i could say i don’t care about love. but i do. i care about it more than i should. i care about it more than what i eat, or what i wear, how my hair looks in the morning or what i look like without makeup on. i’m always willing to cross oceans for it. i’m willing to walk across coals for a taste of it. is that what happened to me? did i have to walk across coals to get a little bit of it when i was little? i wish i could say i don’t remember, but i do. i remember everything.

i miss the smell of someone safe. there’s a dust that settles around you when your shoulders are allowed to drop. when someone gives you permission to stop sending ravens into the sky for help. when their wings can settle and my ink can go dry.

i’ve built cathedrals inside of a man i can’t pray to, with a thousand empty pews and a cross i promised i’d carry. the devil is the desire to be loved and god won’t answer my ravens.

please give me something. please tell me i’m worth it. someone kiss the back of my hands and tell them they’re made for something besides holding the world like it’s going to leave me. like i’m holding the entire thing between my palms and all i can do is watch it seep through my fingers, trying to escape me like everything else. so i kiss it instead, hoping i can be a part of it. maybe i can love it into reciprocation. even just a little bit. but i don’t think it knows i’m here. i search the streets and they are empty.

people look at me like a wound instead of the scar. i crawled out of the hole they threw me in, but they still talk to the dirt instead of me. sometimes i crawl back inside because it’s easier to return to a hole you know than a light you don’t trust. i think i’m scared to reach my hand out and feel the sun upon my skin. afraid someone is going to cut it off the second it touches the sky instead of kissing it and telling me it’s made for something.

i speak with a sinner’s tongue when it’s really love i have a taste for. my heart grumbles at the longing and i don’t know how something can be so full and empty at the same time. my mouth is dry and my plate is empty, i consume myself slowly, in hopes i’ll have some left for the same love i’d cross oceans for.

what is life without it? can a sinner still have a pure heart? i don’t know how else to buy it without the paying in salacious words and risky texts. like paying for candy when you know you need fruit. so you’re full for a time, until the high wears off and you clutch your chest with the same hands you held the world in and beg for something to kill you. what death is worse than a belly full of sugar and a chest as hollow as a promise broken? you can build a thousand cathedrals inside of yourself without ever coming closer to god. you can bear the heaviest cross and still die outside its doors.

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There are parts of me that want to be used. Like a little trash can you can dump everything into. A landfill or a well. Your fears, your hopes, your dreams, your most depraved thoughts and sicknesses. If only my body was something besides a vessel, I’d be greater. A better girl, a better woman. A gooder girl. Is that a word? It should be.

Would there be a white light that drips out of my mouth every time I bare teeth? Just a little thing made for someone else, for something else other than the path I couldn’t carve. I think then I’d have purpose without the responsibility. I could wrap someone else’s desires around my body and wear it like armor. I could live my life as a ship for someone else’s journey. Getting bit by piranhas as I cut through water with a captain driving me to his final destination.

Tell me what to do. What to say. Tell me which version of me survives this. I’ve mistaken freedom for a loaded gun too many times. Don’t give me choices anymore. I can’t seem to make them without coming out the other side in ashes. I look behind me and all I see are decapitated bodies. Ghosts follow me from the other side of whatever battle I’ve endured just to haunt me when it’s over. I always seem to leave with more enemies than ones I came with. They stalk my every footprint. Waiting for me to fall. Fall to the ground. Fall asleep. Fall in love. Like they’re waiting for their chance to ruin me again.

There’s a small, beating part of me that was born to love. To embody it. Wholly. Fully. Unapologetically. And I have. I have loved everything but the very thing it occupies. The very vessel that carries it through purple violence. The other part of me was made for foresight. A magician full of calculative moves. A battle board with game pieces three times bigger than me. Plans that are six steps ahead of an invisible game that only I can see. But I am only playing defense. Like someone who’s built their whole life building exits instead of entrances.

Do you know how strong you have to be to become this tragic?

Do you know how much fucking blood is on this wall?

I don’t know if it’s all mine. Sometimes I wish someone would cut me open and tell me. Does it match? Do you think it was worth it? Do I still look pretty? I want to bleed for someone else so maybe all this blood would have somewhere to go.

I’ve been going around in circles for so long the earth has remembered my feet. Chasing my own tail with a knife in each hand, but they’re blunt and they’re used and they’re tired like me. I was made for love, stitched for endurance, but built for war. Every time I call, no one is there. But it always feels like someone is waiting to take something from me. I’ve carried my father’s vanity and my mother’s rage for so long, we’ve become friends. We’re all just a time clock away from turning into the very thing we swore we’d never become.

We all point and judge and speculate like we have the right to wear a big black robe and carry a hammer in our hands. We think we know what we’d do or how we’d react until we’re actually faced with a situation. I’ve found the same choices I’ve judged others for have been similar decisions I had to end up making for myself. I don’t want to make choices anymore. The woman in me is tired and the hands of the clock have fallen.

But no one is coming to save me. Or you. I figured if I could offer myself as a ship, I could save myself through the saving of another. I figure if I can rent my soul to someone, I can hide from a life that yearns to degrade me. Even if it means to be degraded by love. And for a masochist like me, I think that sounds like a dream I never want to wake from.

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i think about you all the time. i don’t know how to peel you from my skin. i don’t know how to remove you from my blood stream. where does one go from here? dreams and reality bled into each other like two oceans sharing a world and i can’t figure out where i begin and you end. i don’t even think i’d want to know that answer.

it’s never enough.

life and ego. reputation and society. practical day to day responsibilities have become the enemy to what i want. but every time i see myself, i know the truth. i know how much i’ve contributed to my own self undoing up until this point. bobbing and weaving my past like oncoming traffic. trying to ignore the road rage and speed limits and rearview mirrors. hoping it will get me in your passenger seat. hoping you’ll put my seatbelt on and give me a kiss on my forehead. you’ll tell me where we’re going has stuffed animals and blankets and horror movies. but you’re not here and the car isn’t moving.

i’ve driven myself here, only to realize i never quite knew how to drive at all.

this is the first time i’ve crashed. the first time the airbag finally popped open to tell me no. the first time the wrong turn cost me something more than what i’d been protecting. that’s what happens when we drive away. we want to be somewhere else. someone else. something else. but there are too many cars on fire. i can’t put them out. all i see is your face in the sky. like you’re watching me. disappointed. underwhelmed. looking at me like a defiant child, wishing i was somewhere else, someone else, something else.

i just wanted to be yours. i wanted to know what that looked like. and i did, for a short time. if you’re wondering, it was the best thing i’ve ever felt. i was a little girl again. i appreciated that so much. i was full of giggles and nectar and all the things money can’t buy. i was full of you. and although you didn’t create that version of me, you did reveal her.

