Naked Words

Ernest Hemingway once said, “I drink to make other people interesting”. He has a plethora of quotes that I absolutely adore. I have a “writing thing” for Hemingway. I don’t enjoy the old pictures of him, nor am I fascinated with the way he looked. However, I love the chopped words, and the rhythm at which he writes. I enjoy the realism of his words and what lies beneath the surface. See the thing about me and writing is that I feel connected to words. The way they smooth over , when they don’t, and the way they sound coming from the breathes in your lungs and escaping from your tongue. I love every bit of it.   But there are just some writers that make me drop my jaw at the raw, sometimes hidden, beauty. It isn’t always the surface. Sometimes it’s the words between the lines that grab your heart-strings and tug. Ernest Hemingway does that, and I will forever be inspired by his work. He once said, “There is nothing to writing. You simply sit down at your typewriter and bleed”. I have done that and I will continue to do that until I have nothing left. When I have sat down, opened my wrists and veins so deep that my blood fills the page. My blood is not red like most, it is black. I run warm with ink filled veins so that but cutting my wounds open I will write something for you. I bleed so you don’t have to. The liquid surrounding my bones will meld with paper until I have nothing left. So, yes. I do love writing. Thanks Ernest.

I’m listening to “This Feeling” by The Chainsmokers and one of the lines are hitting me pretty hard this morning. It goes, “they tell me think with my head, not this thing inside my chest”. And I’m starting to think that maybe I’ve been doing just that for a tad too long. I’m not a hard person. I am strong, but I am not rude or mean. I love the people around me and I always care. However, lately I have distanced myself from people to the point of not even really wanting to talk or feel anything. I have been giving every ounce of love I have to who is willing to be there. And now I am paying for it. My heart is exhausted and it’s hurt. I have decided I need some healing time. I just need a break from using my heart. It’s time to use my head and take care of myself. I have overcome so many things during this life time so far, and i’m not stopping here. I have so many beautiful things ahead of me. And why should life be rushed? It shouldn’t. So for this tiny little sliver of my lifespan- I am going to worry about me. I posted this picture because it shows the beginning of me taking car of myself. I took a bath. I relaxed. I let my shoulders sink below the bubbles and I let my mind go blank. It was the first step to me being “me” again. Expect to read much much more.

Salvador Dali once said, “so little of what could happen does happen”. From first looking at that quote I didn’t see much other than some ink spilled onto paper. Though I’ve sat on this living room floor with all of the windows open and only instrumental music playing in the background, and somehow it seems all different. Maybe it’s just the harmonious sounds melding together and the cold wind that pulls on my sweater. Maybe it is just the sound of crickets and calmness that is causing me to see something deeper, maybe in something that isn’t really there. Right now though? It is. I see that quote and I am suddenly imagining myself going through this huge debate in my head on the “what if’s”. I go through the “maybe’s” a lot. It keeps me from fully living a lot of the time. It’s sad, really, and to be completely honest I never thought about all of this until now. Partly, I believe, because recently I have endured a pain that no one should have to feel (yet many do). See when he died I thought a part of me did too. I thought I lost in the game of love. I started to look at my current boyfriend and think that I would never be whole again for him. I felt horrible for feeling this and I felt like it was my fault. I was to blame. He committed suicide. I went through those “what if’s” and “maybe’s” a million times over. I have been going over and over what happened in my head every single day. Until I saw this quote. It finally hit me that I need to stop asking myself about the “what if’s” and start asking myself about right now. He and I shared a grand love that most people do not reach and at first, it hurt. It hurt to know I lost something that was so amazing at some point in time. I started doubting myself and doubting my actions and the choices that I made and the people who surround me in life. It has taken me an entire month to finally get that it doesn’t matter what I would have done. The maybe’s are irrelevant. Because when he died, I didn’t die along with him. Instead, my capacity for love grew. I began to look at all of the small and tiny details of life as beautiful. I realized that love comes in so many shapes and colors and sounds. I began to fall in love with life. I fell in love with the sound the oven makes when the timer goes off. I fell in love with the way the drops of water feel like rain in the shower. I fell in love with the way the sunlight leaves trails of patches along the thick soil on a perfect day. I fell deeper in love with the man next to me now and I didn’t even realize it. I was so heartbroken to lose him. I was so hurt, but he was the one who taught me how to love. I remember the fights and heartaches and craziness of my first love. I never saw what was lying underneath. I didn’t realize that step by step God led him into my life to prepare me for the rest. I am incredibly privileged to understand true love and what it actually means. It warms my heart. I overflow with gratefulness to the man who died loving me. Because now I am staring at someone who is ready for me to love him, and now I know how. At first, I was so scared to tell the man I am with now about myself. I didn’t want to let him in because someone had already occupied that spot and I wasn’t ready to let go yet. I don’t think I will ever fully be over losing him. I think it will hurt for a pretty long time. However, because he died I now see that letting someone in is never a bad thing, and I’m ready. I want to soak up the life I have and if that means loving the man in my life with every ounce of it in my body, I will. I’m no longer afraid of what will happen. So thank you, thank you to the man who taught me about love, thank you to the one whos loving me right now, and thank you, Salvador Dali, for opening my eyes to the pain of holding onto “maybe”.

