As I sit here, dripping wet with monotony, I wonder, is there more than just this?
Is there?
More than hands on a clock, more than sand in an hourglass, is there more?
More than hoping this too shall pass, pass onto what? I question myself until I’m passed out on the floor.
I cannot fathom that this is all there is to life.
A routine sullied by sunshine and moonbeams – is this really all there is to life?
An unending battle of day in and day out, there should be more.
More that can shroud me from the perils of reclusivity – if that’s even a word.
More that can propel me towards the dreams I continue to confuse for reality
Because this? This cannot be it all.
Must there be more?
Yes, there must be or else what am I? What are we?
If not sedentary creatures of simplicity.
Tag: Mental Health
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Reflection: More
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The Sound of Grief
“There is no grief like the grief that does not speak” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It’s not so much that grief cannot speak, its moreso that all it does is scream.So much so that I’ve learned to block it out,
Allowing the days to drown it in monotony and routine. But then there are the times it feels like it’s drowning me.
Holding my head beneath the waves,
Allowing them to crest in my lungs,
over and over, until finally, there is reprieve.
The swelling of a monsoon that drags everything with it.
The peace of a moment before destruction.
A shallow breath before it all comes crashing down.
That’s what grief speaks like, it’s what I hear all the time.
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The Sound of Existence
Silence is nothing more that the absence of sound.
Death is nothing more than the absence of life.
And what is life, if not sound, feeling, seeing.
What is life if not tasting, yearning, ongoing.
Because even in death we do not end.
Donde hubo fuego, cenizas quedan,
Where there was once love, an imprint remains.
On the world, a place, a home, a person or people.
Is death the absence of life?
Then what is it that keeps us alive?
That keeps us going when the goal for us all is to die?
Isn’t that the pathway to the grand prize?
How we all arrive at the eternal life promised to us by the word of God?
Is death the answer to life?
Does that make life suffering, in turn making death a way out?
Have we become so sated with questions that we have forgotten to live?
Was this the curse unleashed from the tree of knowledge, when Eve made the decision to eat?
Is this endless crisis of existence the fruit that bore of that tree?
Endless questions and endless dreams.
If hope was the last thing that remianed in pandora’s box,
does that not make it a plague all the same?
If silence is nothing, and death is nothing
Does that not then mean that within us lies something?
That in order to fill a space you need more than what physically exists in this space.
There is life, there is death and there is after, even if the something we were ceases to exist.
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Faking It
Today I dressed up my depression as happiness, until it truly became that.
Until I was wearing an old skin that I wasn’t sure still fit, and it did.
It stuck to me like giggles caught in my throat
A smile bloomed in disbelief but nurtured in warmth,
my cheeks frozen in place with a shit eating grin that was reminiscent of a youth I forgot I possessed. I’m obsessed…with living again.
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It’s All in Your Head
Everyday is different, yet difficult all the same.
Everyday I want it all to stop.
I know, to you, these are just more complaints.
How lucky you are, not to have to live this way.
I know my mood swings are…an inconvenience.
But, everyday I want to cry.
To stop trying, stop carrying this lie.
Because the truth is, I am FAR from fine.
I have moments, precious moments
But they’re fleeting, become sparse with time.
I am the epitome of misery.
At least that’s how I feel, almost every second of the day.
It’s come to where I anxiously await a good day.
But you know you gotta grin and bear it
Because society doesn’t like sad people
Face it, you don’t either.
So you’d rather believe in “I’m fine” than recognize that this ‘thing’ is slowly eating me alive.
A slow sad poison from within.
There isn’t enough oxytocin to keep it at bay
All of the antibodies, slain.
And somehow, I’m expected to not break down.
To silently exist, silently resist, silently, anything but loud.
Because it’s all in your head.
Your head, your mind, your brain is one thing but it’s making you choose sides.
Begging you to pick me no pick me
While it’s more fuck you and fuck you more on the surface,
Lost in a haze of darkness because the light is too potent, too harsh
Unlike the silent dark, because that’s what you most wish for, silence, no jitters, no hindsight, no futuristic predictions
You’ve adopted a predilection for solitude,
Inherited a knack for loneliness,
Built an imaginary imagination
Where the days are easier,
Where the thoughts have dimmed down to a hum,
Where human interaction doesn’t make me physically ill.
I much prefer that fantasy
As opposed to the reality of having never moved from this bed
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Missing Puzzle Pieces
Getting diagnosed as autistic at 30 is realizing your parents tried to beat the disability out of you until you learned to internalize it so it wouldn’t be visible.
It’s realizing that you were gaslighted into thinking you didn’t need crutches, so you’ve been limping around thinking that how everyone is supposed to walk
And then you’re told it’s not.
I feel cheated, mistreated, ignored, unseen. Because I was well enough to be good enough, but I’ve never felt complete.
Always felt like I was chasing something on the horizon that someone else could see
I kept trusting that the more towards it I got the clearer it would be.
But that line just got further and further and more matter how hard I searched I just couldn’t see what they wanted me to look for.
Could never obtain what they wanted for me, what they wanted me to want for myself.
Now I know my present options are different, my motherboard has been rearranged so the buttons don’t all work the same.
But because it was too hard to figure that out they painted my buttons to look like everyone else’s, made me write down each function and label it.
Blue means laugh, no! Blue means sad.
I had to teach myself how to act, speak, even breathe like them
Now I have to relearn how to do those things as myself.
Unravel the personalities woven into this basket case and determine what actually belongs.
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Dancing Queries
A Dance with the Devil, a Date with Death
I have never been afraid of death.
Wary of it, yes
But curious, nonetheless.
And I guess curiosity might finally kill the cat.
Only this time, satisfaction can’t bring it back.
