you (ha ha ha)

I told them my story, sitting on the bed in the nearly empty furniture store:

"I had no idea. I just thought you'd come out of your shell!"

Whenever I tell people my story, it's always the same reaction. I guess there's some minimum amount of bravery involved in the way I can let my life crash and burn, again and again, as many times as I'm willing to move on from my last big mistake.

The truth is, I've made more mistakes than other people have been willing to make. I know this because I'm still struggling just to get back into a school most of my peers have already graduated from.

People have always told me I'm strong, or that I've been through more than they have. It sounds like praise, maybe even envy or self-pity for not having a life of perceived hardships and momentarily feeling like they don't have a right to complain.

The fact is, I'm not a strong person, or indestructible. I chased around happiness for a long time, all the way to the bottom of a prescription pill bottle before I was able to accept mistakes as they happen.

I've learned not to get too attached to a bad state of being, because if it can get much worse, it can also get better.

it's not just me, i tell you it's the both of us

If I am a master of anything, it is being a wildly, recklessly, hopeful person. I believe in a world better than the one I've seen, I've hoped for life to treat me better than it has. Even without any evidence to do so, I recklessly continue to fill myself with impossible hopes.

Maybe it's because I spend too much time in my own head. I swear to god, it's a better place than anywhere I've ever been. In my head, my friends are happy and I keep my last contact with each of them in my mind, tucking them away safely in my happy memories and keeping them at arm's length so reality can't reach them. In my own mind, every bad experience eventually washes away, memories become so sun-kissed as to bleach away all the darkness in my mind.

Perhaps this is the line between hopeful and delusional.

everything you exhale

I think I waited around for the pain to become dull before I felt ready to fill my cup again. It always takes me by surprise when the pain doesn't dull, when it simply twists itself around, comes back sharper and clearer and cuts through me as easily as it did the first time.

I didn't stop writing because I began to be happy. I didn't stop writing because I wanted to hide from my depression. I simply never wanted to begin telling a story I hoped would never end.

it's laughter and loving i disdain

I wake up in the dark and he reaches his hand out to me, half asleep. He doesn't know what this gesture means to me.

The antidepressants are on the bedroom floor, my belongings scattered between two cities.



This was all I had written.

I refrained from writing about you because it seemed like an awkward thing to have loom over us ("beware, kiddies, or she'll write about you on the internet").

I wore your shirt all day but the only things I could smell were hot, bitter and acrid.



After the fact, I couldn't make up my mind between booze or a cig. In the end I ran out of the house in the middle of the night, got in the car and shakily drove off into the black, Peter Silberman filling the emptiness.

After the fact, I expected more. The pain doesn't turn on until I'm confronted with the realness of you. Once a week for the better part of nearly a year, I'm more ambivalent towards your absence than I ever knew.

subsume

So listen,

It's been three years and I still find myself taking all the blame. I imagine this fact would make you happy, providing you the comfort of knowing that I cared enough to be hurt by you. In the end that was what it boiled down to, hurting me to prove that I still had a heart at all.

I may be bitter, but it still scares me when I can't find you. I hold my happiness in a book and you transform in front of my face, you take over my dream and I follow you, hostage to my guilt, bound by your anger towards me.

When he held me too tightly as I struggled to staunch my mental break down, I knew exactly where I had felt this before.

I sit at the bottom of a fish bowl.

we can't run, but we can go swimming

I think if you met me you probably wouldn't like me.

The truth is, if you met me, I wouldn't even try. It's been over a year since I honestly tried to have a conversation with another person, and I haven't made a new friend in I-don't-know-how-long. At a certain point it was just too tiring; at a certain point I didn't want to keep putting myself out there over and over again, letting strangers trace all my scars just to have an interesting story to tell secondhand to someone else ("oh I knew someone who...").

I rang in the new year with S.'s arm firmly around my shoulder, the surprising pop of champagne bottle's cork and the warmth of being at the exact place you want to be flooding my body despite the chill. That night I dreamt of being offered five choices, and as I made my decision I smiled in my sleep, assured as I was that I had made the right one.

"It's not a perfect plan / But it's the one we've got / Cause I make a living telling people what they want to hear / But I tell you, it's gonna be a champagne year" — "Champagne Year" by St. Vincent, Strange Mercy

put up your hands

I quit therapy and writing. My life kept moving past the point that I wanted things to change.

