Tag Archives: anxiety

fields.

i set my blog to private for a few days while i sorted out some concerns  i’ve been having about it. i’ve been writing on the internet since i was 14 (1999? 2000?), since before blogging was blogging, since geocities, since ICQ, since britney spears, since forever. i write on the internet because i refuse to write elsewhere, because i hold myself back. this time i came dangerously close to not renewing the .com, but then i was brutally honest with myself and here we are.

one day, should i ever start publishing, it might stop. but still, i know it will just come back again. i’ve done it for 12 years and can’t picture myself not doing it. i would rather write here than risk having to speak, i would rather write here than risk having to write something i’d want to hear read aloud. and besides that, these pieces i have are just pieces, memories, poignant flashes like the visions of last night’s horrible dream. they’re never what i really want to say.

fields.

i have not stopped recalling
a february you, a lit
face by candles and dim desk
lamps in your pale bedroom

power hungry, and yet a
spooked horse, a man of little
knowledge and impossible
timing, dashing through torn
fields of grass and thistle
because you thought it would
repel me, propel me harshly
from your back

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gods.

while bearing the weight,
when every bone struck
by another finally
gave

you came up through swamps,
through metres of
dampness, miles. you swam
pools of water for me and

my wavering faith,
an idea you would travel
much farther,

give lessons in sadness
and strength

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centre.

after forty
days i have no fear
of death. the planes
lift off from pearson, sky
shuts on mississauga

in the centre
of a highway we walked
and we held
hands, we were
my nightmare soaking
in like sinking wheels before

my heels left holes
on bank street,
bad dreams to the glebe

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whistle.

january.

we kissed without
mouths, you took my
hand by the back of my chair

in real life
a revolution

in the darkness
planting blood
at the scene of the crime

february.

i don’t trust
where i have not
been already, so i don’t trust you

you take me anyway
but i’m never inside

i see him afterwards
and recognize the danger
but i go home with you
there is ice
and a stairwell,
a walkway without salt

we are
too far ahead for comfort

march.

by now there are
too many lies, exposed not
by the sun
but by its glare
off the lavender snow, a
shade pulled by tires

a smile, i know,
is the lie of all lies, i do
it myself and i do
it well

we run with the winter
to gutters, i am
alone in my home sending
soap down the drain,
not killing the mouse
who lives in the wall

he reminds me of you
he comes
he goes
he smiles too often
and hides, but not well

i commit far
too much for the month
of april,

the lawyer would call this
escape clause

i feel more
like i’ve turned myself in

i use your shirts
one more time, still to
cover cold bodies

and this time
like those times

i’m warm
in the dark

i will never let someone else convince me
that i am something i am not

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strangers.

in a memory, i didn’t live here yet. i was pregnant and i was single and i had a terrible wardrobe. i was in love with two boys and i couldn’t bring either of them with me (if i had wanted to). i was about to give up my car, my driver’s license, my job, my friends, my life. i needed to schedule an abortion. i drank tim horton’s instead of starbucks. i depended entirely on six packs & cigarettes.

i got lost. i drove right past what i now consider my favourite place, my go-to place. i turned around at the stadium, recognizing the structure from a photograph. i made my way. and then i met you. somehow, even in a memory, i met you.

and in a memory, i worked 10 hour shifts in a basement. i dyed my hair blonde, then dark brown. i broke my phone and lost all my phone numbers and assumed a new identity. i remembered you. i went blonde again. i moved into a new apartment with hardwood floors. i played house and did the dishes and the apartment burned down. i moved again and i remembered you. i had roommates and i fell hard, incredibly in love with white wine. and i eventually tore down the life i had created and moved into a new room.

that is when i let you in, asked you in. let memories fold over realities, let the lines blur. i tried and tried to keep remembering but the only you i see is in a classroom, spilling water on the floor.

so.
i’m sure that things have been worse before. much worse. if i remember correctly. but these are only memories; i might have made them up.

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king & james.

today i’m seeing the world completely differently, and not in the way that you think. you don’t know what you’re talking about. it’s not that way at all. it’s like i haven’t slept in weeks, my brain being like a drained sponge resting heavy in the back of its cavity, a dirty lump. i feel sketched out, is what it is. i feel like i’m coming off one hell of a pill-binge, right fucked you know, right right, sixteen hours of pure raging madness, lights and colour. i can’t eat, can’t taste, can’t smoke, can’t see. my skin doesn’t even stop crawling when i look down at it. bare arms, too cold. i see dirt that isn’t even there, you know, just old familiar film that can’t be peeled away, disposed of. moving always, muddy clouds across the surface, bit by bit. i’m right fucked up and i couldn’t tell you why.

this one time, when i was eighteen and she was just pushing the borders of sixteen and we were still such little girls, right, we were high for eleven hours in the dismal smoky disaster that we sometimes tried to pass off as our dining room. at ten-thirty in the morning i put on a pair of jeans and the striped shirt with the red neckline that back then i wore almost every day. pen and notebook and, still totally fucked out of my head, i bussed down to j-square with richard and kim and justin. this was when i was still seeing richard, maybe i think, and kim and justin wore studded leather jackets and clingy jeans and bullet belts and it was all kind of the way it’s wrapping up right now, you know, strung out. alone in the whole world, watching everything with my mouth stuck hanging open, eyes steadily scratched by every living thing instead of corners.

you reach a point when you just stop caring i guess. when what the world sees isn’t really what’s there at all. everyone thinks they really know me, you know, they have a good idea at least but no one does. i’m only myself when i’m in bed, my bed, his bed, someone else’s bed, or when i’m writing. i foresee, once these recorded thoughts begin to leak a little more, or once a moment in a bed is the undoing moment, i foresee a lonely fucking future.

spring 2008.

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blades.

above the crust
where else but breaking
through, not me, not
sure who, simply
snuck or stolen from
beneath, an image
shaken from my shoulders
with the earth

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nerves.

side swept
behind curtains, some
stranger’s window
or silhouette of home
left to dry,
gather flies,
left fumbling for
family in blind, trunks
of cars who stutter,
struggle for
the high
way

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simplicity.

it’s only august but i can feel fall coming through the windows. sweaters hang off the ends of my arms on walks home from work, and it’s already dark when we lock up the office. it never lasts long enough. even when there’s still all the time in the world it never feels like it’s enough. part of me knows that it’s boredom, anxiety and excitement for my fourth and final year of school, carleton sweaters with kristina and a graduation at the end. i’m anxious for time to speed up and pick away at me, i wait for it here on the other side of the bedroom window. the air doesn’t come through on its own. i want everything, and i want to do nothing to get it, and there are things i want that i’m beginning to think that i shouldn’t try for. i need to put in more hours while i can and still try and force myself into a strictly part-time routine. i need to focus on me and on school, and on finishing, and not devote every waking second to coffee pots and filing cabinets and cleaning up the client rooms. every year i tell myself the same thing and every year i wind up in the same place, never where i thought i would. i’ve quit classes for jobs in less than heartbeats, how when i was younger i’d quit jobs for boys and boys for their friends and sometimes it just boils down to the fact that my impulses have bred spontaneous dedication. i can’t slow down and i can’t quit anymore. i’ve committed myself more fully to everything this past year than i have ever done in my entire life. everything and, maybe more importantly, everyone. and fall is coming. i feel like it’s coming to take over, take charge. and i’m hoping it doesn’t damage those commitments. i hope it doesn’t take away what i’ve worked so damn hard to keep.

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