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They said ink was forever, but no one told me how it would feel to wear history under your skin, how it brands you not as a person, but as a relic. I want it out. Carve it from me, slice the memory from flesh, gouge each symbol until there is nothing left but blood and the sound of breathing through gritted teeth. Translate every line, every curve and cruel little mark, into agony, a night of reckoning beneath a sky that doesn’t look away.
Melt the gold. Let it burn. Pour it over my spine until it finds the fault lines in me, seeps into the fractures and remakes me. Not soft. Not forgivable. A statue, maybe. Something radiant and cruel, something you look at and flinch from because it gleams too brightly to be alive. I would rather be beautiful in my ruin than pitied in my suffering.
And still, beneath the gold, the river runs. The Styx coils in my veins, ancient and slow, and where it touches my soul, the skin splits open. He asks for penance. I have none. I have only these hands, these scars, this rage.
So I march with the rest of them. The dead who were never buried properly, the mourned and unmourned alike. We rot together in the open air, no prayers, no justice. Only the endless shuffling forward, bone against bone, ghost against ghost, hoping that pain might, someday, become something more than just pain.
5d ago
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I am rotting.
I am haunted by an echoing pulse of once verdant requiems,
morbidly veiling my vision with whispering fungal blooms.
They chatter and chit,
until withering into skeletal thorns that sink beneath my skin and burrow into my cadaverous tissue.
I am overgrown with lingering epitaphs,
as if they were carved into me,
the memory of those I loved secluded in my vessel of a body,
nestled between my tendons and sinew,
Nervebound.
There is a rift between the seraphic nature of the dead and beloved,
and the morbid and discordant kiss of death that blesses me even in life.
Though I yearn in my anguished turmoil to either blossom or wilt for a final time,
the will for my fractured heart to return it's abyssal pieces from the void
is a pointless, forsaken task.
For all my decomposing pieces have been exiled into the earth,
distant and estranged from the Sun.
I will soon be bound by roots,
and I only hope my sap will be bountiful.
A solitary tree, hollowed by silence and a chambered wildfire.
My bark shall ossify into marrow and cartilage,
and a volatile mix of dendral viscera,
wood and resin and pine.
I am fated to decay,
until I embrace the sky,
resurging into a cathartic rebirth.
My crimson liquor within my veins will become liquid amber,
feeding you with sweetness and the phantom flavor of my flesh.
Jun 28, 2025
I hang your jackets in my closet like trophies, or maybe like warnings. I don’t know which. I don’t wear them. It’s far too hot — sticky, oppressive heat that clings to the skin like regret — but I keep them there, row by row, like memory has a dress code. The scent is gone now. That clean, clove-sweet sharpness you always carried. Still, I walk past them every day. I make myself look.
It’s supposed to mean something. All of this. I keep telling myself I’m meant for something bigger — to make a name for myself, they always say — but what name? The one I was given, or the one I’ll have to carve out with blood and trembling hands? Fifty-five years. Fifty-five steps to the top of the hill, up to that damn library where I’ve been meaning to go. Where I keep meaning to go.
And yet. I don’t move.
My legs work. I know they do. They carried me through worse things — war zones of the heart, ancestral curses, kitchens full of shattered plates. But I still can’t make them climb. I don’t know if that makes me weak or merciful. I don’t know if it’s sabotage or a mercy I don’t deserve.
A dog that weeps after it kills is still a killer. A dog that weeps is still a dog.
Your guilt won’t make you holy. Your regret won’t make you clean.
So I ask: when you see a butterfly land on lavender — that momentary grace, delicate and impossible — do you still spell my name in your head, as if that might bring me back? As if I ever left?
May 28, 2025
For a man who follows his heart can never be weak. That’s what I used to believe, once, before the bodies piled up like autumn leaves, and belief curdled into something thinner than blood.
