Everyone cheers for someone who is fighting for their life, full of hope with a positive message, vulnerable enough to be relatable, but not too much as to be overwhelming. She is seen as sincere when she talks about overcoming. She inspires, because she has a life-threatening disease, but she still believes she will beat … Continue reading A Note from the Shadows (an essay confessional)
Is this a battle for my soul? To go down in the fires of reckoning, or somehow grow wings to rise above the flames? To be loss embodied, grief personified, or to open my heart wide to be emptied enough to hold more light. To be wild as the night or tame as the day … Continue reading Free Will’s Toll
I’ve become a fearful, and fragile thing, only strong and powerful when I'm wild in dreams. I may look well but nothing is ever what it seems. No one knows what unravels underneath what is seen. I’ve been a trophy for a hunter and a doll for a prince. I tried to reveal how real … Continue reading Ethereal Lights
I cannot be an untamed wind, whipping others about without a soft place to land, especially when legs are barely strong enough to stand. When you tremble in your shoes and have so much to lose, you cannot open your hands to let go or to hold on when all the silken petals are gone … Continue reading Tame the Wind
Is this some great hollowing? Is this how I'm to be made empty? To become one with the void? Every time I think I'm close to making peace with my circumstances, the black veil returns to shroud the world in my eyes by dimming the sky. Some say it’s hard to see in greyscale, but … Continue reading Heart Light
I used to feel beautiful in the morning, innocense restored and lines smoothed out on my face. Now the lines seem deeper and there is no such thing as innocence anymore. Now I'm only tired and my tissues know it, losing their grip on my bones and sinking like my heart to the bottom of … Continue reading Making Peace with Aging
There is an undertow pulling at the soul housed in my ethereal body too translucent to hold on. Is she mine, that soul? Or was she simply catching a ride? A stow-away who looked so much like me I never noticed she was there? Dusk and blue like bruises. Or pink and rose like love. … Continue reading Free Bird
Untethered and weightless except for the pain. The Great Dissolution commences. Solid frames on walls flicker like a hologram. A haunting silent voice sings a lament for the slow death. Pieces of me I can’t see answer. Soon, they say. Soon will be time to let go. No one hears it but me, the symphony … Continue reading Prayer of a Half-life
Where will we go, Love? To be held in caring arms and know we are not alone in all of this? My paralytic legs and shaking limbs, I become a mannequin filled with lead for you to carry, without the luxury of a silent mind and sealed lips. My skin still drinks your touch and … Continue reading The Mantle
Oh, the complexity of me. Seemingly dichotomous needs tangle up like thorny vines ensnaring silken skirts. Zippers catch on long hair: the struggle to flow freely and be contained at once. Do we commit to ideas of who we are, or to liberating the real thing? Mother Culture says what it means to be good, … Continue reading How to Hold the Universe
