Me! Babbling! Again!

she rises to find a tool
to etch herself into paper,
to pull herself out of thought
and into existence.
she reaches to find a place
to put herself into being,
to find a book to hide her words in,
and begins.

the swish-swish of long skirts
with exotic prints and colors, eyes
painted dark, cradling novels like
children, cradling children like
dreams, and dreams are dreams.
A future like infinite particles,
and reaching out, touching --
and the possibility overwhelms.

Being a person is so strange. I feel
as if I was meant to be a tree,
and there was a mix-up in Heaven.

I like talking to God in my own room.
Or by myself.
It is strange to have people talk God to me,
to put me in a chair
and to put God into a time zone.

Mirrors aren't measuring sticks
mirrors aren't to see ourselves

Remembering hammock days
ice tea days dock days the days
that we pretend we are most happy.

I wish I had a word to fit
everything into -- to squish
happymelodylighteyelidsmeadowsbelieve
and scream it in ice cream parlors
and pizza joints and into the ears
of girls who think they are fat
and make people look up again.

In Heaven,
Jeremiah and I will have a lot to talk about.

Untitled

I cannot remember the first time
I skipped a meal on purpose. Skipped is
the wrong word -- like I wasn't
screaming inside for the food on my
plate, like I wasn't imploding, like
I wasn't ready to eat the stupid
burger already, shove it down my mouth
and smile to say "just kidding." I
watched the mirrors in my house that
year, always watching, looking at my
thighs and my love handles. I remember
my goal was to be able to stand, look
down at my toes and see my whole
feet, not eclipsed by the tiny roundness of
my pale stomach. The doctors told
me 125 pounds was healthy, my
friends told me that I looked fine, but
all I heard was fat fat
fat fat fat fat fat fat, the
sick tattoo of an internal drum.
"All I want is to be skinny and
beautiful" I kept saying, like if I
became skinny, true beauty would follow.
"All I want is to be beautiful" I said,
which really meant I want
to be liked, which really meant
I want to like myself.
I was 15 and tall and gawky and just
wanted crushes to crush back, wanted
to be stunning and amazing and
womanly. My cup size
and my shoe size told me I couldn't.
My daddy said i could and so did
the Bible on my shelf. But the creaking
in my stomach made me burn, made me
feel better, made me smaller, made me
better, I was pretty, I was pretty --
and one day, God said, "no more." Just --
stop. And I did. It was hard. It hurt.
They never tell you that it hurts to
start eating after not really eating.
It feels strange, and then you have to
not throw it back up. But then you can live again.
I am not 125 pounds anymore. I am more.
But I am beautiful. And it has been a long time
since I did not eat, on purpose.

Glass Girl

the careful way she smiles
with her glass teeth and
porcelain face fragile and
breakable scared to walk to
breathe to speak she would
shatter if she moved
glass blown eyes forged in
fear glazed with insecurity
chips in her china hands
she has made herself a
doll body she hates she hates
she hates this herself her
but it is too late if
she opens her mouth to
speak her lips will break
and fall away

so i was skimming this book

called be the change. it's by this 14-year-old kid with a serious desire for the abolition of slavery. and he sounds like me a couple months ago.

anybody that's ever written a research paper knows that you get completely consumed with your subject. i spent a month and a half chin-deep in newspapers, websites, books and blogs talking about slaves. i wouldn't recommend it.

researching the gross subject of slavery was particularly horrible for me because i got passionate about it, but i had nowhere to take that passion. i had no job, so i couldn't donate to organizations. it was too late to register for a mission trip. there wasn't really any club or chapter i could jump on board with. etc. i was impassioned and immobilized.

but my passion died like *insert snap here*. i hadn't really, really, truly, cared all that much. it was like being sorry for mars or something, i was sorry and angry at something far far away that, if we're honest with ourselves, we can't really do anything about because it's so far far away. sure, if i lived in asia or africa, abolition would probably consume me.

but i don't really care about foreign missions, personally. i like that God decides for other people to go bonkers about ukraine and preach from the curb and make friends with strangers and smuggle bibles and cool stuff like that, people that actually have an idea of what the vague christianese word "evangelize" means.

see, me, i care about church people here in america. i guess a lot of other people would think church people are "safe" as in "saved," because you can't lose their faith, so okay, as long as you pray the prayer and show up on sunday you're okay, right? let's go out and get more magical prayers prayed so we can have more people next sunday.

i do not belong to this mindset.
no, not all home missionaries think like that, of course. but the saved people need saving too. the saved people who don't understand the stuff they think they believe, or even worse, the ones who think they have it all figured out. that's who i hurt inside for.

if you're passionate about the dying people across the pond, i think that's amazing and i want to encourage you. [and if you have an extra plane ticket...] i still do my part, i'm a strong supporter of fair trade, yada yada, but it's great to see people actually make a difference over there. i'll stick around here in america, cause there's lots of people here that need help too.

jules verne sounds way less far-fetched in the original french

he does.

Journaling like a madwoman and enjoying it. Wishing I had money for music. Myspace and pandora for now.

school tomorrow. so strange. i forgot everything. like, how i OCDishly organize my folders. i forgot my system. i forgot where the pencils are, because i hate pencils.so it ended up not mattering.

i figured a lot about myself at revgen. namely, that i don't actually want to go on a mission trip right now, that i overthink everything, that i'm bad, and that i'm poor. haha.

gooooooodnight