i’m sorry my past could’ve been the detriment to your future.

we do crazy things to survive. we create egos, armor, verbal weapons and new characters. like putting on an iron man suit or wearing a halloween mask. that’s what happens when the vulnerable self can’t drive the ship anymore. you find yourself breaking down in the middle of the ocean, letting tears and vomit and screams fill the sea like it’s all you were ever made of. there’s always a monster below asking if you need them but never verbally. it claws at the wood, leaving gashes on the sides and edges. until it becomes your protective violence. until there are holes in your boat and you have no choice but to let the monster carry you. i hope you never have to do that. i hope you always feel safe and warm where there’s blankets and stuffed animals and horror movies.

i’m still here, you know? i haven’t gone anywhere. not really. i’m sorry i was so short with you. that’s what i do when i feel abandoned. i run. i push. i hide. the little monster always scratching at my boat, asking if i need her again. so i run, i push, and hide her too. sometimes i hold her head under water, hoping she’ll finally drown and leave me the fuck alone. but she’s strong. and i can never quite bring myself to finish the job. no matter how many times i push her under, she can breathe there.

that’s not who i am. you saw me. i don’t know if you remember everything. i remember every tiny detail. so much so i could draw that entire night blindfolded. i could tell you every smell and every conversation and each feeling. please remember the girl you met and not the monster you’ve seen.

you make the monsters go away. i never meant to become yours.

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I’ll be 40 in September, through relaxed fists and feeling more beautiful than I felt in my 20’s or 30’s. I’m on my second trial of Accutane at my big age and my skin looks great. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anyone teaching me about retinol or how important it is to take off your makeup before you go to sleep when I was young. That would have been nice. The internet wasn’t as big as it was now. We had Tom from MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger. There have been countless benders, snorting lines off the backseats of toilets and more blackouts than birthdays I can actually account for.

I’m a late bloomer. A late learner. A quick talker. I put my foot in my mouth way too often, usually finding myself humbled and still laughing about it anyway. What’s a laugh if not for filling the uncomfortable silence? What’s a neck breaking cackle if not a mask to cover up the ugly things lurking beneath? You get to your 4th decade and realize you’ve had to laugh your way through every decade before that. There’s not much to laugh about if we’re being serious. But I don’t know how else to not cry about it.

Hating myself would be easier than what I had planned, right? I think about how much of my youth was wasted on drugs and alcohol. On hating myself and thinking I was hideous. Fuck, who am I kidding? Sometimes I hate myself now, but make it less obvious. There’s a confidence I can project like a light beam. And people gravitate towards it. Other people are repelled. Some try to steal it for themselves, manipulate it to make everyone think it’s just a big laser beam meant to attack everyone. Yeah, I project things, but so do they. Whether it’s fake or not, does it even matter? It’s still a lighthouse. It’s my lighthouse I built between big rocky cliffs and oceans that build waves as strong as a million soldiers. There’s salt and sea in my mouth and I’m laughing about it, spitting all over the monstrous gray rock with saliva as long as my track record. And sometimes those are the only words I have—spit and light beams. A wave hasn’t destroyed it yet. Isn’t that true confidence?

Underneath it all, I don’t hate myself. I really don’t.

There has been so much sexual assault in my life, I don’t know how to stop talking about it. I don’t know how to cleave it from my identity. There’s a million scapegoats I’ve become, yet none of them are dead. They just follow me around, bleeding on everything. I find them stumbling about behind me, next to me and hovering over me while I sleep—like I can fix them. Like I’m the one who started the slaughter. That’s the thing about being the poster child scapegoat. The knife is at your throat while you bleed yourself dry on marble alters and question if you deserved it. Every scapegoat does. I have to tell myself I deserve it or I can’t justify my reality. Plus, I bleed pretty and I think that’s all that matters sometimes.

Men. My arch nemesis. I really don’t like you. Everything is a manipulative tactic for an inflated ego or to get your dick wet. Devaluing women when you’ve based your entire value around how many of them you can acquire. So much time has been wasted. So much youth has been poured down the drain of a man’s sink. As I stand above it, for years it was like waiting for my reward to come crawling up from the sewer. To tell me I’m a good girl and my suffering was all worth it. Like any of it meant something. It didn’t. It never does. I am a late bloomer, a late learner and a fucking idiot. But you are an ocean of monsters and salt. None of which you can remove from the sea. None of which my lighthouse could ever change.

I think some part of me kept hoping love would eventually stop feeling so humiliating. It hasn’t.

There is less evolution and more personas, more performance. And we’ve all become addicted to it, haven’t we? Filters and porn. Competition disguised as friendship. Focus on the most insignificant issues because we can’t look at ourselves. We can’t even admit when we like someone anymore—out of fear of being hurt or exposed or manipulated. You don’t realize it, but when you’re born, they shove a game controller in your hands and tell you good fucking luck. We’ve forgotten our humanity because humanity has forgotten us.

I want to love myself. I want to love men. I want to hold hands with women. I want to enjoy the last few months of my 30’s by writing and loving and getting fucked an inch from my life on a balcony in Peru. Then I want to enjoy the first half of my 40’s by writing and loving and getting fucked an inch from my life in a haunted castle in Scotland. There is a big lighthouse in me, bright enough to see all your monsters and love them anyway. Some scapegoats learn to love their knives, but some of us just try to bleed pretty while it’s happening. Maybe when I’m on the next alter, I’ll laugh about it like I do everything else. Then I can justify it because everything’s justifiable when it’s funny. I’ll paint a joker smile on my face and hope the whole world laughs too.

I still want things. I am still allowed to want things.

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My tastes have rarely been…conventional. My experiences haven’t been what most would consider normal either. Life exposing me to a particular kind of pain at an early age meant premature seeds being planted and forced to bloom into something that I wasn’t old enough to name. They grew in me, grew around me and split me in places I knew I’d never sew back together. A time came when I learned I didn’t want to.

These growths became fantasies because if you can’t grow around it, you must learn to grow with it. You have to develop yourself through it. There were roots there that had dug themselves deep enough into the corners of my psyche that shouldn’t have had corners yet. I learned I liked to bleed on my own terms because there was beauty in spilling something from my own hands and because of my own hands. I wanted to feel powerless, but empowered in doing so. I wanted to feel like my life wasn’t mine, like I didn’t have to absorb any blame. The truth is, I never blamed myself for any of my sexual assaults. But my brain did something so fascinating, I think it’s worth mentioning. My brain started to manipulate itself to enjoy these malicious acts against itself. Not with my actual rapists, but with a person I knew and loved and trusted. There are ways to take a horror in your life and replace it with your own well-constructed nightmare that fits just the way you like it. You have to be a little fucking crazy to fight fire with gasoline. I also learned if I didn’t contain it, I’d become an inferno. Sometimes I was.

