sometimes i don’t know what’s wrong with me. i wallow in misery over the smallest things and knowing this doesn’t make me feel better. it’s so easy to put a word on something. it makes you think you can handle it. but you can’t cover it up with a label. it doesn’t fix anything, it doesn’t make it better, it doesn’t make it more palatable, it doesn’t make you feel like it’s not a big deal because someone’s been through it before and now there’s a word for it and there must be a solution since it can be identified. that would be easy. but it’s not like that.

for winter, with love

the chill of the floorboards on bare feet,
the after-shower shiver,
the daybreak frost fades to dew

the cloudless cyan canvas, cold glaring sun-
lies!
my opaque breath, my hardened cheeks don’t
lie
but i take it in, this
precious painting

orange – to – blue
photoshopped gradient backdrops
behind spiny silhouettes of
suburban forests

i lie in hardened blades of grass,
face towards the slate and stars,
burning wood and ice in the wind

Even the gentlest rain is a sea of furious crack-ups and mutations. Similarly, we appear to be whole, even serene in our abundantly calm moments, but like the shape of rain, we are a deluge of small processes, interactions, and relations, changing by the nanosecond, yet somehow holding a fragile sense of self intact. -Diane Ackerman, Dawn Light