Spilled Writing - Blog Posts

False Guilt

It’s easier to think,

That you are a monster born broken,

Rather than a human made flawed.

A constellation of scars (with a soldiers story to tell)

A constellation of scars, they tell the story Of a young soldier, beaten and battle weary The taunts, the jeers of those who seek validation The whispers, the rumours of those who see a threat

A collection of memories, they tell the story Of a bright young child, ready to find glory Studying hard for years to come To see their families proud faces When they hit number one

A tale of joy, fleeting yet forever Their mother, their sister, their brother, their father The times spent together with friends Now only a fantasy

The reality of life, an empty black hole The void in their chest where a heart once called home That absence of feeling that clings to their skin The guilt running through their veins that they cloak themselves in

The temptation of pain, just an itch at first Grows to be unbearable in the times it is worst The scabs on their skin that refuse to heal As they are peeled back again and again For that brief chance to feel

The tunnel of darkness continued to grow Would it ever end? They really didn’t know A call from the shadows in the form of a blade Said it brought peace and a moment of escape

The darkness swarmed in on them, promised to keep them safe In the midst of their pain, they didn’t realise it was a cage As the cuts grew in number on their arms, legs, chest and heart They still felt nothing when skin and blade were apart

As the darkness continued to swallow them whole Their loved ones were worried “Where did they go?” And so the acting began, strings of denies “I’m just tired.” They would say, weaving a web full of lies

The fragile strands tightened and coiled Constricting even them into being embroiled. “Maybe I really am just tired, or overreacting,” “Maybe it’s just for attention, to try and feel what I’m lacking.”

The coils wound tight, choking them slowly And though they didn’t realise it, they were succumbing And so the thoughts of death started creeping onto their head “I feel nothing even when cutting, I’m better off dead.”

An attempt was carried out, though they can barely remember a thing Except waking up in hospital, alive and breathing Their mother had found them, draped over the bathroom sink Wrists slit, bleeding out An ambulance was called There was still no feeling

A year had passed and there was still no sign of the end The web of lies had been broken, but the void in their chest remained Even while being smothered with affection There was still no feeling

The world kept rushing past, they stopped trying to keep up months ago But one day it seemed to halt For just a second There was feeling once more

They had been out with their friends Who hadn’t given up just yet On making them feel again Yet another attempt that was set to fail But it didn’t

It was a simple thing really A joke, a smile and then a tidal wave of laughter Seeing the joy that they thought was lost It caused something to stir

An echo of happiness, plucked from a heartstring It resonated through their body And the void seemed to shrink ever so slightly There was life in them yet

Five years passed and they were still no better That echo being the only thing keeping them tethered to this life Why am I not better yet? I should be happy, I should be healed

They began to notice the world The whispers, the rumours Began to notice How the scars littered their skin

Their body, an art piece For those who merely skimmed the surface, it was dangerous and all consuming So they avoided it Criticising the artist to deny their looming feelings of dread To ignore how deep the scars ran

But to those who saw through the critics’ remarks Those who looked deeper Who broke down the walls Who braved the aggression, the masks and the cruelty And saw what lay behind it all A damaged soul, trying to fix themselves with cut hands

The soul of a broken child who grew up too fast A child with a fragile glass heart Shattered to pieces by the harshness of life The expectations, the judgement, the reality It was shattered to protect the holder from the worst But they were still left with their constellation of scars

Those who saw the true meanings were sometimes driven to madness The weight of it too much for their aching shoulders Too weak to carry yet another burden But there were those who could. Those who saw and still stayed Those who showed them, the echo of a life Pulsing through them still

That constellation of scars, that collection of memories, they tell the story Of a brave young warrior, battling enemies even some of the most experienced had never encountered. How exhausted they were, how sick of fighting Who gave up trying to fight back those monsters Who had lost all faith

But who had life in them A pulse that refused to let go Clinging to them even as the darkness led them, Deeper and deeper into despair Echoing constantly, begging for them to hear A pulse that people helped them find