But let’s put the metaphors aside, shall we?

Pain and I are good friends. I’ve never been one to turn away from a good ol’ spanking from a man I loved that wanted to give it to me. Or a woman. There was nothing that could compare to feeling helpless in someone else’s hands or being forced to come and scream like a fucking banshee. Having my hair pulled at that soft spot, right there by the root (ladies, you know what I’m talking about). And if that didn’t do the trick, a nice big hand around my mouth would do it. I was never shy about being choked, losing my air, and fucked an inch from my life. The cherry and the icing to every horrible thing I’d experienced—my way and on my terms.

There’s more to it than that though now, isn’t there? Anyone can cosplay a dominant man chasing you in the woods or fucking you an inch from your life. Any man can spread some icing on a piece of bread and call it a cake. The physical was just the bandaid for the wound.

Yes, we’re back to metaphors.

Not a single man I dated possessed the base of that cake. No eggs or milk or flour. No butter, oil or baking powder. You can tell when a man is pretending. Not for you, but for himself, to take something he probably doesn’t deserve. It’s sadly obvious. Always missing something. Sure, there was love there, passion—but there was never enough trust.

The wounds were all over my face which made me an easy target for men who just wanted to get their dicks wet. I wore desperation like a new pair of jeans and every predator within a five mile radius could see it. I was looking for someone to absorb the blame, for someone to make me feel like these stupid choices weren’t my own. Instead, I trusted men who’d push me off a cliff to save a dollar. And for that—I do have myself to blame.

Recently, I stumbled upon some dark romance novels.

Pft, I thought. Stupid.

But why not, right? Another romantic failure had just presented itself to me and what did I have to lose but a little bit of time? I rummaged through a few—blah, blah, blah. They all seemed corny. Until I found Haunting Adeline which is the first of the series, followed by Hunting Adeline, the second book, written by H.D. Carlton. Without spoiling it, it’s basically about a woman and her stalker and how lines get blurred in the chaos of it all. I will say this, it is racy. And by racy, I mean absolutely fucked. But the more I allowed myself to drink it up, the more I enjoyed it. Soon I realized Haunting Adeline was nothing, if not a mirror into my own desires.

The male main character is intelligent, tall, handsome and scarred. All of those things are great. But underneath it, there was determination and a persistence that would put to shame anyone you’ve ever thought wanted you. There was a love so deep inside him, he was willing to go to lengths you couldn’t possibly imagine. He was willing to burn the world for a woman he couldn’t stop clawing at his neck for. There was a desperation, a yearning that you find in many male characters written by women. H.D. Carlton named him Zade. There were things in there I’d never admit to liking because contrary to popular belief, I do have some shame.

He taught her how to use her trauma as fuel and demonstrated how pain can be manipulated into something beautiful. His humanity was ever present, but slipped if anyone spoke wrong towards what he called his “little mouse.” The girl he’d chase till he’d circled the earth, willing to throw himself off a ledge if he couldn’t find her. Adeline learned chosen surrender through him, a trust he planted so deep inside her they were rooted like willow trees. And that takes time and proof and effort and blood. It takes showing no matter how many oceans between you or how deep the water is, you’re willing to meet them at the bottom. Willing to pull them to the top, and willing to be pulled to the top.

It’s not about wanting to be beaten or choked or violently fucked—no. It’s about being chosen. It’s about not fearing the intensity of a moment because you know you’re safe in the palms of a person who would cross oceans for you. Where your mind feels ancient with the overgrowth of your past, just for someone else to knock the butterflies loose inside it. Showing you you’re more than damaged goods someone tolerates for convenience. Show you that there’s more you can do with a soiled psyche than fear it. You don’t question whether or not you matter. Whether or not he’d push you off a cliff for a dollar. The eggs and the flour and the baking powder are there. There’s a certainty. A performative fuck could never compare to this.

I wish I would have been someone’s little mouse. Someone’s Adeline. I wish someone could have shown me how to water the roots and rip out the weeds. The confidence of a man willing to stand tall against adversity yet fold himself like origami inside my heart. Love is real. I know it is because I’ve felt it grow inside me many times, but I don’t think I’ve experienced the love I need. I was willing to accept what was in front of me in the moment. The desperation, the grief, the part of me looking for someone to blame. The parts of me trying to accept what grew in the cracks of my being.

And while I know dark romance novels aren’t reality, it did create a blueprint that I’d like to thank the author for. I think I’ve reached a point where I’m not willing to be with anyone unless it’s that. Yes, yes, the realistic version. But that. I want to be someone’s Adeline. I want to be someone’s little mouse.

I spent years thinking I wanted pain when I actually wanted proof.

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I received an interesting comment today. A girl called me cocky and said I need to be slapped under one of my recent videos.. She said it playfully, but it was an odd way to go about the observation she made. Needless to say, she’s been deleted and blocked.

I’ve had Uranus going through my first house in Taurus for the past 7-8 years. The pieces of me that were there in 2019 are gone. My old appearance is gone. My alcoholism is gone. My old career is gone. Some exes and relatives are now dead, leaving a trail of what if’s and what the fuck’s in my wake. But if I’m being frank, these past years have been Hell in real time. So horrible, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you what has happened to me. I never show my cards on my channel—usually. There are many ways to express my grief, sadness and horrors that don’t have to do with exposing it in front of others that didn’t consent to it. I wear a good mask, whether it’s to protect myself or others. Which is difficult with your moon in the first house. ;)

Once I quit alcohol, I genuinely didn’t know who I was anymore. It was as if pieces of me were being chipped away, pooling around my feet like glass puddles. Believe me, I tried scraping them off the concrete with my bare hands, scrambling to paste them back on my body with cheap glue. That didn’t get me any where either. I saw myself in others, they saw themselves in me. Which doesn’t always work out when you don’t want to face yourself, when you don’t want to confront what you’ve worked so hard to chain inside you like an abomination.

Before I mention this, I’d like to preface that what I’m about to say is not to paint myself as some victim. This is only to state the facts. I have been humbled greatly. In ways many of you couldn’t possibly imagine. I have been abused in about every form you can think of. Many times I was shocked, almost always I stayed too long and sometimes I abused myself. I have been silenced, threatened, lusted after grossly, stalked and harassed to a point where I fell in such a deep depression, I genuinely didn’t know a way out. I felt like all I had was myself. And I didn’t know who that was anymore. The chips had fallen and all I was left with was…whatever this is. I was rebuilding in a toxic environment. Some of that environment was self created, but most of it was imposed upon me.

