When Push Comes to Shove, This is Getting Old

You know, there’s a funny thing about me. I’m a beautiful, intelligent girl with so many quirks. But even I do silly things to avoid pain. The thing is, as I’ve learned throughout my life, a certain degree of pain is inevitable. I’m sensitive and so full of love for others that the grief and suffering that comes from letting go of different stages in my life has been overwhelming at times.

I owned up to some tough things today. The relationship I didn’t want to be in anymore that makes me feel so powerless that it takes the words right out of my mouth to end it. I have been afraid of my own strength. I am never one to hide from grief, the kind that comes from investing in others but I still lack the confidence to have the first word, to make the first move. Instead, I make myself incredibly distant and difficult. Untouchable. Unlovable. That is how I get rid of people, situations and things I feel I don’t want to own enough to independently walk away from. For all my strength, that is my weakness.

Tonight I apologized to my best friend for lying. She always sees in me what the best and brightest things are. She always encourages me and the soft, round bubble of my life and love, to grow in the direction of the light it most deserves. Recently, I was so consumed by feelings of inadequacy, from months in the wrong relationship and at the wrong point in my life, that I did the only thing I knew how to do. I pushed her until she walked away from me, throwing her hands in the air.

I couldn’t admit to myself that I was not happy. My life felt like one impossibility falling down on another and I couldn’t even find the voice enough to leave the relationship, to trust my heart, to find the fresh air I needed to breathe into my life. I became fixated on the idea of his happiness in my absence. The next girl after me. The opportunity I was squandering by having feelings of needing space to figure myself out. Like we had given each other enough of a chance. Like I had handed out too many chances. That this was what I deserved to feel. As if someone was pulling out my insides every day and telling me, in all certain ways, that I was unworthy of them. And sometimes that’s how things are.

Sometimes you have to lose your footing. You have to scream and howl at the moon. You have to curse and ask god, “Why?!” and maybe receive an answer and maybe not. I have become someone I do not like. Someone who is dependent on another person, the wrong person, for things I know they are not capable of giving anyone because then I feel validated in my own unworthiness. Dependency as a poison. As the thing chaining me to my bed. What a feeling.

I know what you’d say. “You’re such a writer”. I have always felt the need to push myself to feel through to the very depths of an emotion and an experience. To run with the river until it runs dry. Then to cry at the moon. To stare at the blood on my hands and feel that was not enough. My heart isn’t full enough. My body isn’t healthy enough. I’m not detoxed enough, loud enough, smart enough, pretty enough, good enough.

And there my best friend was. Telling me, “Do you even know who you are? What you’re destined for in this life? How much of a force you are? Do you really have any idea?” At the time, I insisted on running still with the wolves, blood in my mouth and in my hair. The dark place getting darker and darker and my voice getting weaker and weaker.

Last week I saw a healer. He said I have been here hundreds of times before. That there is a lesson in all of this. That there will always be someone else even if there doesn’t feel like there will be one. There will always be another time. Another place. I can be anything I want. Go anywhere. Be anyone. Anything can be fixed with time. Anything can be created.

I do not like the person I have become. Blood in my mouth and in my hair and on my thighs. So now I stop. I chose instead to swim downstream. To find the words that have been sitting idle in my mouth for much too long. To fit into my life only what deserves to be there. This time, I look at my grief and my pain and I thank it for coming into me. I thank it for releasing in choked sobs in the bathtub. I thank it for coming when I am still bleeding. My body still sore and shifting and leaking. My heart still clutching and turning over and beating. I thank it for coming and cleaning my slate. For allowing me the rest I need. For being deep and seemingly endless right now. For bringing me back into the darkness but instead now with a light and a trust that I am no longer afraid of what comes next. That even with the worst it ever gets, you still get through. The wounds heal. You stitch them up when the time comes but first you must feel them fully in order to purge yourself. I do not create a small, empty space in my heart to keep parts of this. I want it gone. Out. Cleansed. However that comes to me. However that happens. Even if it means I need to drag myself by my hair for a while through the months to come. I will do what it takes.

I am ready now to meet the person I will become in the next stage of my life. To say goodbye to the way things have been for a while now. To let go in all the curses and uncontrollable sobs and cries and deep, uncomfortable bouts of sadness that I need to free my heart and my life of the things that have been chained to it. I am not afraid of myself anymore. Of my power. Of my strength. Of me, so unlike any other and in such confidence I can say it and feel it and know it deeper than the deepest, most sacred thing in my heart.

