Empty Wandering Hearts









To compile words that aren't sure where they belong yet.

Personal.


An exercise in admitting truths to myself, like “you don’t always have to love things.”

(Source: apanoplyofsong)


"

If I had six questions to ask my mother, I’d start with where I lost my words. When the lines around her eyes started to form. When the hills stopped sliding upward, and why I won’t get a chance to grow old. Why I wasn’t born young. How you carry a life,
or maybe if it still hurts.


If I was given three words to send the universe, they’d be
“please, don’t go.”


I’d use those same ones for you.


I would apologize to these creations around me with a barren statement of
“I lost my way,”
and tell my mother all the things she has missed in a simple
“home is still strange.”


And my thanks to this damaged place would fall somewhere in the things that make up
the way I get to call you mine.


I am from a fragmentary world.
Your bones, they are trembling still.
Yet somehow, I can believe that somewhere
in this shaking shattered smoke-filled room,
there is someone saying “it’s okay!
just let them be.”
Using their six words for you and me.

The placing of faith on broken things.

"
—  Some letters to this universe, and the next universe still

I had a life before you.
I promise.

You say you want me to know the way you speak my name,

so I try to remember it at night.

I run from words when the time comes.
Bury them beneath my lips.
Let them gather dust in the corner
until they start to ferment and rot, but
maybe someday they’ll find you.
Be whole once again.

This spring doesn’t have magnolia branches,
yet somehow the earth still finds its cues in
things that aren’t your freckled face and white tree blossoms
thrown against the clouds.
Here, I’m still learning how

to love something whose roots can’t be seen.


Let me count the ways I miss you.

Let me count the ways I miss you.

(Source: peacefulghosts)


A note to self on getting better

Love yourself more.
Accept even when it feels forced.
Cry when somebody tells you that it’s going to be okay and you feel broken every time the sun sinks down or the clock hits 2am because you can’t fight anymore.
Cry for the mother you haven’t seen in years, on nights with nothing special but their thunder.

Resent the pills. Take them anyway.

Accept the words when they come and when you think they’re not enough.
Light the candle that smells like back-porch summers and let it breathe.
Tell your best friend you love her.
Tell the man you wish you could fall asleep without the same.
Bake a cake on a Wednesday afternoon.
Try not to be afraid when you need something other than yourself. You always have.


"I could write a book on the way the days here turn warm and heavy
while the rest of the world is still looking south.
I already slip my feet into fourth position
to fit within the light pole shadows on the sidewalk,
bare soles burning all around.
I still love most people I’ve sunk my hands into
though on some I use my teeth to fight free,
as if by sheer will
I could use them to love you more.
I’ve got a string of one liners I keep wrapped in my pocket,
and I try to fill my bed with things that won’t remind me of you.
I always fail.
I stay awake at night
pretending the dark is the touch of your skin."
—  Things I wanted to tell you

(Source: peacefulghosts)


paperscrapmemories: I just got back 4 rolls of (pink-tinted) film encompassing the last 3 months of my life. Bear with my chronicling over the coming days. Words are a little sparse right now, but my visual diary is up, running, and prepared to be updated, if you’d like to follow along there.

paperscrapmemories:

I just got back 4 rolls of (pink-tinted) film encompassing the last 3 months of my life. Bear with my chronicling over the coming days.

Words are a little sparse right now, but my visual diary is up, running, and prepared to be updated, if you’d like to follow along there.


beating hearts and things we haven’t said

beating hearts and things we haven’t said


I still fall in love with the strangers that I see.
It lasts approximately 3 minutes each time.

I let the water scald me when I get home.
My toes stay permanently cold.
I like them better that way.

I still believe there’s something in everyone that can make them cry
and that you carved yours into your ankle when you were six.
After 38 minutes in the summer sun,
my skin will turn the same red as your dreams
and stick around for another week.

My mother once sang to me in French a song her mom taught her;
a piano resting in the garage for years.
I let my voice get heard sometimes,
but mostly it still cracks under the weight of the waves I’m not bearing:

I’m not drowning if they’re not there.


I always forget about this part of winter: too warm for heat, too cool for air. This year it came three weeks after we rang in the new year, shared a kiss in an elevator shaft, hands pressed tight at three different midnights in the back of a taxi cab with a driver who told us about music. Told us how its magic carries you everywhere you go, stays tucked in your chest pocket on windy days so you can feel your way home. Nights with legs hung out from under sheets like sticking tongues under loosened teeth, just to feel them move. That song that got stuck in my head for four days in a row and the pillow we almost left in Tennessee. How it became us. How many impossible things.



bated breaths