Things changed when I lost my best friend. She wasn't even that, she was a placeholder, a notion that I could hold onto, a bookmark on the moment in my life that I one day hoped to come back to. I trusted in a complete stranger, and she trusted me back. We might have gone on to become great friends, but I told myself that I could pause my life, retreat into my own world, and when I was ready it would be there again.

It has been three years since I hit pause. I keep waiting to resume that life that I had, I keep trying to recreate it. Was I honestly happier in that moment? Maybe there is some irretrievable naivete that made my life seem more perfect, when I didn't know for a fact that my mind was flawed and that I would have to try so much harder for the rest of my life.

Life keeps moving within that "pause". I thought I had lost a father, running out of taxi cabs at night and doing my best to not hear my name being called as I rushed to the front door. Instead my mom was running out of my house in the middle of the night, meeting him at the cemetery like teenage lovers, crying about the end of the world in Shakespearean dramatic fashion.

I left my home recently, I packed a bag full of every book I couldn't part and grabbed all the cash I had, I showed up to a friend's house and stayed in a dark corner in the basement where little insects bit me over and over again, leaving little polka dot scars all over my skin. My habit of being inconsistent with medication led to a thunderous pounding in my head and I was screaming all over Seattle.

In its own way, this year has been nothing but moving in violent, anti-climatic circles, a never-ending exercise in emotional tumult and disappointing endings.

I will be moving into my own apartment in October. I may never be able to un-pause my life and resume it at the exact point that I left off, but I am no longer willing to wait for the perfect moment to accept the reality of my life the way it is.

till we ghosts

I've kept this blog for too many years. I hope that retiring these old poems and posts may be similar to cutting one's hair or donating the majority of your belongings. The process feels transformative and cleansing, the immediate moment afterwards is one filled with awkward self doubt. My only hope is that it finally gives me room to start writing about the rest of my life, rather than dwelling on moments in my past.

your half smile doesn't scare me anymore

I don't even know where I am supposed to begin. Do I start with the antidepressants, or do I start with the fact that I haven't been home since Sunday afternoon? Just struggling to find a place to sleep or getting a shower or anything really. Literally everything that I do on a day to day basis suddenly requires an incredible amount of forethought and planning.

But anyways, this blog is coming to you from the basement of a friend's house. More news to come from the girl that is officially homeless.

i felt your shape

I dig my fingers into my forearm and press my lips together tightly. Was I always this numb?

These days, I am perpetually cold, I carry it under my skin six inches deep. These days, I am medicated, my mind buzzes slightly and then shuts down. These days, my words sink into my stomach, I dissolve them with diet Coke until not even the letters that once composed my real thoughts are left.

The things that I refuse to say flood my bloodstream with guilt and shame, until I can't even manage a simple conversation or sustained eye contact, they collect like platelets and clog my veins. I could conceivably take control of this, I could be better than I am at this moment, but instead I wait for the cardiac arrest.

It's only when I hit rock bottom that I know which direction to move.

set you off

By far, what reminds me I have this blog the most is not the actual people that read it but all the spam comments I seem to get. Last night I received 10 emails alone. Let me know if you need something called "sac burberry".

maiiim myyy biiitch

n e r d g l y p h | stephaniekwak

I swallowed my words, I bit my tongue. I waited til the edge wasn't so sharp, to the point that it came through the other side, the way everything goes full circle, looping back to the beginning when you wish things would be linear.

Just be positive.

I put these words in my pocket, along with two nickels, the key to the store and my bus card. They dissolve in my mouth and I am empty again.

The babes open their sleepy eyes in the glare of the headlight before the car speeds up and they are asleep again. You never saw your father as a smoker, a drinker, a man that would act as if he might roll over a car full of children, but this is a man that let go of the handlebars because he felt constantly "threatened" by his own family.

Be friendlier, because he might spend more money on you.

If it weren't for parents, people might actually grow up believing in love, that money can't buy happiness, even God.

die

Nothing really gets me more interested in music than listening to musicians talk about music. And nothing wakes me up from being down in the dumps than music.

I'd abandon words, and writing, I'd abandon it all if I could simply say, "I'm having a hard time," and have that mean something to anyone. Because I lay my words down like bridges but I'm the only person crossing them.

In my dreams, all my fathers forsake me. It leaves clots in my veins and a pounding in my head.

It's the same winter coat, with the same dead leaves and the same cloying grey. If, for half a moment, I can walk on a stretch of sidewalk soaked in the sun and imitate Christopher Owens' walk while singing "Honey Bunny", if I can listen to "Surf Solar" by Fuck Buttons on repeat with the volume turned up, it feels remotely like conversation.