That brought them from their knees That told the young soldier, “Don’t loose hope yet, I’m still beating.” The young soldier hadn’t given up yet They would be victorious

Their constellation of scars, told of memories Good and bad, joyous and despairing The memories of their life past And would tell of the life to come

As the new scars were added, the jeers stayed the same, Unwavering in their goal to hurt

But still, they lived Though their scars never fully healed, their pain never fully erased The void never fully gone

There were good days Where their scars seemed non existent And there were bad days Which broke them all over again

But what was important Was that even if the light disappeared from the tunnel, Even if the dark seemed inescapable, They would always have the pulse in their chest Cheering them on, keeping them going Awaiting the victory only they can achieve. Steadily beating.

dear adora, from elliott

To the little girl, I used to be do you remember all those nights when you would stay awake Thinking and dreaming up all those far away hopes and dreams You would stare up at the ceiling planning out how you would do it all

All those late nights Planning on how you would save the day Becoming that perfect superhero Swooping in to rescue everyone, Saving all the kittens from trees, Putting out fires Freeing your family from that living nightmare they would never wake from

Remember all those promises you would use to make Between you and the world outside that shitty apartment window Telling yourself it would get better, rehearsing it so much it was branded in your heart and brain Telling yourself those thoughts would go away That you could wake up And be the perfect daughter You would wake up and be a girl and believe it Your body would no longer feel so wrong

Spending all those nights and early mornings Praying to that god you were so hopelessly clinging to Begging him to make it all make sense Those thoughts stuck circling in your head All the worries and fears that had kept piling up Tangling themselves together

What would you think of me now if you saw who you became Would you be proud? Proud that I finally found myself That I had finally realized who I was Would you be happy? Happy that I had made it this far, Being able to finally make it to sixteen, even though you didn’t?

I guess you had been right when you thought you wouldn’t make it For me to make it, you had to die That I had to kill everything that you were Stealing away your name Cutting off those long curly locks, everyone had adored scarring that beautiful skin, that used to be your pride and joy

The only darkness I shall allow into my life, is the night

For even then, I have the Moon.

When pain has crossed the limit

It turns into a heavy stone

It sinks into soft skin

Continuing past flesh and bone

Until it finds it's way

To your feather light soul

And there it stays

heavy and cold

They say write what you know so I will. I want to tell the story of loss and hope. How quickly everything can fall apart , how you can be looking at misery and then suddenly living inside it. How hopes and dreams are a shield against dirty looks but they don't protect your cold hands or feet in the winter months.

I want to tell the story of the forgotten, the ignored. The people sitting against storefronts that are always asked to move move where?

I want to tell the story of the tired, the burdened. The children raising their siblings while their parents buy more scratch cards because maybe this time we'll win some money will they snap out of it then?

I want to tell the story of the desperate, the lost. The young person that left everything behind , that sits in cafes but never orders. That uses the free WiFi to check social media accounts of old friends, but can never bring themselves to do so, afraid that they realise they've been forgotten how much longer can I can they hide?

What story do you want to tell?

Sometimes I think the dreams are either alternate versions of me or another person completely and I'm just hopping along in their life that night.

I had a dream I was a woman working in a book store but this woman was not me. I've had this dream before over a decade ago, same woman, same bookstore. She now has her own office so she's doing well since the last dream, she seemed happy, fulfilled. I woke and felt motivated to do something with my life. Maybe visit a books store, maybe I'd see her in the women checking out books, Maybe I'd one day see myself with my own book adorning the shelfs.

I wonder if she dreams of me, I wonder what she sees. Am I a recurring dream, the Young women that prefers to stay curled up, that never went out with friends and now lives half in a world of pretend. Does she see me lay in bed, lost but searching, waiting but hiding. Am I a nightmare. Does she wake confused and heavy and think thankgod that's not me.

Am I only ever meant to dream of what could have been.

