#liminalheadspaces

[liminalheadspaces]

It's really cold out, much earlier than I expected. My cheeks are red like that night when I leaned over the bridge. I think about you often these days. Someone told me you're speaking to me in cryptic ways. I want to believe they're right because I don't think I'm staying here much longer, and I'd really like to see you before I go. There's still a few things I'd like to do before the cold frosts over.

-serena

<3

[dagneyrobertson]

Make more time for anything you enjoy. The corollary is also true. Do less of what drains you. It is hard enough to get through each and every day, right now. Use your time to create something, or to appreciate something someone else created. Encourage instead of criticizing. Help someone whenever possible, and accept help when it is generously given. These are principles that have stood me well for many years.

This year I find myself noticing so much generosity and so many people holding others up, but only because I am looking for it. It is so easy to get spun up in the narrative of bipartisanship, so tempting to focus on the stress and sorrow. But, if you are paying attention, there is also so much grassroots good stuff going on. You frame your world view. Gilt, mahogany, barnwood or bullshit? You decide.

-Dagney

#dagneyrobertson #mymidlifecrisis #liminalheadspace

Note to self: make more time for photography.  You enjoy it.

[liminalheadspaces]

I asked the tree, with its leaves littered across the pavement in the middle of summer, if it hurts to watch your guts spilled on the concrete floor beside your body. I asked if it would have anything left to shed by the time the cold breezes came around town. It whispered, it doesn't matter how I feel; it's the way it is. What matters is my bark that will be touched by the dawn of new centuries you will never see.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

Loud laughter plays out on a bright animated screen. I glance to my side and share a smile with our group scattered across the row. Their smiles twitch. Uncanny Valley. I'm not supposed to be here. Oh no, I've done it again. I've wormed my way into people's lives and tricked myself into believing my own delusion of forever. Now, I must quietly excuse myself because I was never invited in the first place. Why must I only realize halfway through? Will I just be a dream? Something you made up in the haze of passing seasons? The routine of quiet shuffling up a theatre aisle feels familiar today, and before I know it, the door swings shut behind me. I fear I'm doomed to grow apart from ninety-nine percent of everyone I meet. I've run through so many people that I don't recognize myself anymore.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

Everything always comes back to the simple truth - is everything I'm feeling true or is there something deeply twisted in knots in my head and the sick mush of my brain will one day be studied in textbooks that explain the dreams of a mad author.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

I don't know if you believe in the red string, but today, I feel it tugging and biting my skin. In the early hours of the morning, the thin threads squeezed my neck and wrists till I turned a beautiful lavender. I am left with nothing but your name and the epiphany that it was never about the mess we made. It was always about my fear, this unbearable pit at my stomach that gathered when I remembered today that you weren't a story I made up. That you were real. That you really saw me, perceived me in a way I had been waiting my whole life for. But bitter are the harmless wishes we weave myths around. Being completely seen petrifies me. I feel nauseous and frozen, and all I want to do is run away from my own body. I forgot what that felt like until today, until that thread tightened. And I fear tonight it will draw blood.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

On the bus today, I was thinking about how my future self wouldn't let me stay this way, so they definitely know more about me than I myself do now. For a brief moment, when we spoke, I could see them. Old and wrinkled. And it hit me - before today, before June 8th, 2024, I had never once seen myself old. Older perhaps, but not old, elderly. It felt like something inside me had healed and the timeline had shifted a couple months ago, and perhaps in this lifetime, I will grow old and I will know what it feels like to live for years and years.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

I'm returning to myself in so many ways. I could never explain my world in events because everything has been unfolding in my mind. But everything - the fear, the anguish, the love - brings me back to who I was and who I am. I have become more myself over the last year. And it's truly everything: all the pieces are radioactive on their own, but together, they complete me.

Today, I finished up another book. I'm reading with the curiosity and mirth of a child. I open up unknown titles, and I let the sentences on the pages sink in. I don't chase the story; I sit with words and roll them around my mouth.

I read so much as a child because I was eager to create meaning from stories so far from my own. I read anything and everything. Books stirred my heart and enveloped my whole world.

But when I wanted to return to my books a few years ago, I went searching for that feeling and I could not find it. I didn't know what I liked to read anymore. The reward of the epilogue was no match for my impatience.

Today, I realised that I've found the feeling now. And it's just one little speck of the entire universe I've (re)found. It was never about the books - it was always about the words.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

Let my dreams be kind to me tonight. If you must enter them, please tread carefully and leave a trail of only soft whispers and loving words. I am so tired and I don't want to fight and hurt and bruise tonight.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

Another year will pass and I will experience something so extraordinary I can't believe it and I will be thrown into a loop of pure awe and dazed fear. And once again, it'll pass and the equilibrium will be reset. Whoever said death in rebirth was right. I've shed these scales so many times that my past lives feel like a fever dream.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

Pretend for a second you don't know me. Close your eyes, let the tips of your fingers trace the ridges in my palms. Can you feel it? Do you see all that I am? Do you see where I could go? Do you see all my selves and all their journeys? Don't you see, it was all predestined. You were always meant to crumple me in your fist. And I was always meant to thrive in the concrete. So many paths and all of them lead back to right here: your fingers in my palms, and us wishing we could rewrite history. We always land right back here.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

I thought it was over a few months ago but I don't want to be alive again and I'm realizing that I was the problem all along. I'm sorry I blamed you in my head. I was the chaos. It was me.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

Maybe one day I will know how it feels to love longing. I am captivated by longing in that it holds me captive, squeezes me raw. I return to it because I love the familiar softness of bruises. But I know it is dangerous; I know I have drawn blood before. I only hope that one day I might submit to longing without the danger, a longing that does not desire self-destruction.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

For a brief moment in time, for the first time in a while, or even in my life perhaps, I regret everything. That's not something that happens often. Funny how I regret things only when everyone else in my life firmly believes that I shouldn't. My ears are ringing and I can't breathe. I pray to my future that everything meant to be will fall into place nonetheless. This is a new feeling and I hate it. I hate having regrets. Again, I shouldn't have them, not this time, according to everyone.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

Sometimes I'll watch a video of myself and think I look particularly young. My face hasn't really changed, but unlike yesterday, my face looks like a twelve-year-old today. It's in the expressions, I think. And it's days like these when I realize that the little girl never really left us, but it's even harder to watch her grapple with emotions that are not hers to keep.

-serena

<3

[liminalheadspaces]

I know deep in my soul that I am a good person. Not in any righteous sense under moral conceptions of good - I just mean good in terms of genuine intentions, constant growth, and being a deserving being. But I think that secretly, I am actually a terrible person, and my god am I petrified of people finding that out.

-serena

<3