Along the way, I lost my voice. I lost my personality. I muted myself. I subdued my light, walked with my head down and my posture shaped like a willow tree. I searched for myself in another person, they lost themselves in me and I didn’t want to find them there. It felt like the child had been beaten out of me; over and over again. I had been given a hand from time to time, that felt like hot irons pressed down on my fingers until I had no choice but to let myself burn. I didn’t try to bandage it. I wasn’t drinking anymore so I couldn’t numb it. I had to hold space for it. And sometimes the world blamed me for how I reacted to its cruelties.

But I am a fool. There is no doubt about that. But in tarot, it is the Fool’s journey after all. We start at zero. And that’s where I’m at. I had to make some difficult decisions. Some difficult decisions that cost me. But those decisions are worth my pride. They are worth me finding my voice again, my personality, my spunky inner child that always had her hands in the mud. I’m not asking anyone to accept me. I’m far past that. But I will speak. I will write. I will use my voice and I will not mute my being for anyone’s comfort on this channel.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Thank you for supporting me, my work, my channel. And thank you for reading this long ass message. You mean a lot to me and I love you dearly.

Vee

everyone remembers the night wrong, but i remember the sound. i was on the street when it happened. my ring from my pinky finger hit the concrete and spun like a driedle before laying flat. he just stood there, watching me. and i stood there pretending i wasn’t letting him watch me.

half of me was already gone. it was as if half of my body ran away somewhere and i was left with a sack of bones. my ribs poked me from the inside, begging to be unleashed, to be seen, to be snapped. for fuck sake, somebody make a wish. whoever gets the bigger piece wins.

i couldn’t see him. but he was always there. always watching, always waiting for me to break. i knew that’s what it was. boys love their toys, violence and broken things. but only if they break them first. put something destroyed in a man’s hands and he’ll either fuck it or toss it. isn’t that what we all do anyway? we fuck each other and create things and we either toss them or they’re taken. everything lands at the bottom of a barrel anyway.

and he knew that. and he knew just how to bait them. stick little old me in a dark alley in the middle of the night and wait for the boys to flock. and they did. some of them were drunk, some of them depraved but always ready to stick their dick in something. he knew that too.

they’d find me, skinny and rotting in the dark. almost always it was about what was underneath, what was inside and how does it feel? all women are tiny coffins living with death already inside them, you see. sometimes they rise and sometimes they kill, but none of them belong to us. and then we’re forced to live amongst them.

but some monsters have fangs and others didn’t. that was the difference between the boys and my man.

it was always the beginning of the end. the beginning of self sabotage as i knew it. and i didn’t know it until i found myself staring at it in the face.

it starts early, you know? men like you early. men like you sitting on their laps, weak and hairless. they like ruffled panties and sundresses. they like pigtails and bloomers and knee highs and mary janes. not all of them, of course. but most. sometimes they don’t even realize it’s in them, until they’re presented with it. until they have the opportunity to see you in this light. and you’ve been accustomed to pleasing the eyes of a man since you were a child. you just didn’t know it.

the little mermaid and her seashell tits and the way she was ready to give up everything she had, including her voice, because she fell in love with a man on the beach. how i think about all the women who risked their voice because others didn’t have one. but you don’t think about that back then. you don’t think about it because no one really tells you to. and as a girl, you don’t do or do unless you’re told.

that’s the part of you you have to kill. the part of you that needs it. that needs to be sexualized. do you like me like this? do you like me bent this way? how far would you like to see me go, go, go? but it lives in your for a long time. it’s like you were born with the expectation in your veins. you learn to spill it once a month and they proceed to tell you how disgusting you are. how you’re unclean. but don’t forget to shit out some babies after you let a man put the crown of a slave on your left hand.

you will always be punished. for exactly who you are. your chest won’t be viewed as something that nourishes the very children that are expected of you, no. you’ll be sexualized. everything you do will be sexualized. short hair, long hair, school girl, shaved legs, librarian, hairy legs, nun, virgin, whore. it all seems so normal to you. it’s your baseline and you didn’t even know it. passed down like dna itself. passed down to please. to smile more. to be degraded. when you fight back, that will be sexualized too.

dark eyes, dark hair, dark skin. he was a gateway drug into the rest of the chapters of my ruin. and the next one would be completely opposite of how the last one looked. some had soft hands or big calloused palms, angry eyes and wanted to fuck a girl that looked like his sister. or his mom. or his father. whatever issue he had accumulated over time. some you’d never even guessed they would’ve hurt a fly. you can stare for hours at a man you love and never really see through. but if you get close enough, you’ll realize the devil is just a human with a penis.

i didn’t realize at the time that it was never a question of if it would happen, but when. that delusion was not my first mistake nor my last. the benefit of the doubt never benefited me in the long run.

when it happened, the numerous times it did from childhood to my teenage years to adulthood, my brain shifted. it turned their violence into kinks. my mind normalized it, adrenaline fed my body what it needed to become accustomed. to transmute it, not just into fear but the combination of fear and pleasure itself. once the cream is in the coffee it will never be just coffee again.

and there it is. the lamb and the slaughter. your brain betrays your body to keep itself self safe.

there may be a day where you kill her or she will you. the woman who contorts herself like an acrobat. the mind that pretzels itself into its own sabotage at only the very expense of yourself. the heart in your chest wears a dunce cap, but it’s not you.

unconditional trust and love is something only dogs have. then you grow up to be a bitch.

all wolves salivate in the presence of meat. it’s natural. i’s normal, they say. so why does it feel like carnage? why does it feel like the dawn of our extinction?

venus is officially retrograde in aries and the petals from our flowers are beginning to shed. i plucked some myself. i’ve crushed them between my fingers until their juices bled down my wrists. i find myself stripped to nothing most nights, counting the freckles on my skin and wondering where they lead to. trying to connect dots and sever strings simultaneously. black vines under my skin buried in frost.

a crumbled castle under the veil of a monochrome nightmare always visits my dreams. a black horse plods through the snow, yet never leaves a single print. and i don’t know where i am. i don’t know where i’m seeing this from. and yet i feel this all lives inside of me, taking my life upon rest and giving me breath once the sun comes back. but that crumbling pile of stones and that raven-colored animal has more life than my waking one.

the print of the ghost on the pillow feels more alive than me. no hands claw from the dirt and the devil drinks like a king.

don’t tell me you love me. you don’t know how deeply i’d gut myself for a thread of reciprocation. for a shred of kindness. for a merciful hand. for an upturned palm covered in blood that isn’t my own. for the smell of my grandmother’s lentil soup. for the sound of her laugh ricocheting off the curves of my heart. what i wouldn’t give to meet the version of people i had in my head.

