quietlyaligned

[quietlyaligned]

[quietlyaligned]

there is an empty room somewhere that needs me

[quietlyaligned]

at some point i chose to exist loudly and honestly and it has been sort of revolutionary. i didn’t silence my story. i used my voice and i spoke up. removed the shame and shifted my narrative. i gave myself permission to stand tall in my truth without guilt

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is it easier to pretend that i am a bad person to justify the pain that you are causing me

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“you could be in love and not be together and i think that’s the saddest thing ever.”

— sometimes two souls are poisonous for each other but love each others taste. (via bubbly)

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But then he will drop your body on a platter, 
stick a fork in you and call it love 
That is the only love you will receive, 
because all you are is a slab of meat, 
and meat is only for consumption, Natalia.

[quietlyaligned]

but would you notice

[quietlyaligned]

I remember there being a short period of time in which I believed that maybe things could get better. And these things became the hairline fractures in my heart. Until suddenly there were so many, that they morphed into one huge unavoidable break. There were so many moments in which I was alone with her; evenings where I wandered into the void of her darkness with a lantern fathomed out of a desperate need to understand why.

“What the hell is happening?”

I hid the quivers in my voice, and the shutter in my ribcage in order to make her believe that I would be okay holding the weight of her existence. I became her confidante. And that evening she handed me her baby girl. Swaddled in a towel, and wriggling in the wake of the passage between her arms and mine. I gazed upon her and saw nothing but a blank face. How could something so small weigh so much? Bent over on the stairs with my mother, and a baby, I met the man who killed us. His hand outstretched like a snake in a garden, clenching my neck until my eyes bursted out of their sockets. I cried for my mother to save me, but her eyes became dark pits in the middle of her face too. She held her baby by it’s neck, and neither I, nor it, knew how to cry. The baby dropped from her hand like a wine glass, and shattered into a thousand shimmering pieces. The man was gone, but the seam where my mothers spine should be, began splitting in a perfect line right down the middle of her back. Bent over on the stairs, I watched her turn into a yellow tinge. I saw the black on the tops of her teeth, and the bruises on her legs. I saw her lose and gain weight like an unexplainable tide, bellowing at the moon like a wolf in the middle of the night. She wept like the rain outside of my window, and the same fear that I felt in the wake of summer sirens screamed in me like a thousand questions unanswered. I remember when she told me that God would save her. I remember when she asked me to pack up all of the alcohol in the house like a box in the garage would be enough to keep her away. It wasn’t. Like asking her daughter to bury a gun in the backyard, only to come home one day and find that she had dug it up and blown her brains out on the kitchen floor.

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[quietlyaligned]

tell me you’ll remember me

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[quietlyaligned]

when I was sixteen I used to whisper over the phone, “I don’t get angry”.

[quietlyaligned]

Today I drove down argyle forest

looping around morning commutes

and late night walks

from different lifetimes

Wells Road

Where I was 17

And thought I knew what it meant to go to work.

Riverside

Where I was 18

And thought I knew what it meant to get lost.

That’s where it cuts off

When I cut down

And cut out

I sat on the edge of the passengers seat and

Sketched the skyline

But by the time I got a building out on paper

We had already moved

And my drawing

Wasn’t true anymore

Not that it was

True to begin with

Like maybe the only

True things I know

Are things that are already over.

“Drive by here again in two years” he said to me.

“You won’t even recognize this whole stretch, the current landscape replaced with silver beams in beaming light.”

Drive by here again

in two minutes, I think to myself.

And I already won’t recognize it

Because it is already not mine

Because I am already forgetting

What I am already not even sure I ever knew

[quietlyaligned]

Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961)

[quietlyaligned]

I let you hurt me. Scrub my skin with broken glass. That should be enough. What the fuck else do you want from me? What the fuck else is there left for me to give?

[quietlyaligned]

voicemail-60.m4a

[quietlyaligned]

Nothing feels important but everything feels urgent. Something is missing here. In the car, in the bedroom, under my fingernails. I arch my back and bite my lip against the hallowness and taste fucking blood. I want to be wild, ugly, and undeniable. The world owes me that. Give me a city that I can destroy. Give me a lover that I can burn. Let me hold a heart in my hands and break it. They all know it is there, my aching rage. It’s why he knows I won’t let him kiss me. I hold him farther than arms length. I hold the loneliness inside of me when it wants to pour itself out of my throat. I want to spill out I want to spill out I want to spill out. At the very least, I want you to stop wanting anything from me.