In the end, the people I remember most in the last year aren't the ones that I've told, "I'm having a hard time". It's the Noah Lennoxes, the Avey Tares, the Owen Palletts, the Bradford Coxes, the Christopher Owenses and Peter Silbermans of the world that tuck me into bed at night and whisper, "Sometimes it's like that."

this is starting to fuck with my head (you can count on me)

At 21 it seems a little irresponsible to have already lost two fathers.

As if I might lift up the couch cushions and find him there, arms wrapped around my mother, spreading peanut butter on a saltine still.

You'll have to excuse the language, because I was 6 when I started saying "bastard" and I'd ride in my father's truck and ask the meaning of every curse word I could think of as he drove me to school.

There are certain things that I can't believe are truly over. I still feel like you'll be there, as you always were. Because that's what fathers do, right?

I guess I wouldn't know.

cuckoo, cuckoo

If I think about the last few years before the end of the world and can press my lips in a straight line, it feels remotely like staying.

I used to try and clean the driveway with a toothbrush, until the bristles wore down and the skin on my knuckles rubbed off on the pavement. You used to smile as you walked by.

If I sit with my head against the window of the bus and I remember you swinging me across the surface of the water, it feels exactly like we lost you.

I don't want to remember you like I'm trying to prove you were ever here.

Was there ever a good way to lose a father?

i wasn't made for anyone

I wasn't made for you, like the smiling doll with a set of pearls around her neck like a dog collar. A million little dollhouses, I pass them every night. I used to call my heart a home but that suburban dream was washed down the sink, along with the frog that she blended and every other problem we couldn't solve.

I want you to understand things. I've been standing with the suitcases packed since I was six but I've stayed because if one of us wasn't committed we would never have made it this far.

For your birthday I painted my favorite picture of the two of you, but my hands were shaky and I was tired and soon enough I mispainted, your lips transformed from a carelessly captured smile to a red smudge. I wanted to start over, to get it right, but I cut you apart with my own hands.

When I look closely enough, I can see the cracks now. If we stand far enough away, everything looks alright.

I wasn't made for anyone. I was made to stand far enough away until everything looks alright.

as young as yesterday

When I was a child I used to have a nasty habit of scratching myself. My arms and legs were covered in scabs, which I'd pick off to create even bigger scabs. Or, if I'd picked them all already, I'd scratch myself until I bled.

There was never any rhyme or reason to it; I did it because I needed to keep my fingers busy. Soon enough, my body was covered in a hundred scars, little circles, like someone had put a polka dot pattern on my skin.

It took me years to quit the habit, to turn the pages of a book rather than pick myself to pieces. It took even longer for the scars to fade.

Sometimes, at night, busy fingers scratch skin, until I wake up with new scars. Maybe I've just always wanted to tear myself apart.

I did it, I guess

Congratulations are in order, but unfortunately there aren't many people joining in the celebrations. I was reinstated at the University of Washington! It's a happy day, and a testament to how hard I worked this year and how much it sucked, but because I've been keeping most of that to myself, news of my return to school has had a fairly lukewarm reception.

Anyways, I'm happy for myself. And since I need to share this with somebody, I thought I'd share it with everyone that's been with me this whole long way, from being in college to being kicked to coming back. Thanks guys!

never tear us apart

If I could write my own ending to this story, I wouldn't be so damaged. We'd probably be talking, instead of the awkward silence between us that only I seem to notice.

The fact is, mistakes were made. Things were done that can't be undone. But my soul is weak, and things worth having require standing up for, and lord knows I don't have solid knees.

When you hold me it's the only time I can feel my old heart beating. More than anything I'd want to tell you that I've only felt alive when you run your fingers across my skin. But I've been spending my time suppressing screams, I've been living with ghosts and getting strangled every night.

I want to have something to offer you, but I don't have anything to offer myself.

magnolia

The word comes heavily, sitting in the back of my throat like a thick syrup.

Tonight I tried to bury you again. I washed you down the sink, I tucked you in a page of a book I never read, I clawed your throat of soil and gravel. Out, damned spot.

When I speak your name, the sound catches and I can feel all the times I drew you near, only to hear you whisper "Bitch" behind my back. Where I might have had gentle words, it takes all I can do to keep from shutting down completely.

Memories of you remind me just how much I don't want to be in love.