It's nearly halfway into the year and I feel a little bit lost and heavy. I feel like a stone sinking into the summer months. warm. sleepy. Isolated.

Let's be honest.

Let's be truthful.

When you meet your own eyes in the mirror

Can you recognise or a least reconsider

The apathy

That you let cling to thee

It's carefully downing you

It feels a secure embrace

But you're afloat

You've lost the boat, to passion, to joy, to meaning

It's calling out

ahoy

Where did you go

I see your eyes meet mine in the mirror

I see what once was starting to flicker

Are you but a ghost

A lost dream turning thinner.

I don't get out bed most days, I barely remember to drink water and my hyper fixations seem to be doing me more harm than good. But I go to get groceries in the late evening hours, as the birds call out to the fading sun. I can't bring myself to go regularly, but I've been in my house for weeks and the birds are singing and the streets are empty and life seems beautiful and fresh when you walk alone just breathing or singing to your self. I walk over the fly over, closer to the branches that reach up and away from here.

I sat outside on a wall across the pub. My dad was inside. I hadn't spoken to him in ten years. But I had seen him through pub windows and passed by him as he smoked in doorways more than a few times. Once I heard him sharply inhale, coughing as cigarette smoke choked him when I passed, but reached out he did not and neither did I.

It was summer, the air was warm and still, the daffodils had fully bloomed. I don't know how long I sat there, but I know it started to get dark and the streets emptied. Someone in the pub put on Sweet Caroline, everyone inside sang it with all the energy of a football chant, I hummed along to the chorus looking at the sky as it changed from blue to pink to black. I sang I'll be fine (I know now those aren't the lyrics) even though I felt so alone in that moment, I was adrift, I was waiting. And I'd waited long enough. But how could I stop. It was all I had.

I kept my eyes fixed on the door for awhile, then the stars, then back to door blinking against the tears gathering at the edges of my vision. I wanted to take off my shoes and rest my feet on the cool pavement, I wanted to feel rooted in something other than my loneliness, my sadness, but I didn't. Instead I quietly sang along to Sweet Caroline, sang about hands reaching out and felt more alone than ever, felt an ache settle deep and heavy into my bones, i suppose I was rooted by my feelings after all.

I'm not sure why I stayed there, was it in the hope that he'd spot me, rush out, hold me close and say it's going to be okay now , dads here or was it a punishment mixed with self pity. All I know is I couldn't bring myself to go inside but also didn't want to hide. The song ended and the stars above looked on in indifference.

Then a man walked passed. I got ready for a suggestive remark or something similar. there are some streets in my city as there are in most around the world, where women line dark alleyways and men in cars roll down their windows and ask how much, and if you happen to be a women walking alone in those areas you might get asked if your working tonight. So I was prepared for something along those lines, I was prepared to politely smile and get my keys ready between my knuckles if needed. He paused for a moment.

"Are you alright love?" he asked, his voice quiet and concerned.

With the relief came the overwhelming need to tell him the truth, to spill everything to this stranger, to tell him that no I wasn't alright, I was deeply not okay and the heavy feeling has been following me around for so long I dont know how to live without it, instead I indulge in it, I give it a place at the dinner table, I drink it with every meal and tuck it close to my heart every night, I use it as a substitute for a lullaby. But I couldn't , I didn't.

I flashed him a quick smile , the most hollow thing you could imagine, the only thing I could muster. it was just something I did to get him to walk away. "Yeah, I'm good thanks".

He didn't walk away, he stood there with eyes so caring I was afraid they'd make everything I was holding in unravel in a messy pile at our feet. "Are you sure, really?" he knew I wasn't, my sad shining eyes didn't help.

I shook my head slightly, another quick smile "I'm sure."

Beware the ides of march they say. Perhaps we should beware every month, as we the participating audience watch this pantomime play out on insta reels and YouTube shorts. Meanwhile groceries prices go higher, innocent people die trapped under the rubble of their homes and country relations are haywire，all because the man on stage wants to pretend everything is satire. And he does this while the world catches fire, calls it progress. Calls it great T.V. But will call foul play when shots are fired when the people he hurts grow tired.