I caught the whistle player once, a man stitched together by calluses and riddles. His tune wasn’t music; it was a wound dressed in melody. It scraped something raw inside me. A song of mystery, yes, but also of cruelty, a tune without mercy. When I asked him how he knew such things, he only laughed. Said the desert had taught him.
Said that Mother Gaia, if she ever existed, didn’t whisper. She screamed. Through the grains of sand, she dragged him down, ankle-first, bone-deep, until he touched her molten heart. Said he came back remade, not better, just aware.
"Men," he spat, as if the word itself offended him, "have always been the destroyers."
Not gods. Not fate. Not even history. Men.
And I realized then: this isn't about nations or borders or wars. It’s about the individual. The one who chooses to light the match. The one who watches the blaze.
It is the gender.
It is the myth we wrote in our own image, thinking ourselves gods, when all we ever were, are, was ruin.
Jun 29, 2025
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For a man who follows his heart can never be weak. That’s what I used to believe, once, before the bodies piled up like autumn leaves, and belief curdled into something thinner than blood.
I caught the whistle player once, a man stitched together by calluses and riddles. His tune wasn’t music; it was a wound dressed in melody. It scraped something raw inside me. A song of mystery, yes, but also of cruelty, a tune without mercy. When I asked him how he knew such things, he only laughed. Said the desert had taught him.
Said that Mother Gaia, if she ever existed, didn’t whisper. She screamed. Through the grains of sand, she dragged him down, ankle-first, bone-deep, until he touched her molten heart. Said he came back remade, not better, just aware.
"Men," he spat, as if the word itself offended him, "have always been the destroyers."
Not gods. Not fate. Not even history. Men.
And I realized then: this isn't about nations or borders or wars. It’s about the individual. The one who chooses to light the match. The one who watches the blaze.
It is the gender.
It is the myth we wrote in our own image, thinking ourselves gods, when all we ever were, are, was ruin.
Jun 29, 2025
I unblocked him today. Stupid, really. A gesture that meant nothing and everything at once—flick of a finger, avalanche of consequence. I don’t love him. I know this the way I know fire burns and poison kills. But there was a time I did. Or at least, I believed I did, which might be the same thing.
And now, in the pit of night, he comes back. Not in memory, which I could handle. In dreams. Those cursed, wretched dreams where love feels like a trick played on me by some malevolent god. We are soft together, whole together. It feels real. Worse: it feels good. I wake up gagging on it. That intimacy, that false safety. My brain taunts me with what could have been, and I can’t even scream back.
So I dissociate. That’s the clinical word for it. But really, I haunt myself. I float through the day like a ghost freshly exhumed, skin buzzing with sleep that clings to my body like mold. Am I still dreaming? Has waking up ever felt this fake?
I ask myself: Do I still love him?
Then a worse question: Did I ever?
And the worst of all: Did I make it up, the whole damn thing?
Because if I did—if I built it all out of nothing, like straw houses and paper people—then maybe I am what he always said I was. A liar. A little girl who makes up stories and calls it truth. My father’s daughter.
And that’s the most disgusting thing of all.
Jun 7, 2025
Last night, I dreamed—though I can’t tell you what of, not exactly. There were fragments. A lawn, half-mown, or cats—dozens of them, maybe. Their shapes flicker now at the edge of memory, insubstantial. That’s how it always goes. I dream every night, I know this, but each one slips through my fingers by morning, evaporating like steam before I can grasp it.
It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I kept a dream journal. Religious about it. Woke up, wrote it down. And something about that changed me. Sharpened the recall, made dreams more solid. Realer. And then, over time, something turned. Now they vanish even faster. Like the act of remembering too hard wore out the muscle.
I’ve thought about starting again. Journaling. Documenting. Not just the dreams, but the moments around them—the texture of waking, the taste of forgetting. Because vivid dreams begin with remembering, don’t they?
But I hate recollection. The way it drags old feelings back up, stale and bitter. The way it stains the present with shadows of things that never happened. There’s something foul in remembering too much.
Still. Maybe I’ll try.
Jun 7, 2025