there is no one in this world that suffers more than the heart of a child inside the body of a woman. and how this mind carves through the film that my enemies hide behind, as easy as carving a cake. as easy as a hot knife melting through a stick of butter. or how the sea carves a cliff. how a violinist drawing the bow for an audience already slipping to their death. art is appreciated more in the eyes of the dead.

and art is only art in the eyes of the naked, or in the eyes of the blind. you don’t know what it’s like to devote your soul so deeply to someone who doesn’t even share your blood. you don’t know what it’s like to lay yourself on the altar and gaze lovingly at your killer. to be strong enough to tell the tale and the tale weak enough to die as a scar on your face.

they will call it devotion. they will call it love. but i will call it what it was-a masterpiece carved from marrow, a requiem in flesh. because art is only art in the eyes of the dead. and tonight, i am finally beautiful.

some goodbyes are easy. a hello and goodbye the first time you meet someone. a small deal in the grand scheme. some goodbyes jerk your heart off until your eyes come. some are a whisper. some goodbyes are complete darkness. they leave us at a loss of what we did wrong, what we don’t have. other goodbyes will be the last time your hand touches theirs. the last time your lips lock into an official DNA swap that triggers your mind to overdose in memories. you won’t even know it. you won’t know it’s the last time.

a goodbye is not always so simple. it leaves a sour taste on the tongue. it leaves a bubbling poison in our bellies while revenge knocks at our door. the goodbye proves to us what we’ve known all along or what we didn’t. love with conditions is what most of us have. everything’s conditional, transactional, conceptual. sometimes our goodbyes come with dark clouds carved with a blunt axe. chiseled storms cultivate themselves in our chest showing everyone how strong we are. and it waits. it waits for the perfect moment to show everyone how heavy our heart actually is, to show everyone that we are flawed. that we are angry. that sometimes intrusive thoughts win. but whatever has been carved has the ability to crumble.

if i could take back anything, it would be how i said goodbye. too many goodbyes to count. too many goodbyes slither through my hollow bellied hands. all the things i should have said are always in the ring with the things i didn’t say. but nothing wins a gloves off tournament like the things i shouldn’t have said. no one can take that trophy. no one can throw a punch quite like the mouth of a heavy weighted heart. no one can defend the heart like a tongue with talons tucked behind flesh hungry fangs. it goes down like milk and comes back curdled in our throats.

regret is a slow blooming bruise, spreading beneath the skin long before the goodbye has left your lips. some people i wish i could hug again. or kiss again. or fuck again. like i mean it this time. in my heart, i know. in my heart i understand why people leave, why people die, why people seek revenge. oh god help me, i want my heart made for understanding. my heart fights to cleanse the thoughts an ancient mind rather defile. a mind digs a grave that the heart must bedeck in love-laced lily of the valley. my heart visits the dark place where many have rotted forever in the back of my mind. she dances on their graves and makes love to the soil. she sits on their tombstones and tells jokes of past times.

“hey, remember when…”

i will set your sails with a smile. i will shake your hand and tell you there are better sirens in the sea. i will understand your purpose in my life with unconditional understanding and i will try my hand in unyielding love. i will wave my hand from the shore, and see you off with greatness. i will pour our ashes into the ocean and let the waves wash us of our wicked hearts. i will spill our remnants into the moon’s blood stained mirror and let the waves tear us apart one last time. forgive me for the salt in my throat and i will forgive you for the venom in yours.

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My innocence is gone. Most of it has been taken from me before I really started giving it away. Because I got to the point where I figured it was easier to give it. It felt easier to offer it as opposed to someone ripping it out of me. I was forced to smell their stench. Forced to be touched. To be stolen. She was stolen from me. I miss her so much.

I was just a child the first time. Still in diapers. Barely learned words. Words that meant no. Words that meant yes. Words that meant ‘ice cream please.’ I wonder if I was too young to say it. Or if I was just too young to understand what was happening to me.

As for my second experience…

When I was just old enough to have a period, he climbed through my window and took it from me. This time I knew how to say no. It didn’t matter. He left out of the front door. The audacity to leave out of the front door you weren’t invited into. And how I cried with a tummy ache in my bed for the rest of the night. And how I let him chip away at my self worth till it was just a pebble in his shoe. Even that was an inconvenience for him. He broke me down so low, I began giving in willingly. And no one knew. When they did know, I was a slut. And I was too broken to tell the truth.

A year had passed. I wasn’t a legal adult. But drinking became the crutch and the disability at the same time. I loved the feeling of what could kill me slowly could keep me alive. And then she came. She was twice my age. The alcohol on her breath smelled sour, putrid. Her red lipstick smeared from napping earlier in the night. I remember trying to push until my back was against the couch, trying to angle myself enough to get away. When I was finally able to get away, I locked myself in the bathroom until someone showed up and put her to bed. I never told anyone.

My first long term relationship was a year after that. He locked me in closets, beat me, tortured me in many different ways. He was cruel to animals. He was cruel to the homeless. He was cruel to himself. And everyone was too afraid of him to speak up. He devoured me. My body and my threadbare innocence. He hid my shoes in the trunk of his car every time he left the house so I would have a harder time escaping. And he would always have his friend come over to “babysit” me until he got back. I developed stockholm syndrome and PTSD because of it.

More things happened between this time, but the most prominent after that was my boss who drugged me in my late twenty’s. I was too stupid to take notice that bringing someone Vodka in a foam cup was uncommon. I remember taking two sips and that was it. I didn’t remember anything. Just woke up with him on top of me. I had never felt this feeling before. It was like waking up from a weird dream that I couldn’t remember. He had his way and I had to see him at work a day later. Eventually, I had my Mom call and tell them I would no longer be working there. I never told her why.

Once the can is cracked, there’s no cracking it closed. I began to hate myself. Then to prove my narrative, I created more ways that affirmed that narrative. Put alcohol or drugs into the mix and you don’t have to feel anything about it at all. I developed the unhealthy mindset that if I just start giving it freely, it can’t be taken from me. The false sense of power I have tried to get back my entire life. I am now 38 and I miss the little girl I was.

I miss who I was before they made me who I was. They touched my body and the way I tortured my own soul because of it. Please don’t tell me to pick a better man. I have gotten to the point where I truly hope they don’t pick me at all. I don’t want to be picked. Once I learned I can simply pick my own flowers without feeling obligated to spread my legs, why go back? Now that I can sleep peacefully knowing no one is abusing my love behind my back, why sleep with another? I can cry loudly without someone blaming me for my reaction to their abuse. One more withdraw and the check will bounce.