When I was little I was collecting all my future pains and putting them in a neat little line, each one climbing up the ladder of my spine. Because what is time, what does it matter when I could see the ending before I had even begun. It was like the Me that would live through broken glass and kicked in doors felt her heart beating so loudly she sent the sound back through time, and it found me in my room when everything was good. This organ we prescribe love to felt so much fear it ran back to a time before the palpitations.

In about ten minutes I'm going to receive a phone call and I probably shouldn't be making a post, because I always start freaking out just before (so rn). but I'm doing this to trick my brain into being semi productive, basically I'm getting the ball rolling and hoping I can cling to whatever motion is left for the phone call.

I usually sit in literal silence for hours before any call so that I can store up social energy and mentally prepare myself, but sometimes I instead start getting more anxious the closer it comes to the call time, and when that happens I just don't pick it up. It feels like there's a wild animal waiting on the other end but also one looking over my shoulder ready to get me if I don't pick up.

So I'm going to just make this random rambling post and hope I stay out of my amygdala. Gosh I hate this lol, I've been through way scarier things but waiting on phone calls always feel like falling down an elevator shaft.

The icecream man is driving down my street with the song playing loud and I'm Feeling intense nostalgia, for the childhood I still cling to. I feel it melting away, it's cool softness turning watery, slipping between my fingers.

I just awoke from a nightmare. Absolutely horrendous I tell you. There was a koala sized rat/tarantula hybrid and it kept running at me and clamping it's fangs into my hands. This being. This fiend just wouldn't let up, it was relentless, I have phantom pains in my hands. But To be fair it might have just been extremely pissed off and offended, because the moment it toppled out of a backpack, I gagged and held up a blanket like it was garlic and a cross.

I want to write about the pain of it all, I want to write about the people I qued with outside of food banks; there was an old man who looked like a wise wizard with his long white hair, he waited for a small portion of pasta most days and offered me advice on the best times to turn up, there was a group of polish men with cans of alcohol shared between them, who at first assumed I was polish aswell and tried to talk to me, but all I could say was Przepraszam, nie wiem Polski the old man told me to stand next to him after that, there was also a brother and sister who where both addicted to heroine, most days they seemed to be going through intense withdrawals. We would all wait in a old medieval churchyard, some sat on toppled headstones while others leaned against stone angels with their faces covered. I want to write about what complete isolation and poverty does to you, how eyes don't meet yours and voices talk over you. But when I do, the room goes quiet and people look away, suddenly i feel the need to awkwardly laugh and say so yeah anyway.

Anyone else physically recoil when thinking about how we are made of flesh and bone. I can even look at uncooked meat, if I've seen it raw I can't eat it cooked. And if it looks like a limb I'm not eating it at all. Then I think about how my body is uncooked meat and my bones possible tools and I shudder, I feel far too close to the tendons and the blood, I feel alive, so alive that the sound of my heart is a warning and a blessing, I feel so alive I'm afraid I'll die, I'm afraid of how gruesome it is.

I try to write something, anything, but the words are only clear when I feel them press against my heart and mind. They become muffled when hands reach for them, they loose their shape.

An incoming phone call you say

And I freeze like a deer in headlights

Have I been hit, I feel blooding rushing past my ear drums

My heart is beating quick

then quicker, a fast rapid flicker

it's trying to run away, but my body won't move

Instead my body stands shock still and I watch locked in, but so far removed

I'm dizzy spinning around and round in my amygdala, a ringing is pulsing against the outside walls of it

trying to get inside

I cannot hide

Then the ringing just stops

it's stops

Incoming call is dropped and rational thinking has lost.