Is it wrong that there is a part of me too loud to ignore that would be okay with that?
That would welcome that outcome.
Yet, another part of me is just as loud, and she rages against the idea of an end.
Fights with tooth and nail until she’s bloody
But the opponent is inevitable, the only thing that the determines how long you will fight is time.
Time is the thing to fear most.
Time allows you to believe you own it, you have it.
But it is nothing more than a handful of sand.
The more you try to grab and possess
The more of it that slips through your fingers,
Right back into the hourglass.
Back into the fold, isn’t that how the story goes?
Polvo eres y a polvo volverás, no?
That’s the silent part of me, the one who weighs the most.
Who steadies the devil on my shoulder, and stifles the battle angel in my soul.
She waits, for truth, for confirmation, for the answer.
Be it received now or decades down the line, she simply waits as acceptance and denial murmur words to sway her.
To tilt the scale one way or the other
To react.
But silence is nothing more than the absence of sound.
She is my anchor of peace in a world that is too loud.
She does not fear death, nor does she embrace life, she merely exists.
And for now, that is enough.
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Unlock the Passion: Read Me Now
Read me.
I want you to inhale every one of my figurative details.
Hold a sensory image in your brain of what I look like.
Let my pages describe what I feel like, and what happens when I skim you.
When, my eyes devour your chapters in seconds.Pick me.
Lift me off the shelf and bore your eyes into mine.
Let my lines sing to you the beatings of my heart.
How they flow in time to the sound of every page you turn.
Drown in the sands of my hourglass.
Let my words pour into your soul and complete the understanding.
Tell me you see me, finally.
Read me, like your favorite story.
Predict my lines and rewrite the dialogue,
Just read me, it’s the only way you’ll see me.
Believe my words, feel the passion behind them, they are my most sacred treasure.
And I’m giving them to you.
I want to share myself with you,
But I am so lost in these lines.I need your help to find the page where I left myself behind.
I’ve jumped into the pages of your lines,
Of my part in your story.
Read me, pluck every syllable from my soul.
Define my adjectives, nouns, and verbs.
Get to the root of my words.
The root of my soul. -
It’s just a bad day, not a bad life
How do I even begin to explain?
Some days are better than others,
And most days, I have good moments
But not good days.
It’s like my vocal cords are wrapping themselves around one another
Constricting my throat so tightly,
It’s hard to breathe.
Being stuck in a hole, and feeling powerless
As to your survival.
What else are you supposed to do but sit.
Wait, talk to the shadows who deem you worthy of conversation.
Because while you’re stuck in this hole, life, the world,
They go on without you.
And say, you manage to escape,
Freedom never felt so great, but,
You don’t know what to do with it.
You haven’t been around people in so long, that being swarmed scares you shitless,
Haven’t seen the light of the sun, that its rays are blinding.
So you go back, and jump into your hole.
Because your prison became your home,
You found understanding, and faced fears in that hole.
But the laws of life consist of nothing but regeneration.
You take one away to be replaced with the next one.
How do I explain how it feels to feel like I do, right now,
And secretly, all the time.
Seething. Desperately hopeful,
Wishing that others can change, that they’ll notice the dirt on your clothes from climbing into that hole every night, and climbing your way back up every morning,
Before the light reaches the windows of those you thought might notice,
But they don’t
No one ever does.
And that’s okay, I’ve mastered slinking away.
Lying about the look on my face almost effortlessly.
And you don’t care, you try not to, but you can’t help it.
And you notice the dirt on their clothes, and because you know what it feels like to be stuck in a hole, you offer consoling words
Only to be struck back, lashed at, leave it alone.
And that’s okay, because you tried and were pushed away, it wasn’t you,
Or was it,
You question and search and maybe you shouldn’t have bothered, maybe they like their hole as much as you like yours.
But digging yourself out hurts too much at dusk.
Blindly seeking hand and foot holds, sliding and reopening scabs that healed from the last falls.
So you ask, and you talk because you know.
But the I’m fines and it’s okays and just forget it, push you further back in that hole.
And sometimes you just don’t have the strength to claw yourself out.
You make dolls out of clay, formed from mud and too many rainstorms.
And then it rains again and it all fades away.
But on my good days, the light from the sun doesn’t bother me so much, it lightens me and lifts me up. Dusts me off and sends me on my way.
My hole, I’ve realized, is a prison, not a safe space.
But it’s where I spend most of my time, locked away from ever having to disclose these feelings
That, I don’t even know how to explain.
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Finding Calm in the Chaos
It’s just that,
Sometimes it feels like I’m drowning.
Like, I want to dip my toes in the ocean on a hot summer day,
But as soon as they touch the water
A hurricane of wind and rain sweeps me away.
Most of the time, I’m spinning.
Being hurled around and around,
Fighting against the air being pushed into my lungs.
Sometimes I command the storm.
The thunder and lightning,
The tsunamis and monsoons;
We are one and the same, breathing into one another.
Other times, I fly into the eye of the storm; floating on silent waves.
As everything rages away
All I can do is focus on every breath.
On, staying afloat until I can swim back to shore.
I can’t shout, I have to make every breath count.
I can’t cry, I couldn’t muster up an SOS if I tried.
And then there are the times I actually make it back to the line between the land and the sea.
When I realize the only thing damaged in the storm was me.
I take my time away from the shoreline.
Away from the waves, and the sun.
From the calls of the sky, and the horizon.
Until, inevitably, I find myself back at that line between the land and the sea.
Between living and existing.
Inching my toes closer, wondering what the outcome might be this time.
To see if we might endure the pain of life.
If we might survive the perils of treading the open waters before us.
Or if floating, fighting and drowning is all there is to be found.
A Poem a Day 