I feel like a huge part of my writings is contributed to love, or the lack thereof. This used to bother me. I would constantly repeat to myself “You need to write about something else, EVERYONE writes about love”. Not that I grew tired of it, I just felt that everyone around me would. I’m a romantic, but not in the ways that I fantasize about being whisked away into a fairytale or imagine going on extravagant dates and whatnot. Instead I like to relive the moments in my head when he wakes up next to me with messy hair and a warm smile. Those moments I roll over and kiss him. As I’m kissing him (every single time) I start to memorize each crease in his lips. I start to write down the patterns of his tongue in my head. I enclose every moment I open my eyes to meet his inside the folder in my head labeled “love”. However, not everyone likes this sort of thing as much as I and so I tried to steer away from it. In doing this, though, I realized I stopped enjoying writing as much. It began to slip away from me and I didn’t feel that passion I once did. I kept trying and trying , yet nothing ever flowed. So it finally hit me. That without love nothing is worth writing about. Maybe it isn’t the type of love you think I am talking about. Yes, it’s that lovey dovey type of love when you look into their eyes and a part of you just melts from head to toe. OR it’s the love when you look at them you feel safe and warm. Both so important in a relationship. But it is also the way you love your favorite movie, you love that one restaurant on the other side of town simply because you love the way it feels, you love your family (or maybe you don’t), you love many things throughout life and not all of them are relationship related. See the thing about love is that we actively choose to give it to someone or some thing. No one or no thing is entitled to our love. Love is so much stronger than any other emotion. Most think that hate seems to overpower love , but in the end hate can be broken. Love cannot, even when it may seem to have been. So once this sort of revelation hit me I finally saw that if I’m writing about anything at all it has to be love. Love is so important in a world filled with doubt, hate, vial controversy, and war. When I say war I mean that in every single possible way. We all battle each and everyday and without love there is no true reason to keep that smile on our faces. I’m not saying that if you don’t have a boyfriend/girlfriend you can’t be happy. I am saying that if you try to imagine yourself never liking any specific foods, imagine yourself not caring when your favorite show starts, not liking that nice car, not having friends because they don’t mean anything to you- it all seems to be super boring and monotonous. With love, though, life is filled with roller coasters of emotion. It gives room for hurt, and pain, yet everything seems to be centered around the thing we call love. So my advice to you today is- don’t shy away from talking about or expressing the love you feel. It is the strongest of emotions, holding it in will only cause you problems.