Hollow eyes watching the crowd

it's mid day, It's busy

People rush to stores like beds of fish

Fish with magpie eyes looking for shiny things to take back to their home

The figure watching, Is ignored

To look at those hollow eyes would mean to look at their own magpies ones

To confront the misery and their lack of it

So instead they talk louder as they walk past, they drown out a defeated "excuse m–

Or they become silent, their steps quick and their eyes down as they click and swipe

As the figure with hollow eyes watches you pretend to type.

I know right now, with everything that's going on in the world, it feels like the night will last forever, it's darkness stretching out for years and years ahead. But I have to say that one day, the soft pull of life will tug at you. You'll find yourself sitting quietly in the summer months enjoying the warm rays and the birdsongs, maybe you plant some flowers or berrys. You'll laugh till your sides ache and your heart lightens. You'll make art and get paint on your clothes and on your carpet. You'll read books your friend recommend and gush over your favourite characters together, maybe you'll write your own. That's what's getting me through, that one day it will be summer, the days soft and I'll have my book finished in my hands and maybe someone will read it. Maybe they won't. But it's things like this, the soft things, that make everything worth it.

I stole a bible a few years ago, I browsed the shelfs not looking to steal but to pass the time and then I saw it, black cover and pages edged in gold. I wasn't religious, more agnostic or an atheist that dabbled in Buddhist ideas, I felt the Christian narrative or at least the one I heard about was always about who would pay. How jesus payed for your "sins", and if you didn't believe then you'll pay in the after life, so hold on to guilt and carry your strife , but I also knew that I wanted , needed something. I wasn't looking for misplaced shame only hope and I wanted to have it tangible in my hands.

So with my stomach empty and my shoes hole ridden, I ignored the fashion magazines with diet tips and beauty tricks and filled my emptyness with something close to hope, if only to cope. I grabbed it from the shelf and I left the store. I was too afraid to steal food , I didn't dare even with my hunger, but possibility of having something bigger than life to cling to on cold and lonely nights seemed worth the risk.

During that time I wasn't doing so well, my mother was drinking and taking drugs with her friends god only knows where and the cupboards where completely bare. I would wander around town, I would wait for the days to pass, I would wait for something to meet me in my loneliness. I wanted so desperately for something like god to reveal itself to me, my mother wasn't someone I could lean on and my father wasn't around so I think naturally I wanted something to believe in, to sustain me when food and family couldn't.

Last year my brother and I where almost homeless, we slept on the hard floor in a cold empty room for three years, we spent every day waiting. I would wait for the stores reduced items at the end of the day, wait for the sun to dry my clothes, I would walk for hours round and round, my shoes didn't last long, I tried ducktaping the soles but the pavement wore through that aswell. When I wasn't waiting outside food banks, staring at white walls or writing, I sometimes would visit the church in town. It's a cathedral and I still have no idea what denomination it's under, but I'd walk around and admire the marbal pillers and stain glass windows, I would try to remember how people hundreds near a thousand years ago carved angles into stone and placed their hope in something other than themselfs, that back then a church may have been the only place you could go if you had no where else. I reminded myself of all the people who would have prayed there, that would have stood where I stood and cried, wished and waited as I did. I would light a candle and I would wish for a better tomorrow, I wasn't asking jesus or a god, I was asking the universe, I was asking subconsciously myself to keep going.

What do you think of religion? (Are you religious?)

Excerpt from my WIP Dead above.

I'll do it on Monday. I'll do it on Tuesday. I'll do it on Wednesday. I'll do it on Thursday. I'll do it on Friday. I'll do it on Saturday. I'll do it on Sunday. I'll do it on Mon–and the cycle continues and nothing changes.

Why do you watch me so forlornly? Don't think I didn't notice, I know many of you, I've gazed at your cities with their twinkling lights, the ones that dim the stars to you and I've listened to every secret, every heartfelt want or desperate wish, you tell me your worries and have questions you think I can answer. But mostly you cry, and so very often. I don't have the answers, but I can sit with you, when your sad or lonely at night, when you think your alone.

If the moon could talk what will she say?