I ask for forgiveness. I bring back into my heart the strength and light it needs to bring me into the skin of the next woman I am becoming now. The one who will look back on this year and say, “I did stupid things but I am not that person anymore. I needed that stupidity to bring me to who I am now.” I look forward to what my grief brings me and to what the unknown holds. I am ready to face it. Not run. I can go anywhere. Be anything. I am already so much.

I close the door now on the things that do not serve me and I lock it. I clean the windows and find that I can see the ocean, in it’s endless push and pull, just beyond where I am standing. Always there.

Love,

Zandria

All the Soup for You

I am having a slow Monday. Applying for internships. Writing like crazy. Napping. Thinking. Eating so very much. And watching the BBC 1980’s adaption of Pride and Prejudice (the one with a shirtless Colin Firth). I wouldn’t kick him out of my house, bedroom, bed… whatever.

I threw a bunch of things into a crockpot for dinner later. I love and hate how little things can sometimes be such clear reminders of a different part of your life. When I first lived in my very “almost” own apartment, I split a place with a best friend. There was only the two of us to contend for fridge and cupboard space. I was still studying psychology then and wearing huge knit sweaters that went down to my knees. I never brushed my hair. Nicole was always cutting her split ends or half-assing yoga in our kitchen while chugging a bottle of wine. We spent our evenings after work/class both curled up on opposite ends of our couch. Reading to each other. Painting our nails. Playing drinking games that we made up as we got drunker and drunker. It was always raining and all the grass was very, very green. I became really obsessed with soups that winter. Bean soups. Spinach soups. Split pea soups. Our apartment felt like a refuge from all the rain, so warm and cozy and smelling always of some sort of soup. It was everywhere. Whenever Nicole had a stressful day, I’d bake cookies and leave some hot soup for her. If she was sad over a guy, all the crying and the soup and some wine.

I had been casually seeing a guy that year. Someone from Toronto who left me more restless than anything else. I’d come home after spending the evening/night/weekend with him and chug cold, starchy soup like it would settle my heart down. It often did. I still have a scar on my thigh from all the soup I made that winter. Soaked straight through my jeans when said boyfriend leaned in to touch me. It had mixed with the smell of Nicole’s hand rolled cigarettes and burned me. Pretty badly. I look at it now and laugh. All the rain. All the soup. Feels like forever ago.

I need to get back to Colin Firth and sugar free chocolate since I’m on my 5th day without sugar or caffeine. Happy Monday eve, loves.

Love,

Zandria.

The Selected Morse Code of a Writers Past

Three years ago almost, an old series of photographs
to go with my dusty, old poetry.

I’m feeling nostalgic today. Particularly honest.
Most of this old work is ridiculous but it’s all
a part of me.

---

1.) June 27th, 2012

Sometimes, I  really envy people
a glass of wine with dinner
you replaced your margarita in
my favor and sometimes,
I go months without writing anything

we must try, our school teachers told us
if we want to become anything
but I am sitting right now and
lamenting one of those days
where nothing and everything
are the same thing

five days ago,
I was sitting on the balcony
11th floor, warm LA
crying to my mother

over a long-distance phone call
I still cry and phone my mother even though
I am 19 year old woman,
I am,
I am
but sometimes she doesn’t answer her phone
and sometimes … I …?

---

2.) January 1st, 2012

Thy Flesh, Thy Bone

I don’t know where I am going or how
I will get there
but I know that I am leaving
before the sentence can finish itself

I have my fingers on the map
and my feet out the window
of the second floor building
in the room where we used to
slow dance in our underwear to a symphony of shadows

truth behold, I am always looking for a way out
before I have even found a way in,
oh how this restlessness used to bother you
to no end

I brought you to your knees
slowly until you were kissing the ground with the very
same elbows that held me, cajoled me so many nights
into sleep

this is the secret, small and barely recognizable
only felt in the evenings
when I am very much alone

I cannot throw you far enough away from me

I think about your body and how your muscles arched
to rise and fall
with each breath
like tiny roman empires
surrendering themselves fully to
defeat, the scent ever present, of lust

and in the mornings, too tired to say much
of anything, we excused
our flaws and let our eyes betray us

and you say I am so
full of secrets, that I am a language
you could spend lifetimes learning

but I fear lately and with age, that I have
become a magazine with missing pages

there is nothing of me worth knowing
the small of my back, the spine and its vertebrae,
are common features
to your average woman,

you will
find pieces of me now
everywhere that you look
oh the torture! but nothing useful
in describing

except the tact you use
when you are ripping out the paper from the
bindings

just for a tiny gasp from my mouth

to make me say the things you want to hear

and I am losing density, soon I will no longer be
strong enough
to hold onto this name, nor place and age

