#from my capstone chapbook at my uni

[olskuvallanpoe]

I feel like we’re going about this backwards.

The first time we met, he told me he loved me.

And now? I pass by his door without knowing who lives behind it.

[olskuvallanpoe]

Skipping Stones

There are rocks beneath my skin, buried within my muscles.

Boulders. Like when you eat something but don’t chew it enough so it sinks like a stone through your esophagus.

These are other places, though. My calves, the middle of my back.

I’m skipping my painting class today because they settle painfully against the wooden bench I have to sit on.

Well, I’m not skipping class, not really. I’m told that missing class due to chronic pain flaring up is a valid excuse.

I’m still not completely sure I believe that—

Or maybe I’m completely sure that I don’t know if I believe it. What’s the difference, really?

Is there any merit to naming the way my chest tightens when the clock strikes the time I would have otherwise left my room?

Once, my brain was really muddled.

(My mother and I refer to this as “pain brain,” and we first noticed it when I couldn’t tell the difference between left and right while directing her through Google Maps. It’s when I’m in so much pain that my brain stops working the way it usually does. I forget things, and everything gets jumbled, even the way I talk.)

I had a class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that started at nine-fifteen. I had another class on Tuesdays and Thursdays that started at nine-fifty.

I left my dorm on either a Monday, a Wednesday, or a Friday—I only know it was one of those days because of which class I was going to that day.

I got to the classroom at some time suspiciously before eight-fifty (or maybe it was eight-fifty, itself?) and the room was dark.

I checked the time on my cell phone and then had the realization that I must have gotten the time wrong. The class must have started at nine-fifty, not nine-fifteen, since no one was anywhere near the room.

To make a long story short: I ended up missing class and sending a frantic email to my professor, trying to explain the foggy way my brain had dealt with the dates and the times.

It was like I’d put the two times in identical bags, completely wiping the dates from my mind. My muscles told me to go at nine-fifteen, but I didn’t choose that bag to pull from. I pulled nine-fifty instead.

But how do I explain that to a professor without sounding like I need to be institutionalized?

My loved ones worry about me a lot because apparently I push myself too hard.

Sometimes I agree, but sometimes I just feel lazy. Sometimes I feel like other people feel like I’m lazy, and that’s one of the biggest fears of mine.

My disability is rather invisible, and this was even worse before I started using a cane.

I always feel like people assume I’m lying or exaggerating.

Sometimes I even agree with them. Often, I agree with them, actually.

Like when I miss class because of the rocks in my calf muscles but don’t know how to explain it beyond a my chronic pain is flaring up and two or three sorry for the inconveniences to assuage my guilt.

I’m dreadful at describing pain. To doctors, especially.

Like—how am I supposed to know what a stabbing pain is when I’ve never been stabbed?

Is it a bone pain? Dude, how am I supposed to know? For all I know it could be a blood pain.

I don’t really trust medical professionals anyways.

I’ve met maybe one in my life who actually listened to me.

I don’t know how much more of this class I can afford to miss.

[olskuvallanpoe]

mom’s knitting basket

at 9 am, after finishing three duolingo lessons, elsie is still in bed.

a memory—not a real one of the kind you’d find in harry potter,

a blue-white string of light pulled from a temple, or extracted from a teardrop.

only this is how my memories would look in the pensieve: jumbled, full of questions,

tangled up in life and examples and profound little notions.

it’s like how i imagine it would be to spin a brain into yarn—

not an actual spool, though, but the tangled mess of mismatching colors and textures at the bottom of my mom’s old knitting basket,

one long, clumpy, dusty mess that only i was ever patient enough to unknot.

the rest of my family just tossed it out or clipped it with kitchen shears.