I am now five years alcohol and nicotine free and I will never go back. The things I have endured. The amount I have tried to self medicate. The light has left my eyes. I swear, my heart beats slower. And I have to forgive myself for dealing with it the best I could. I will never get her back. And neither will they. But I am still here. And that’s something they can never take.

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They pinky-promised under the street lamps, swearing they’d never love anyone else, then they screamed at each other in the rain an hour later. But God, they sure knew how to kiss in front of raging waterfalls. They’d blow pinwheels hard enough to make them spin. Their lungs were always empty, either from yelling at each other or trying to make the wheels twirl. But they were never empty enough to say, I love you. How his hands would get stuck in her mouth from feeding her too much cotton candy. How her tummy ache became a performance that everyone had to endure. Big feelings, fragile hearts-their love was the kind that spun like a ferris wheel, never quite touching solid ground. And he always got blamed for the tummy ache.

But he touched her gently. He held her in the crook of his arm like she was an egg. Picture a little boy with curly hair tip toeing across the linoleum. He did everything with one hand. He took a little bit longer to turn off the lights. A little bit longer to carry her plate to the table. A little bit longer to comb his own hair. She’d watch him with big eyes and blushed cheeks. In him, she saw a willow tree with tendrils stuffed by cotton clouds. She saw her favorite flower dance between his tongue when he spoke, like the little ballerina in the music box her Mother used to play for her.

Sometimes, his arm would start to droop, but he never dropped the little egg in the nook of his arm. She’d curl into him as tight as she could-tighter and tighter until she started to crack. And the whites of her eyes spilled onto her cheeks, wide with the fear of losing it all. Their pinwheels stopped spinning-frozen in the dead of winter in 30 mph winds. And waterfalls ran down the cheeks of a girl with tummy aches and a crack in her forehead.

The boy still held her in the crook of his arm. He let the whites soak into the threads of his shirt, her yolk still jiggling in his elbow. Many years went by. The boy had grown even more tired, his arm had lost its feeling long ago and the girl grew sad. She could see him turning to an old man. A beard had grown, baby patches of gray smiling down at her. She pinky-promised him all the love in the world, swearing she’d never leave his arm. And his smile no longer reached to his eyes. And again, the girl was sad.

One day, the little thing in his arm wriggled and wriggled and wriggled. But the boy barely noticed anymore. So she kept wiggling and she squirmed and twitched. Until finally, she slipped from his elbow. She squinted her eyes tightly until little lines formed at the sides of them. A sweet slow motion fall from the top of the little ferris wheel they rode on together. Where they held hands and argued. Where she promised him a million kisses every single day and where he promised he’d always be her best friend. She could taste the cotton candy on her tongue, she could feel the sugar melt and the phantom tummy pains. Someone should kiss their lover under my falling tears, she thought. And the flavor of pinky-promised memories came to a halt as she hit the ground.

Everything was over in a moment. But death was cushy. It reminded her of cotton bunnies and downy marshmallows. Thoughts of sugar clouds and candy rain ran through her little brain. And the rain came. And the rain started to spill over her like a shower from God. The wind blew her hair into a thousand rollercoaster vines. And when she opened her eyes, all she saw was a drenched beard with galaxies of gray pushing her into the boy’s hands with a reverse-switch million pinky-promised kisses. She found herself on the pillow of her boy’s palm. And she never quite hit solid ground.

Because love is never meant to land. It’s about the fall itself. The tumbling, the spinning, the blur of cotton candy skies and pinwheel hearts. It was the space between the fingertips of a pinky promise that held a million words.

And that is all we ever are in love. Two souls caught mid-air, suspended by the fragile gravity of an almost forever, floating endlessly in the crook of an arm that never quite let go.

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everything around me became too real. the days after my sobriety were some of the hardest. nothing to cling to. nothing to fall in, fall on, fall over. just me. my veins drew breath. like breathing plants into my skin, where only sunflowers and freesia and sweet peas could grow. but with that the weeds clung to my throat.

i found it harder to speak. my courage was buried somewhere where sobriety was planted. the awareness became haunting. the self awareness felt predatory. it creeps up on you. you try not to look, but you feel it following you like a beast with an empty stomach. and you miss who you were when you didn’t know who you were.

you found me. i held your face between my hands and let your face droop between my fingers. your freckles, little galaxies splashed inside a big old art gallery. you seemed to hold the frames like a kid at show n tell. and i was at every exhibit. i had something new to look at. something new to get drunk on.

but your mind is a funhouse and my heart is a paper weight. and the more shows i would attend, the more paintings you made, the more colors you played with until everything became a splat on a canvas. i saw killers and dead orcas, you saw jesus and the future. and art is an opinion. and sobriety is a perception.

you stand on the stage and no one else is there. i always sat in the audience smiling, clapping as loud as i could, but i am not the hands of a thousand people. and you feed off the breath of many thanks. and i can’t watch it. and my heart becomes a rock you cannot lift.

but a funhouse is only fun if there’s someone to laugh with. and a paperweight only matters if there’s something to hold down.

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The first time I saw myself, I was standing at the edge of the ocean, ankle-deep in saltwater, holding a cigarette like it was the last thing keeping me tethered to this world. I didn't smoke it. Just held it between two fingers, watching the waves gnaw at the shore. It was late. Too late for someone like me to be alone, but I had the look of someone who had never been afraid of the dark, only of what waited in the light.

And nothing ever came. And no one did either. And sometimes no one is all there is when everyone shrinks you down to a no one too. I am no longer bothered by the whether or nots of someone wanting to be my friend. Forget me nots, echoes, ashes—all just embers from hell. But they’re never as long as the pencil shaped residue growing on the end of a silly girl’s cigarette. A friend to all has gotten me to no friends at all, and isn’t that the way of it all? Isn’t that the joke of the Gods? The way of the waves. When you stand there cradling a cigarette between skin and bones, begging for the waves to take you. And they never do when you need them to the most.

It’s only when the sun tattoos the freckles on my shoulders and my mouth is open free. It’s when I can taste the salt under my tongue and the sand between the crevices of my thighs and the love of my life is kissing me in the rain that the fucking waves want to take me.

But never when I ask.

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Nothing could keep my enemies from banging at my door. No deadbolt was strong enough. I could hear them shouting on the other side, demanding to be let in. Who knows what they wanted—sex, warmth, company, or something more. More often than not, they could infiltrate my home with one carefully chosen word. One "please forgive me," or a couple of "I love you's." The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the couch with one of them. I was cooking for them. I was sleeping with them. The call was coming from inside the house.

