside the dying fire. Dunk lay on his back nearby, his big hands behind his head, gazing up at the night sky. He could hear distant music from the tourney grounds, half a mile away. The stars were everywhere, thousands and thousands of them. One fell as he was watching, a bright green streak that flashed across the black and then was gone.

A falling star brings luck to him who sees it, Dunk thought. But the rest of them are all in their pavilions by now, staring up at silk instead of sky. So the luck is mine alone.

 A few inches of snow on a Friday morning. Last night, I got drunk and re-read a huge chunk of this blog. It's funny; I feel like I used to be such a good writer, but now my prose and poetry feel so lifeless - not just because I'm going through a hard time now. It was off before this. I know the only way I'll make it better is to get back into practice. I used to love writing about my life in this blog, even knowing nobody read it. Somehow, having it be online instead of in a journal somewhere made me try harder with it. I would really like to get back into the habit, and I know I won't unless I keep writing something here. But it's frustrating.

musings on cursed jewelry

 I've never been the kind of woman to ask for jewelry. 

I wear a ring that my mom bought me when I was 16 in Norway, a sterling silver replica of a Viking Queen's ring pulled out of a grave. It's seemed to have grown to my finger. My mom has the matching one. My wedding ring was 40 dollars from Costco, and I bought it for myself. My engagement ring was a divorce ring bought by a man who used to beat the shit out of the only family member on my partner's side that I ever loved. It's never fit me so I don't wear it. I don't tend to like rings. I break firewood with my hands and scramble over fences. Rings get snagged and rip. I grew up in a family where the bills were paid with manual labor. I remember the first wedding ring of my landscaper father hooked up on some wired root ball, the way it almost ripped his finger off and the look of his dark red blood forking down his finger from the rent in the gold. His second ring, he gave to a beaver walking down the center of a moonlight river. He still has his third. You don't buy nice rings for such a man. I'm my father's child. I'm more likely to be walking down a river in the middle of the night than to be given a little banded nest of diamonds that cost more than the nicest car I've ever owned.

I asked for a ring this year - it felt so scary to do, even dropping the hint. It wasn't the kind of fancy ring that one would spend a paycheck on, but I liked it: a blood milk moon stone in a pretty setting. Of course, it was cursed, and of course, I don't have or deserve it now in the hellscape alternative universe nightmare that's become my life. 

I've thought of that often in the last few weeks - not the ungifted ring itself, but the sense of absence. Maybe I would be a better kind of woman if I wanted those kinds of trappings, or if wanting them, I asked for them, or being desired, was in a situation to receive them. In stronger moments, I've thought about buying it for myself, my own meager moonstone ring. I could buy it and pretend someone who loved me wildly and thought I was priceless and didn't hate me had bought it for me. Or maybe it would be better to imagine it was something I had gotten myself: a strong statement of my own self-possession, the message "I am worthy" despite what I feel instead. In a real way, I don't even have the 200 bucks the stupid ring would cost, so it doesn't matter, but I think of it.

I had an anxiety fidget ring with a wired stone I'd bought for 10 bucks in a witch shop in Occoquan, but I literally ripped the stone out of the holding flicking it too hard the last few months. I think I'll unwind all the wire and bury it in my yard.

cs lewis

 

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.

Sonnet

I dream the grocery list.
I dream that I must go to a city on the coast, but my eyes can't focus on the map, and I end up on a highway driving in wide, infinite loops.
I dream I am building a wall of snow.
I dream the crows come down and are nicer to me than they ever are in life.
I dream my stand up.
I dream someone I love is strangling me to death in the Whole Foods parking lot. 
I dream a skating rink. A mall from my childhood with splashes of teal and purple on the walls.
I dream I wait on a boardwalk full of abandoned tourist traps, dimly lit by dusted bulbs.
I dream the waves outside are higher than houses.
I dream of a blue jay flying on a leash held in the hand of a woman who looks like my neighbor.
I dream of a thousand better things to say to you.
I dream two twin, perfect twisters.
I dream a basket of seeds that are as perfect and bright as candy.
I dream I have captured every cat out of the backyard.