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Text of the page (random words):
an t tell where my edges meet with the world i don t understand why i suddenly feel so foreign to my own perceptions am i really seeing what i m seeing the world comes at me too quickly and moving slower doesn t always help me feel sure of my footing it s so strange to have a body my eyes force themselves shut when i desperately need to see and yet i m terrified of seeing what s before me tension headaches like i m continually looking up a flight of stairs one day i will have realized that i ve traveled a great distance both forward and up i don t know if that climb will have been worth anything to me if i m still sad in the end it all comes back to the fact that the world i see before me is not the world i am from i am still a stranger here my sister isn t a part of this world and that alone has altered the very fabric of everything around me it s physically disorienting to look at a world that doesn t hold my sister but maybe sadness will come and go and at some point later on i ll find a better measuring stick to size my existence by something more than pain endured right now i m trampled by sunlight and choking cloudlessness this is what summer comes to me as the sky clears and my body forbids me to get out of bed the weather becomes an extremity wracked with tremors and a fever my body rages at extremes makes me feel insane for choosing bed over nature my body is simply exhausted and struggles to face anything that requires enduring even hot bright sunshine i hate hating summer because by extension i find myself hating the need for adventure the way that summer unbuckles it like a lover that naked sky is sometimes just too much for me to face let alone caress it didn t used to be that way and that s what angers me the most i can see the trees when i look out the window but what sort of trees are they the sprawling synapse of leafy green memory i have no idea what the life of the forest is like right now in this instant i don t know its mood i don t know anything about it anymore because i m so far away living in bed while i recover from living while i recover from the fear of being alive i want more than anything to feel a kinship with the beauty of the world again i want to feel it pull me yank me into the bloom i don t know much about anything i see right now i spend my days recovering from living a kind of waking into the ideas of death and sleep goodbye and hello which spin themselves around inside me to form webs for catching what will i catch a fever a dream a poem a moth something inspiring i am dying of recovery i am dying of recovery i am dying of recovery 433 days of panic and lethargy a tasteless soup of depression grief and terror of the empty spaces around me the longer i hide inside the harder it is for me to look upon the world i ve noticed something though the forest changes at about the same rate as a human in terms of seasonality but the difference between humans and the forest is that we must fight and writhe in flame to understand our role in the endless goodbye the forest does not one could say that there is also an endless hello and that would be true but saying hello requires far less bed rest than even the smallest goodbye goodbye to the sunshine on the carpet this morning goodbye to the rain light of the afternoon goodbye to the tea in my cup goodbye to the smiles and scowls i saw today goodbye to what births me what births me is my body my body is shaped like an arboretum it all comes back to the trees and me inside them them inside me i look in the mirror and think at least i still have my seasons i suppose that will always mean feeling that particular yellow ache of blooming remembering falling apart saying goodbye and saying hello again knowing full well what phrase i ll have to say again next 1 comment lungs air posted on april 22 2014 by braeden leave a comment rivers posted on april 4 2014 by braeden leave a comment sweet gum ash posted on march 25 2014 by braeden as i type this i am sitting alone in my room with the lights off and my sense of reality is rearranging itself a few hours ago i was laying on the couch watching lord of the rings return of the king with my roommates while i worked on a poetry project i was laying there re reading selections from jay ponteri s wedlocked when i was overcome by the urge to go into my room grab the dry red sweet gum leaf on my bookshelf and crush it in my hands i wanted so badly to throw it into the driveway and scuff my shoe across it i sat up went to my room and grabbed the leaf i stared at it for a moment while i thought about how crazy such an act would be for me i make sense of my existence by my relationship to the landscape around me to do this i accumulate objects from nature in my room and assign metaphoric significance to them so that i can think about my being in concrete terms the outer world becomes a projection of the inner me that s why it would be absurd for me to just stomp into my room and destroy some old leaf i d been saving it would be like slamming my finger in the door for no reason this particular sweet gum leaf was the first piece of nature that i picked up and took home after my sister was killed i was on the marylhurst campus in late november of 2012 just weeks after the accident i was walking from the south parking lot and the sidewalk was plastered with freshly fallen wet sweet gum leaves they were all a deep blood red with bursts of yellow in the center this leaf caught my eye because it was brighter than the others i picked it up and kept it because in that moment i thought it was so strange that i could still recognize beauty and perhaps even stranger that i still had the instinct to care about it in the first place it was a testament to the fact that even in desolation i could still touch and be touched by the world around me even so i thought the leaf looked so fucking sad it made me sad just to look at it so i kept it what good is the ability to recognize beauty if it conflicts with the state of one s inner emotional landscape i loved that it was beautiful and that it made me hurt worse it made me hurt worse because my sister could not hold that leaf at the same time the contrast of the colors were just astounding i couldn t stop staring at the way the darkness of the red gave way so easily to the sting of the yellow in the center so there i was in my room holding the leaf in my hand fighting not to crush it into red powder after a little while longer i decided that i would destroy it along with several other leaves on my shelf however if i was going to let myself give into this weird impulse i would have to come up with a good reason why i was doing it i couldn t think of one but i felt the urge welling up inside me along with another feeling the feeling of difference when i thought about destroying the leaf i felt different than i have felt for the past few months for a split second i didn t feel crippled by anxiety i was scared but my body was no longer shrieking at me to be saved from some unknown doom just for a second i felt that the anxiety became replaced by a weird kind of pain in my chest a kind of residual nerve sensitivity that reminded me of the first time i got punched hard in the ribs i can only assume that this was my body reacting to the oncoming epiphany i paced around the house looking for a lighter because there was still that part of me that saw the leaf as a sort of talisman if i was actually going