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Some new thing is growing inside me. Against all odds, it flourishes in the dead heat, this brittle, barren mindscape I call mine. Nothing should grow here. The air is dry and mean; the ground splits apart like scorched parchment. Like skin, peeling from a nose too long in the sun. And everywhere, snakes. They don’t strike unless I forget to watch. But they’re there. Coiled. Waiting.
I don’t long for high school. That’s nostalgia’s lie, that it was ever better than now. It wasn’t. But I do miss something as stupid as socks over skinny jeans. There was a kind of armor in that. A loud, silly defiance.
Back then, I let people peel them off. I thought that meant something. That if someone wanted to strip you down, you were wanted.
Now, my socks stay hidden. Worn under the jeans, dull and quiet. They’re toe socks, ridiculous, maybe, but mine. No one sees them. No one knows that I wiggle my toes in my shoes all day, a private protest. A quiet comfort. They protect me from the sharp, glassy stones littering the creek bed. And maybe that’s all I need: something small, something mine, against the jagged things that would tear me open if they could.
2d ago
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My room is a corridor of doorways. Not a space, not a shelter, but a network of half-thoughts and abandoned exits. The floors reek of piss, like some wild dog marked its territory and then left me to rot in it. The walls pulse with memory. Or maybe delusion. Either way, it’s loud in here. Thoughts swarm like ants — frantic, mindless, pathetic — all scrabbling for something to hold on to. Information. Meaning. But there’s nothing. Just famine. Starvation of sense. A thousand tiny legs searching for crumbs in a house that hasn’t been fed in years.
And every day the sky breaks open again. Not metaphorically. The rain here isn’t poetic. It hammers. It devours. It doesn’t cleanse; it drowns. The ants drown, but they don’t die. They keep moving, twitching, twitching, twitching. Not alive. Not dead. Just full of guts and nerves and the viscera that keep them twitching. That hard carapace we all grow when the storm doesn’t stop. That’s all they are. That’s all I am.
Sometimes I think I’ll dig my way in. Crawl through the iris of my own eye — molecular, meticulous — and enter the network of my brain like a savior. A surgeon. Maybe a god. Maybe I’ll find the ants and teach them how to be more than twitching muscle and damp despair. Maybe I’ll name them. Maybe I’ll give them something like hope.
But dry drowning is real. No matter what they say. And the terrifying thing is — there’s no evidence it isn’t.
May 27, 2025
I’ve never felt this skin touch air before. It’s pink and raw like fresh meat, like something not meant to see the sun. And here I am—half-naked in a garden that pretends to be Eden, if Eden were lined with thorns and mountain lions instead of angels. The shrubs rustle. I hear it breathing. I know it’s there.
Maybe I made it up. Maybe the fear is its own beast.
Tonight, sleep will come with teeth. That I know. You can’t talk to nightmares the way you talk to people—there’s no bargaining, no clever arguments. Just blood and the echo of screams.
There's a cartouche on my wall, etched in gold and dust, staring back at me like a curse I forgot I summoned. I think it’s watching. I think it knows. And where the fuck is my shoe? I had it a second ago. It’s absurd, isn’t it? That I’m thinking about footwear while being hunted?
It moves. I move faster.
There’s a crunch. A scream—mine, maybe. Or maybe the thing’s.
I look down. Under my Converse, something’s twitching. Then it’s not. Just a smear, just a stain.
I’ve killed it. I think. I hope.
And I wonder, briefly, stupidly—would Mother Gaia forgive me for snuffing a life because it frightened me? Because it was inconvenient? Because it was there?
Probably not. But it’s dead all the same.
Jun 18, 2025
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Soon I'm starting college and leaving my home. My parents, my family, the houses I grew up in, the towns I know, they all will shrink in the rearview as the roads become unfamiliar. Outisde the window, the budding fields will flower, then grow sparse, then livestock will graze until on all sides surrounds a desertscape split by a lonely road.
Im not scared of the sand or what lies at the horizon line. I'm just anxious about meeting this chrysalis. Will I remember the green hue of my catapillar skin? What about the grasses that keep me safe?
I know my childhood isn't lost; the butterfly or moth I become will have the same guts. It's just honestly hard for me to accept how much childhood I've already spent. Hard to lay rest to the virtues and aspirations a young larva once held so tightly.
We're always crysalizing, constantly cocooning; simultaneously one thousand larva one thousand cacoons one thousand moths. I guess I just convinced myself to enjoy it.
May 8, 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