No one else unlocked that door but me. No one else wrapped their sweaty palm around that metal knob but my hungry hands. My fingers desperate to touch something besides my books and my tarot cards and myself. This was only a reflection of how my heart had allowed me to be beaten down by life, people, love and how parched my body was because of it.

Imagine you’ve been walking through a desert for three days. Your throat feels like sandpaper, your gut is a hollow cave, and the baby hairs on your forehead are stuck to your skin through sweet, salty sweat. After being on your own without food and water, a strange traveler finds you in a desolate space. This person is riding a camel, looking down at you with a bottle of water in his hands. You beg, “Please, sir, may I have some of your water?”

He replies, “Yes, but only under one condition.”

“Yes, yes, whatever you want!” you say. “Please, just give me some water.”

He smiles upon your sun-beaten face and warns, “This will quench your thirst, but it will also make you sick.”

You are more likely to eat from a poisonous hand when your belly is a ravenous monster. I kept trying to build boundaries outside of myself. I would tell a person what I wanted, what I didn’t want in hopes they would abide by these rules. Unfortunately, these are just wind, these are just words, these are only whispers against a roaring sea. These are white flags waved at werewolves who arch their backs to the moon and laugh. Spoken words mean nothing to a pair of claws. Boundaries built on breath alone crumble before the hunger of those who never planned to honor them.

My heart is a beautiful thing. Pumping all of this red juice into and through my veins, filling me up like a proper Koolaid pitcher. It’s the juice of addicts. It’s the smell that attracts a hundred sharks circling around you like ring around the Rosie. It’s the thump, thump, thump a vampire hears on the other side of the door. And she has been my worst nightmare. The heart is the dumping ground for what the mind refuses to carry. The heart will willfully endure what the mind deems silly, useless and infantile. The separation between the two is the nothing but a tale of siamese twins. One wants one thing and the other wants something entirely different; both attempting to live out what they find to be most beneficial. You must refuse the heart to build boundaries within. Just as you must refuse the mind a certain strain of thoughts so you remain in control of your actions.

To refuse the heart and tame the mind is to lock the door and throw away the key, to keep the call inside silent, no matter how sweetly it pleads. Refusing the heart means holding back the hand that reaches for poison. Refusing the mind means silencing the whisper that says, ‘It’s all you deserve.’ Together, they learn to listen, not lead.

There was a man in my life that I loved very much. I still do. I realized that I couldn’t say no to him. I hated how I could easily bend at every whim, take every call, forgive at the first, ‘Sorry.’ Waving the white flag wasn’t working. I had to build the boundary with myself, not him. I didn’t have a set of rules that I lived by. I had to set these rules as the fence that surrounded this metaphorical restaurant.

My Rules:

1.) You are not allowed to open the door if they call you names.

2.) You are not allowed to open the door if they don’t do what they said they were going to do.

3.) You are not allowed to open the door if this person lies.

These are just a few examples.

I had to make rules within self. And then you would show these set of rules to said person and give them back the control.

Example: “If you refer to me in that manner, you will not have contact with me. It’s up to you on how you want this to go.”

I had to give the “control” back to them. But my rules never changed. And if their behavior didn’t either, then I was not allowed to open the door. These rules became immovable. They were etched in stone, and no one could change them-not even me. What I did was I tricked my brain to treating the relationship as a metaphorical establishment. It has rules, code, a dress code and if someone can’t follow these, then they can’t come inside. It was almost as if I was taking a third party approach, working for myself as another entity.

“Sorry, buddy. I don’t make the rules, I just work here.”

I’m not saying I will never break them again. I’m not even saying I’ve perfected them. But while on a mission to implement these standards, these are the ones I have set. Not for anyone else, but for myself. It’s not about your relationship with other people. It’s about the relationship you have with yourself. You are your own boss. You have employed your brain to make decisions. It has not employed you. And if it feels like it has, then it has enslaved you. And you will never get a metaphorical paycheck this way. The kicker is you’ll never get fired, but you’ll have to live with the patrons that eat at your restaurant and your boss will always resent you.

When you have low self worth or people have treated you less than, you subconsciously, allow your boundaries to be taken advantage of because it’s that parched throat that keeps the poison in business. You can trick yourself into acting as almost a third-party employee for your heart. You will be pushed to find other ways of quenching this thirst besides drinking the water from the guy on the camel. I’ve learned that not every knock deserves an answer, not every thirst needs quenching, and sometimes the greatest strength is in letting the door stay closed.

i was almost her. almost smart. almost soft.

but it would take an axe to the skull to crack a head made of fuck you’s and do not disturbs and why i oughta’s. and i almost don’t care that they’re mean to me.

because my mom came with a built in switchblade underneath her tongue so i learned how to dance before i learned how to tie my slippers.

speaking of slippers, i was almost a ballerina. but apparently you can’t pirouette your way out of a fight when the stage is a kitchen and the audience is waiting for you to slip.

and i almost did.

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Spoken word version here:

you held it there. for me. then for us. sometimes you held it for you, if only to help find your way back to me again.

and you always did.

without you, it fades. it gets dark. it unravels, piece by piece, until we become a shadow of what we were, until i become the shadow that steals from myself.

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Everyday feels like a one minute hourglass. I’ve barely drunk my coffee and I need to be out the door to take the kids somewhere. There’s a few lines needed on the last of my poem, but I need to work. How desperately I want to romanticize my life, but when I look out of my window, the view is nothing but a huge brick apartment building right next to me. Brick walls and train tracks. A dog shits on the lawn, the cops bust a drug deal literally in my parking lot. So I found myself creating a world within my bedroom, hanging those stupid little fairy lights in the corner to give it some false sense of ambience.

I have so many interests but can’t niche down to follow just one path. If I did, would I get somewhere faster? Am I going nowhere slower because of how many roads I’m traveling at once? I am so busy with work, I had to decide against taking my second fiction class that I was really looking forward to. Writing is the drink of water in the desert. It’s the time that is just for me. No one else. I feel starved of it. Am I a spoiled brat to be so entitled to think I deserve this? Or has life made me believe that my days should be spent on the things that pull from my spirit? It takes from me. It feels like it’s supposed to.

I fear if I lean on my creativity, I will lose my footing. Maybe I won’t be able to make rent. Maybe I won’t be able to buy my daughter that thing she wants. I won’t be able to pay the electricity or whatever else I feel like my life depends on. The sacrifice of soul to appease the survival feels like a death sentence. A different kind of death. The kind that kills you slowly, and one day you look in the mirror and your hair is gray. And none of your paintings have decorated the walls of an art gallery. All of your poetry is half written in some Barnes & Noble journal in the nightstand. Your inner child has given up tugging at your pant leg, or your shirt or your heart strings. Robbing myself of a hearts necessity to honor the pride of pocket change.