to start going through my room destroying these little objects of memory i was at least going to do it ceremonially and burn them instead of smearing them across the driveway with my foot as i walked out to the front porch with a fistful of dried leaves a lighter and a flashlight the realization of why i needed to do this hit me hard i ve been keeping myself sick by pouring my grief into these objects and then filling my living space with them as manifestations of my pain i have been building myself into a prison part of the reason why i ve kept these grief objects with such reverence is because i felt that they were a tribute to my sister the devastation i ve felt has been so complete that many of the things i ve been doing to honor my sister s memory have started to fuck with my belief system what started out as memory exercises placing memories into objects to preserve and enjoy them slowly turned to a reverence for pain because it was pain felt on behalf of my sister then that reverence slowly began to manifest as worsening pain depression distinct from grief panic disorder ptsd symptoms etc i revered the trauma of the event of her death because it was her death with that reverence came an acceptance of excruciating pain as a necessary consequence of daily living it would simply be the nature of my having survived her death at all and for a long time it genuinely was until the acceptance of pain became the requirement of pain the realization that struck me as i was preparing to burn the leaves was that i ve been clinging to the objects of my grief as a means of denying my ability and my responsibility to create something new for myself that doesn t involve my sister these objects are anchors to my own devastation and more importantly the virulent belief that i cannot move forward in this life without her that belief is at the heart of why i don t feel safe in the world it s the belief that has turned me against my body simply because it is so scared of dying that it panics at the mere thought of being alone subconsciously i built myself into a palace of suffering so that i would not abandon my reverence for my sister s death and my resulting grief deep down i didn t want to keep living without her and i poured that belief into the very matter of the world around me so that i could hoard it and place it up on a pedestal as a shining symbol of what i ve been reduced to a grand mirror whose only purpose is to reflect my own shadow back to me so i burned the leaves i stomped on the ashes i flicked the stems into the lawn i hurled cups of acorns out the back door crushed oak balls between my fingers this doesn t mean i m done grieving in the slightest it means that i m no longer making vows to stagnation i ve been writing a great deal lately about what it means to live in the void i ve learned that the only real way to confront the void is to place something within it with the knowledge that emptiness is the nurse of form darkness the nurse of light and most importantly that whatever is created in the void will someday be consumed and vanish allowing me to create again however this is not to say that form is the only thing that brings comfort here this journey is a kind of loop where i oscillate back and forth between creating and destroying writing to deepen my own mystery damage certainty and honor chaos is as much a part of my process as imagining a new life how can i run towards something that terrifies me and plays tricks on my mind and body how can nothingness be fertile how can i live if i feel dead and displaced from reality what happens when i no longer recognize my own face in the mirror can i willingly lean into destruction can i trust my perceptions how can dreams make more sense than reality how do i move forward through pain can i be in love with a contradiction there are two poets that have influenced me the most in this process william blake and paul éluard my favorite line from blake s marriage of heaven and hell states that the prolific would cease to be prolific unless the devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights the way that blake treats contraries in his work is nothing short of remarkable i ve never seen a writer embrace this concept with such deep confidence and affection that alone helps ease some of the crippling anxiety i feel in writing about these things éluard on the other hand is making me question everything i know about writing poetry i ve been familiar with the philosophy of the surrealist movement for a long time but have never actually read any of the literature until now what strikes me the most about éluard s writing is that he freely allows the subconscious to bleed into reality and he does this because he questions the distance between those two things perhaps they don t truly contradict each other but rather compliment each other in the process of creation and destruction writing and living then becomes a loop that is simultaneously creating and devouring itself and that is precisely what grief feels like that is precisely what love feels like pain is one of the most persuasive forces we are capable of experiencing and my pain is quite the orator i ve become so skilled over the past year at rationalizing my suffering here s what s truly tragic about the whole ordeal i very nearly convinced myself that i was not capable of being in a relationship with someone if i were in this much pain and because the source of that pain was something i revered i very nearly convinced myself that i didn t want to fall in love period i could come up with a thousand other reasons why it would be best for me to further my self isolation i can look back at the end of my last relationship and see how shattered i was i can look back and see how long it took me to pull out of that i remind myself of how much of me i sacrificed simply to get along with another human being only to have that sacrifice be the problem i ve isolated myself from people my entire life and there s been a part of me that has really reveled in that i think if anything this encounter with the void has taught me that isolation and stagnation taken to this kind of extreme can and will destroy a person first in their mind then in their body and finally in their heart well i burned the leaves tomorrow i ll burn the sticks i ve been keeping myself sick with worry doubt and sorrow i ve been making promises to stagnation that i simply cannot keep i couldn t even if i wanted to if anything burning my sad leaf collection means that i ve decided to stop talking myself out of living i want to truly enjoy driving again i want to enjoy eating and sleeping again i want to go exploring in the wilderness again i want to feel excited about connecting to another human i want to stop flinching every time someone touches me unexpectedly i want to create create create and i want to fall in love with someone who understands how terrifying it can be to choose to be alive in the face of nothingness i want to be in love again whether i m in pain or not whether i m scared or not and whether my sister is here or not i have to believe that is possible 5 comments status update posted on march 15 2014 by braeden this is incredible i want to write to unknow to unlearn to discover and to discover that what i have discovered is wrong or incomplete or fluid i think about wanting to write and plunge myself into the blackness every single day but so rarely find ways of articulating this very 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