oh, honey. all fire but no flame. in over your head and hiding under an argument, flailing and fragile and trying to forgive yourself for knowing better but saying yes anyway. mad at everyone else for a choice they told you not to make. soon you’ll see the difference between what he gives and what he’s taking. soon you’ll feel the difference between who’s just barely bending and who’s breaking.
-tbrumm
I wake up every day where I always said I wanted to be and still I wonder if he’ll ever love me like I think I need him to or if I’ll ever again feel as proud as I did telling people I was moving to New York.
He cooks and cleans and walks our dogs in the morning so that I can get that extra 15 minutes of sleep I swear I need to be happy and I spend my time talking myself out of doing what I love most for the fear of finding out that I could get everything I’ve ever wanted out of life and still not be happy; terrified to find out with certainty what I’ve always known to be true: I don’t know how to be happy.
So I am starting my 28th year of life trying to be positive, reminding myself daily how lucky I am just to be breathing, no matter how shallow the breath. I am starting my 28th year by climbing out of a big, dark, freezing, pool of depression and I’m sitting here, clothes still drenched in sadness, and I am trying. I’m walking on sunny sides of streets, I’m drinking more water, I’m brushing my hair at least half of the week and I’m crying during the second to last song at Soulcycle because it’s the only healthy release I know.
I am trying – to kick, push, or even doggy-paddle my way to the other side of this.
-tbrumm
A year ago I wrote, “Standing on the corner of Greenpoint Ave., I looked up at him and thought, I am not worthy. I am less than.”
But time has passed and my hair has grown back down to my hips and we both live in Manhattan, together, and he admits standing in our kitchen that he is not worthy and while he cries I close my eyes and tell myself, You are not too much as a result of his being too little.
I’ve been here before, in this position. It varies, it evolves, but I’m always here: an emotional fetal position. Crippled by the idea that the men I love could ever betray my trust with girls I’ve spent my entire life trying to stand apart from.
-tbrumm
Who’s really at fault? He took shelter and you took advantage, he stretched out and you contracted. He said he loved you and you believed it.
-tbrumm
I like the way you fall asleep all at once or not at all; this or that, never null. You’re like ‘this’ with so many things, ‘that’ with most things. I don’t believe you recognize gray on a color scale (other than to describe my most often mood). You live in extremities while I do my best to merely exist and I envy you for that. Sometimes, I cannot stand you because of that. You see the world in a way that makes me wonder where your brain stores everything your eyes see and how your heart manages to carry the weight of the overflow. You are better than I am; at most things and to most people. I love you in spite of this rather than because of this and that speaks volumes of my intellectual growth. I, too, used to live with such certainty. But mercury went into retrograde, someone too good died too young, constants became inconsistent…I saw the brightest colors fade and the dullest colors darken and I lost track. I lost sight. But you, I see you most clear; a sort of beacon guiding me home.
This or that, these or those
You are my shade of gray, this i know.
-tbrumm
Some days I wake up sad. I didn’t go to bed angry, hurt, or even hungry but I wake up starving. Starving for sunlight, for substance, for something that fills up all my empty parts. Something that makes every day stand out from the ones that surround it, something that keeps me from blocking days, weeks, and months from my memory. But then I wonder what happens when I find it, what happens when I’m full? And I remember all of the times I thought I was full, but really only full of habits and half-assed love . Stay hungry, sweetheart. Satisfy your cravings but stay hungry and stay hunting until you find what satisfies your soul.
-tbrumm
There’s a difference between being sad and missing someone. Sometimes we’re sad because we don’t miss them at all. We’re sad to have realized the reality is that we’re better off without that thing we thought we couldn’t live without, didn’t want to live without. We’re sad that we no longer believe ourselves when we say that it was or will be worth it. We’re sad to have to agree with our friends when they say we deserve better. Because we didn’t want better, we wanted what we had. Mostly we’re sad that somebody or something yanked us from the fairytale we insisted on living in and introduced us to the cold and lonely world of reality, where people leave and love fades.
-tbrumm
I didn’t run into oncoming traffic when he asked me to. He hoped to see me collide with a force stronger than my own, as if me being defeated might make up for all the times he had been defeated by my unsatisfied hunger for something more than what he gave me.
-tbrumm
I came around to telling you I missed you. You never said it back. “Must be lonely,” making an assumption about my plan to go a year without sex. I let you know I felt more lonely spending time with men that weren’t you, doing things I was predetermined to believe you did better. And instead of trying to force different squares into the never ending circle that is you and I, I chose to do without. Round and round I went while you remained still in the center of it all, watching me spiral. A series of me reaching my hands out to touch you while you slipped yours into your back pockets for whatever you had waiting there for you, someone you saved for later. I told you I knew what I wanted and you told me to spell it out for you as a business proposal. You wanted my feelings bullet pointed, our future outlined, and steps for getting there. You said that once I submitted you would review and decide whether or not you accepted my terms. I did not accept that, the idea that my love should be submitted for review. But now it makes sense, your arrogance, I was one of two. You wanted to hold my heart up to the light to see if the light would shine through and when I didn’t lay my bare flesh in your hands for you to examine all the holes you dug you decided to bury your face in the neck of someone else. But maybe she’d like that about you, maybe she’d confuse your RFP with you having an idea of what you want. I know all too well you have not once in your life known what you want and that if you did you expected it to sleep on your doorstep until you were ready to let it in. Maybe she wrote paragraphs about your charm and went on for pages about the way your voice made her heart explode. Maybe she filled a blog with her thirst for your love. I’ve filled notebooks with pieces of you and all the while you told me you didn’t like to read.
Must be lonely, knowing your love is not worth the weight.
-tbrumm
tbrumm 