Life begins before we inhale that very first breath. It begins when the two humans who create us fall in love and build a life together. Life begins when your mother reads that pregnancy test. We come out crying, screaming, breathing and so very much alive. After that we begin the chapters of our lives when we live carelessly and freely. We run without the fear of scraping those little knees, and even when we do – we do not fear scraping our knees next time. We still run with the same passion. We scream, fight, and love without any boundaries. As children we know little fear. Fear is taught from our parents and the influences around us. Whether it be friends, family, media, or environment we still have that growing fear. We start to fear the monsters under our bed and in our closet. We fear the dark. Then as a preteen/teen we develop the fear of not being liked or being “cool”. As a teen or passing through Highschool we fear rejection and failure. We fear not doing a “good enough” job to build ourselves for the life after Highschool. After Highschool we begin the part of our lives where we have no idea what we are going to do. Nothing prepared us for this. We have so many questions and so many problems. We are scared to check the mail because of the envelopes containing bills we can’t always pay. We over cook that turkey on our first thanksgiving. We cry, we give up, we yell, we fight, we think we just can’t, and we start to give up. But then we laugh, we love, we hug it out, we stand back up, and in the end we keep going. Because our primal instinct is to survive. However, if just surviving is draining you, I am here to remind you to let go and let God. You may not be a believer and that is perfectly fine. If you don’t believe then I want you to believe in letting go and letting it happen. As a Christian I trust that God will pick you up regardless of the situation you are in. Aside from what you believe, I would like for you to relax for a minute. Relax your shoulders. Unclench your jaw, let your tongue fall from the top of your mouth, let go of the tension in your neck, and take a deep breath. Truly take a moment to step back and just look at your life, appreciate everything you are blessed with, and now I want you to take the initiative you have been wanting to go fix the things you want to change. Because darling, it simply does not matter what you are going through. I promise you will make it through and if it goes horribly wrong and everything falls to pieces it’s for a purpose. It may be because the direction you were headed just wasn’t right for you and so everything must fall apart for you to rebuild. I have no idea where your journey will take you. I do not know where you come from. I am not familiar with the ground you walk on. I don’t know you at all, but I know that in 5 years it will all be completely different and your life will be remarkably changed. I pray and hope for every single person who reads this that it be a good change, but it isn’t always what seems good to you in the moment. That doesn’t mean it isn’t what you need. Sometimes in this crazy journey you just have to get through what you’re going through. So sit back and ride the waves. Sometimes we get so caught up in trying to hold every little thing together that we forget to hold ourselves together. What I do know, is that what you want or what you are waiting on will work out. It may or may not happen, but it will work out for the purpose of ending in your overall happiness. Please stop losing yourself in the process. I know you may feel like you are being pulled in 1,000 different directions and you are sitting there looking in the mirror wondering if you’ll make it. And you will. I know it’s so easy to say “oh it will be all good in the end”, but the truth is that it is so much harder than that and it may not instantly get better. You may go through the most heart wrenching moment you have ever had. You may lose hope. You may get so close to the edge that the wind could push you over. You may cry so hard you can’t see. You may lose people. But I am here to tell you that there is no mountain that could stop you. This is your journey. This is your life. Your happiness matters just as much. And whatever is holding you down will lift if you keep pushing. This journey costs blood, sweat, and tears. I can guarantee you will pay all three. So laugh your way through it and smile until the pain is gone and you can smile for real. Try your best to let it all go. But don’t get so caught up in acting happy all the time. Cry. Let it all go. Scream and just lose it for a moment. It is okay to release just remember to gather yourself after. Because the ultimate thing about this life is that the crying, the screaming, the anger, the sadness, and the hopelessness means just as much as the happiness, the laughter, and the love. Life is filled with passion, heartache, and everything above. Don’t deny yourself the feeling of truly living solely because your journey isn’t going in the right direction at the moment. Let go and let God. Continue your journey with the fiery passion you came into this world with and persevere as hard as you can. I believe in you.

Sometimes I sit back and I think about the life that I once had. I think about the endless nights of staying up, while being scared that if I fell asleep I would wake up to a man holding me down. I think about how tired I was the next morning, but I always gathered enough strength to spend hours hitchhiking until I couldn’t walk anymore or I found a bridge that looked decent enough to spend the night. I think about how many times I barely escaped death. I think about how unsafe I felt and how scared I was. The cold nights. The long days. The snow, the rain, the scorched pavement, ad the cold hearts. I lived a very lonely and unsafe life. I think about how truly sad I was. I remember thinking that happiness was never going to be within my grasp. I got it into my head that the rest of my life was going to be this miserable and scared life, because one bad thing after another happened and it began to out weigh the good. I stopped imagining the dreams I once had. They seemed nearly impossible and I was tired of getting my hopes up. Even after things went a little right and I got somewhat pulled out of the type of life I was living….I wasn’t happy. It’s crazy how one person can remind you of why you dreamt in the first place. It’s crazy how someone can put way all of the years of abuse and unsafe feelings. It’s crazy how the two right arms can make you feel safe and secure. It’s crazy how happy you make me. I guess at some point you turned into my dream. Thank you.

It was hard to see that

God placed you into my life for good reasoning

I’m thankful for you noticing me.

I’m thankful for our love and all the shit you taught me.

I’m thankful for our ending,

I was broken- indescribably.

I’ve faulted myself for loving too hard, for too long.

Today I applaud myself.

In a generation where falling in love is conditional

and frowned upon,

I’ve spilled my soul.

I’ve let you see my naked, and sometimes ugly, truth.

This morning I finally saw my silver lining –

Crazy how it used to be you.