So that when you try to find me, years from now

You will ask yourself if I was
ever someone real

---

3.) February 2011

when you left me, I started writing notes to myself
little notches to measure the time in which
we were apart

first it was just a word, then a sentence
in pen on the palm of my hand(s) then to
my wrists

eventually, I understood that the silence
was everything and they became tattoos
without even really trying

I forgot your first name but every so often
at night, I’d wish to be something more
than a girl, my bones wanted to be called
woman, freedom
and I’d hear you as if you were right there

Instead of in another bed, far away
and with another lover

for another year, another lesson

I am the girl always leaving and never really
knowing how to say goodbye

---

4.) June 29th, 2012

I am sleeping on the wrong side of the bed
even though neither side
is really the right side
when you have the whole room and your entire body
to yourself, every night

a quarter pack of bobby-pins later
rain, dropping into
the ocean
in a town where everyone pretends
to know me,

the real strawberry blonde
five stray
palm bays later and your bow-tie
hits the soft parts of my thigh
And I want you to know,
that I don’t have much to say
about you, to you,
for you, anymore

and I paint my lips red
because a best-friend once said,
that the best colour
For a sallow girl,
is bright and reckless
just like all my summer freckles
I draw maps in my sleep
on your hands
in an empty bed

in front of a dirty vanity mirror

and I have booked my flights out of this country
with a valid passport

and a different first name
than the one you used to call me

---

5.) May 10th, 2013

The Great Lakes of Canada

On the fourth day, I begin looking for messages
in my cheerios, drinking almond milk
with tingling disgust so that the
boys won’t notice

how often my body trembles
alone in bed at night, like
a frequency, barely picked up
by the human ear and
although i have scrubbed your
name from my skin, sat long and
hard in the sun, dried out the
pieces like fruit, bittersweet
on the end of my tongue,

I still know where to find you,
at the edge of my bed, with your
hands in my hair
like hooks, digging into my flesh

I could make a map out of this
place with the consistency
of your bite marks
on my flesh

but,

today, your last bruise fades
from my shoulder,
today, you are in the wilderness
on the outskirts of a city I do not
know well,
will never come together
again

so, I am falling out of sleep
and into the daylight like a bird
flying toward the horizon
because I have no where else to
go, you are paddling the great lake
in Algonquin park

with nothing left of me in your blood
and I am pounding my fists against the
wall, the lonely whale in the ocean
who cannot be heard by anyone
but herself

yet still, I am eating my cheerios
quiet and slow,
floating in this god-damned almond milk
soaking up nothing but the way
my love bloomed
and was cut down
by the raging waters of
Ontario and how distant
your body is
in relation to my heart

---

6.) March 2011

I want to kiss you with my eyes open
I want to read to you,
lines from books that I don’t remember
that have somehow pressed themselves
like drying daises between my muscles and bone
the same way you press yourself
between my lips and hair, falling asleep
as a boy that I am not loving with 
all my heart because my excuses for our escapades
are tiny and quiet
like the wings on a bird, so fragile
and if our tongues were made of glass
maybe we would be more careful
with speaking but
we are made of different metals
fused together and could you think of all
the jokes, we may or may not have
shared over the years?
how does it embarrass you to realize that we have spent many
of our nights the same way, so in love that it hurt
and pulled apart our veins, felt like nails
in our skin, pressing down and onward
used up all our declarations of innocence
other snaps of identity that
grew and displaced themselves
flowers in jars
smaller than their roots
and as the years went by,
I became less of that woman
and more of my own
with no one particular, an image, a smell
swimming through my veins
at the mention of late night binges on letters
handwritten, you left by my window
and secrets colder than air that seemed to stall our actions
but all of these things are relative,
somehow subjective
and your diction isn’t loud enough,
you’re too far away
the truth is, I never wanted you as much
As you thought

---

7.)

