I have been slowly digging back into my current work-in-progress — a poetry collection that, I think, will have a theme that is representative of the past few years of my life. There have been many hard moments in those years. I isolated myself in the bottom of a deep well for quite a long time, my mind deteriorating from the strain of living in depths that seemed to be both desperately loud and oppressively silent. Eventually, I pulled myself out (sometimes I envision this process to be similar to the girl from The Ring emerging in her decaying form from that well – disturbed yet unrelenting). I then spent a long time discovering who I was for the first time in my 30-something years and also who I wanted to be. What were the actions I needed to take, the boundaries I needed to implement, the rot I needed to remove in order to seek and then possess that life? What could I do for myself? This was a foreign concept in many ways up until that point — perhaps remnants of my childhood, the decisions I made in my relationships, the things I held onto long past their expiration dates. Regardless of the reasons, it was up to me to redirect myself towards health and happiness. That being said, these were also things I needed to acknowledge, work through, and heal from. The latter part remains a work in progress, and I think this collection was borne from and is written as representation of that journey. Occasionally I write a piece that doesn’t quite fit into the theme of my collection and then I sit with it for a while, debating on what to do with it. Do I hold onto it until later down the road when perhaps I work on a different project where it does belong? Do I seek single publication for it? Do I share it on my creative-specific but oft-silent Instagram account? Do I publish it here? My writing has evolved in such a way that I largely ignore my first works. I appreciate and respect those works because they came from a specific season of my life, but they can also be hard to look upon. I like to focus on the transitions since then instead. But I used to religiously post my work online and it feels almost like a disservice to myself to keep this new chapter of my life, this new season of my writing in particular, hidden. There is also that ever present pressure to seek readers because though it is horrifying to be perceived, it feels a necessary burden (and also intermittent desire) as a writer. And thus, I have settled on sharing this piece of my own accord in the hopes it will find me new audiences and new communities as well as, maybe, old ones. The below poem, entitled “A Room for My Halo,” was written in response to a prompt I saw a while back that called for a line to be included from another poem/story. I decided to include a line from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and I feel fairly proud of how it turned out.
I was swept away early in a forced rush to an abandoned home of hauntings, reproducing scenes and people I once knew – still standing, still proud – unencumbered though they brought me forth for dissection. My life the meal that hung from their jowls, a thorough display of apathetic gluttony. There was an ask to devour all light as though I were the cosmic reaction to a dying star, an ask to absolve the traitors of the living. I have been tempted by ghosts who offer dreams of permanence in a whisper that curls in my ear and wonders at my humanity. A vision comes to mind. In the dark, the emptiness I felt was a moniker for every pretend god seeking my body – smothered and then shattered, temptresses of sins that were distractions from the ruination at the hands of the powerful and thus excused. Until now. Memory is a gift for the hollow and I have been nothing less than an excavator seeking treasure. I offer revival in the expansion of my lungs, the evolving force of my life, and reject solicitations of those unfurling, then fading, in triviality. I seek the halo surrounding other spaces, more compelling doors, and turn the knob cautiously to a place not yet cursed and gutted. A small gift, this light, my request for renaissance held along with my desires. I glimpse inside towards the spark of what will be so much more. The eyes and faces all turn themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I step into the room.
Leave a Reply