I hope she doesn’t hate me. That little blonde girl. I hope I can find time to honor her in my smallest moments. I want a life that is mine. And I understand that the world still spins even when I try to stand still. But I do wonder, if I could find my balance, would the world balance with me? Maybe if I shot for the moon, the sky would give me time to count the stars. And if I counted the stars, the sun might take his time to rise-just to give me a few more moments. And just maybe when the hourglass turns on its head, I’ll learn how to outrun the sand.

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I read an article today about a man explaining that men need sex. He went on to say that sex is a man’s version of love, it’s the fountain men drink from. He didn’t say that women need to just enslave themselves to men and get nothing in return, however, there was a comparison between animals, babies and men. That when a baby cries, you don’t get mad at it, you just give the baby his or her bottle.

And that is just the issue. Us being humans, is exactly what separates us from animals. We have a sense of self control, of empathy for other human beings and somewhere there should be morals that God pushed down into the depths of our souls before we were born. Comparing a man to a baby is truly putting men’s standards for themselves at the bottom of the totem pole. If I view a man as an animal or a baby, why would I want to sleep with him? There has to be a desire for some type of human evolution beyond “sexual instincts.” If there’s not, then rape happens. And this is why men are usually the ones to commit such acts.

I have, unfortunately, dated more men than I’d like to admit and have certainly had my fair share of sexual encounters with them. And being completely honest, I can only think of one that was worth it and that’s only because we had children that I love dearly. Other than that, wasn’t worth it in the slightest. Nothing is ever enough. When they get bored of you, it’s either off to porn or physical interactions with other women. Then when they get tired of that, sometimes they resort to other men. Sometimes they resort to goats, farm animals, babies, a hole in a tree (true story) or emotional cheating (girls on twitter, instagram, someone at work). Nothing is ever enough, it seems.

The amount of rape, physical, financial, verbal and emotional abuse I have endured from men ruined me as a person. They have beat the child out of me. The sparkle has left my eyes almost completely. As a teenage girl, I was so traumatized by this warped perception men have given me of myself, I resorted to massive amounts of alcohol abuse. And in turn, engaging in sexual acts that should have never been happening at such a young age. It’s usually the men you know. Even relatives. Some of them don’t care if you are their daughter, granddaughter or niece. It has a hole, right?

I know this is off-putting. It was certainly off-putting experiencing it. But I don’t see how much has changed. If you want a woman to sleep with you, and I say this with all the love in the world, …evolve. Because guess what? WE WANT TO SLEEP WITH YOU! Yes, that’s right! We WANT to. At this point, I’m begging for a reason. But no one owes you shit. And that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

The Red Pill community has completely ruined your brains to make you believe that treating a woman like shit is the best way to get her under your thumb. And guess what? The Red Pill community would be right. Because most of us have been so far beat down by one, two, three or more of you that we don’t have much fight left in us. So is that who you’d like to be? The lion who goes after the wounded gazelle? Nothing is impressive about that. If I punch a toddler, that doesn’t make me a good fighter. It makes me a piece of shit. Do better. Have some discipline. Develop self control. Watch some videos on establishing emotional intelligence. We’re tired of teaching you empathy. And for God sake, stop lying. It’s called a woman’s intuition for a reason.

Some of you want to bring sex up on a first date. If you feel comfortable enough to bring that up, then you should be comfortable enough for me ask you to pay a bill. If you don’t want tacky, don’t be tacky. A woman is a multiplier. Whatever she becomes under your care is exactly what you are. We are receivers and creators. You are givers. So what are you giving that we can multiply? Because whatever that thing is, is the seeds you planted-the seeds you will sow.

Marriage was supposed to be the best day of a woman’s life, but from every woman I have spoken to, it ended up being the worst years of her life. She was asked to pay half, but still remain submissive. She was expected to give full access to her body while cooking all of the food and cleaning the entire house all while still going to work. If you want a “submissive” or “feminine” woman, then I suggest you learn how to create that space so she can naturally fall into that. There’s nothing worse than being in a situation like that and be expected to still look up to and respect your husband/man/boyfriend. You want women to pay for you to cosplay head of household. You want a submissive provider. You are becoming the punchline.

We want you. We want you bad. But we NEED to want you. Give us a reason. Give us true confidence. Beating a woman down physically, emotionally or mentally is not a win. You are teaching yourself that others must be small so you can feel big. You must become big enough to uplift those around you. Because that is what a LEADER does. And the only way you’ll build confidence is through courage. What are you afraid of? We are looking to you with hope. And many of us still believe that some day, it will happen. But how many of us will die alone while waiting? We are there now-where we’d rather die alone than die with you. Be the change that you want to see in us. Be the leaders God intended.

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There’s lovable menace by the name of Arlo that lives at my parent’s house. He has a coat made of the most ostentatious brownish-red fur you’ve ever seen and has eyes that could strike the Devil dead-one blue, one brown. Arlo is a mischevious one year old puppy that loves to drag inanimate objects to the living room and rip them apart until he finds his next unsuspecting target. One time, he even brought a turtle from outside, brought it in the house and continued to roll it around in the afternoon hours until I caught him and saved the turtles poor life.

Though my one of my relatives truly adores Arlo, she’s the one who yells at him the most. In truth, someone’s always scolding him for something. But I don’t think he quite gets it yet—he seems to interpret it as playful attention, always assuming the best of everyone. But when you constantly hear people frustrated with him, it makes you wary. You start dodging him like a little tornado of chaos, assuming the worst in him. I’ve even found myself rushing to my parent’s guest room, quickly shutting the door behind me, sometimes locking it, as if he’s about to barrel through and wreak havoc at any moment.

I’m at my parents' house now, just Arlo and me, sitting outside in the sun. At first, I was a little nervous being out here with him. Oh God, what’s he going to do now? Is he going to attack my laptop, or jump all over me until I lose my mind? But none of that happened. He laid his head in my lap. He licked me quite a few times, looked up at me with those big, gorgeous eyes and sat with me here. This is the most relaxed I have ever seen him. No destruction on his mind, no turtles in sight, and no one around to yell at him. He’s taking a good old fashioned love bath via all these hugs I have to give.

Arlo is most of us-when we don’t feel loved, when we feel forgotten, when we feel like the ones we love are too busy for us. But instead of chewing a turtle shell, we drink ourselves into a coma. Instead of desecrating a tennis shoe, we destroy our relationships, our jobs and ourselves. Sometimes we don’t have the guidance, the love or the proper upbringing to understand how to appropriately maneuver through life.

Without the proper tools to understand, we become misunderstood. We are all Arlo.

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