February 27th, 2013

I bought a pack of Malboro lights today
for myself, for emergencies

this isn’t really a poem, so much as it’s
working guilt into never opening the

pack of cigarettes that I have for no reason

---

8.) May 1st, 2013

Stay.
I have invented a new language
full of just that word
and my body begins
slowly at first, in the mornings
naked with your fingernails
tracing my ribs
to betray me

this compost heart
ragged
hums the word
over and over
the silent prayer
until I am made of nothing else
but for holy sorrow
and the way you kissed
my mouth
on that first night,
how our bodies broke together
like panes of glass
sharp enough to bleed
and now I’m jumping from cliffs
with my arms around
your neck
up in the early mornings
worshiping the sun
in your place, my bed empty
my arms outstretched, aching

I never wanted you
the way that you thought
until it was too late
to cash in the flights

you’re made of money
not of time

and I don’t want you to go
but you’re already
far, far away
even inside of me
that place sacred, your eyes
clouded with hopes
for a future
that does not include me
and still

this tired heart beats
stay, stay, stay
because it does not know
what else it could be

I’m exhausted, so heavy
with the things I cannot change
the men I will come to know
with fingerprints and tongues
I have no interest in anymore
just you

I am standing endlessly
back straight, spine-tip topped
pouring hot tea on your lap

and these life lessons, designed
to make my bones steel
my kisses lighter..
one after another, as I watch you
pack your things
and walk out the door, I wonder
the use of destiny, cursing God
or natural acts, sins
because I have committed many

I need something to make me weak in the knees,
it would taste and feel
so much better
than your body, on top of me
swallowing all the words
I will spit up later

---

People will always try to take the salt out of you.
The truth is, you can’t let them
no matter what.

Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light.

Forgive.

Write often.
Never apologize for your strength,
your beauty,
your potential.

Not everyone will understand you.
Not even you sometimes.

Love,

Zandria

Catch Me Running

It is without much ceremony, the act of
living so I am bored enough to fall
madly in love with myself.

In all honesty, I have been
known for showing a little skin under
short sundresses, some thigh
and a handful of summer freckles

But I am as much of a play on words
as the next person, never stopping
all this changing and the second
everything moves upwards and
onwards is the second that I
forget that someone new
is breaking out of me to make
a name and a place
for all this mess and all this joy
and every moment of our
humanity

She looks every year
of my twenty-two birthdays so far
which
is to say, she looks like nothing
at all but the height of the mountains
in a city that she was born in
but hates with a passion
and the litre of ocean water that was poured
into her eyes the day that she came into
this world? Well that can be followed
anywhere on the globe
with a coast to it.

So, what can I say now except
I have turned my chin up at less
and you know by now that
my skin is braille, each beauty
mark mapping a different world
in my mind than the one I’m in
and so I write
to get it all out of me, like turning
your palms upwards
and putting a knife to your
own skin
just for the blood.

I find fewer and fewer reasons
to do anything but hustle
in this place, flatter than my
grandmothers porch, busier
than the busiest day
of the year, with everyone
always moving to you, around
you or through you.

I have known only a few things
in my life but I know that I am
made for something more like
this, the crowds, the tastes
and the smells, the faith
that pulses under each
street lamp and on every
corner that we are all
alone but together

now, I am softer and softer
like a flower in the sun, looking like
something
blooming and with it I find
such intimacy in all
the places that I had never thought to look
and isn’t that where it all begins?

and lights and burns out and lights again
with every carton of cigarettes
that I have ever tasted.

With a smile sharper than my own tongue
and almost velvet charm
like my favorite black dress
that shows more of my back than of my
thighs
there is no where
and I have no idea
how it is
I could have learned all these new habits
and desires that come from my mouth,
and ring in my ear, the very
kinds of things you truly have
not one word for

It is only in the way I watch myself in
mirrors like I might escape
that I realize
I am not a creature to be known
or understood anymore, the word
used to catch my attention
is one one syllable too long, always
mispronounced or missing a letter
and it has no solid meaning.

I am serious about nothing more than
myself, than the weather
and poems that speak of
passionate sex
while these parts, foreign
settle themselves in
and I begin again
anew as the girl buttoning up
her shirts, still showing a little
too much skin, shaving my legs
in the middle of winter with
the simple truth
of change and changing, filled
and filling with the weight
and the lightness
of a different woman now
and the cold here is not as bitter
as it once was

So I have started running again
and that is how I find my new language, entire
beginning with
the way a man comes up
behind me and zips my dress closed from
the bottom of my spine and afterwards
leaning in to taste the nape of my neck,
and ending with my favorite flowers lined
up in rows
all down the avenue on the snowiest
afternoon of the year,
handed to me and later thrown
into the trash
a sunflower for every letter
of the alphabet so just

catch me if you can, using old textbooks
on biology and art history. I’ll be somewhere
In this big old city with my hand outstretched
grazing my own, blood-red mouth
and
wearing a dress shorter
than the time it takes to sin,
not caring if you call me or not