Everything looks wonky, is it my eye level, or were things always that way? I can barely walk without wanting to curl over, and fall to the floor, my feet are heavy, like clay, but they don’t have that same soothing earthy smell. I want to lay bare to the ground, for it to be covered in glistening, wet silt. The stench will impregnate my nostrils, and rebalance my soul.

Every time I speak it comes out as a bark, harsh and sharp around the edges. What the fuck is wrong with me, honey used to pour from these sweet lips. I feel like a dragon, or a witch, or one of those ugly trolls that live under the bridge and come out like a prison guard every time you pass by. I push everyone away just to feel close to myself, and yet when they leave me I hate the person who resides there. Because I have become angry and bitter, and there is this big empty space that permeates my insides. How long does it take to return to zero? Or is zero not really the aim here. I look at my last blog post, and how promising it seemed, a hopefulness that was seeping around the edges. And these words I now write are just shrouded in black, but perhaps seeing them on the page will lighten the load. If you expose black to the light, the darkness becomes diminished, but it’s always only a light switch away.

The troll is afraid of speaking. Words spill from my fingers like beautiful dripping diamonds. Should I learn how to speak, and not write it all out? For an audience that cannot understand everything, they only understand what I write, and even then it’s loose ended, ambiguous and open to interpretation. Everything is open to interpretation, even my words in speech. So let’s stay writing in black and white, so perhaps you can one day use it against me. As you isolate those words and take it away from the rest of their history, like every good prosecutor is known to do.

Do I portray a girl stuck within her insides? Who hides in between caricatures for fear of being vulnerable, for fear of becoming the thing that I do not understand; my mother, because it seemed she never had a voice. I am so close to her, I am inside her skin and it terrifies me. I always become her, because there is no other place to go, like a little rat caught in a maze. But wait I am not her, yet I am so like her, but perhaps…that’s ok. It is ok that I am like her, it does not spell my death. Look I am here and standing, gazing as if for the first time at all the things that are so alike. Why have I resisted it so much? I love my mama, yet this fear of becoming her ate right through my childhood, and is now chasing like a ghost at my tail.

And then there is my father, and my desire to be like him, to be one of the boys. It is played out in my work and in my life, leaving a sticky tobacco stain on everything it touches. Do I disappoint? Because my fears are so ordinary?

Image credit: Partum, 2013, Prefix-poly (collage).