Tag: Writing

Feeling Inspired

Elm33 Comments

I’ve been reading a fair few blog posts today, along with various other tasks that have kept me busy. I connected with some blogs I hadn’t read in a while and began to comment again and to engage with everything. As I was reading, I started to notice something that made me smile: these blog posts were making me want to write. They were filling me with an inspiration that I haven’t felt in ages.

The thing I love about the community – I mean, there are so many things which I love that I couldn’t just list one – is the creativity. Today, I read posts that ranged from book hauls to a letter about past friendship. As a blogger, you can choose to read what you like and though you can sometimes feel an obligation to read, I feel like there’s more of a relaxed atmosphere around what you read. As there are so many blogs out there, you could never be expected to read thousands of posts but being given a variety of inspiration from all around the blogosphere and the world is fantastic.

How I felt today, whilst sitting down and reading, was connected. Not in the manic, social-media-must-rule-my-life sense but rather, I felt connected to human emotion and experiences. I think that’s one of the reasons I started blogging – I wanted to be involved with the beautiful web of life and feelings; this was and is one of the best ways. I was stunned by some writing I read as well, the fact that someone could create such beautiful imagery from verse and their own heart.

Ideas started running around my head. I took little things from each post – a section of recollection, the euphoria of friendship, the invincibility of having your words read and understood. Seeing collaborations like The Artistics and blogger interviews made me feel like the community was interconnected and respectful of each other. That made me want to pick up my keyboard (well, just tap out some things on it) and finish posts I hadn’t touched in weeks, start on new ones and let the thoughts run free in my head.

People have such amazing stories in their heads and I often forget that I can be one of those people. In the mayhem of social media, stress and my own brain shouting at me, I forget that I’m a person and a blogger too. Engaging with people reminded me that I have my own independent thoughts and that they shouldn’t be blanked out for the sake of fear about how people will respond to them.

Of course, I try not to read posts when I feel too drained. It’d only make me feel worse but there are plenty of occasions where reading someone’s writing, that they’ve spent their time creating, can create a wish to share my own writing with you. Isn’t that the best feeling? It really reminds me why I love blogging so much.

I want to say thank you to anyone who writes. You might not know it but every word I read and every emotion captured in a sentence inspires me to keep going. I don’t know what I’d do without the community to lift me up and most times, they don’t even know they’re doing it!

Have you read any good blog posts recently that have inspired you? Have you written any that you think I should read?

Love from Elm πŸ™‚

When Writing Becomes Stressful

Elm28 Comments

Recently, I read a post by Michelle that shocked me because of how much I related to it. That post essentially said that even when you want to write, you sometimes don’t and one of her reasons was that she was scared. Whilst there are other reasons why I’m finding writing difficult right now, the notion of being afraid and not understanding why struck a note with me because it was putting into words what I’d felt for months.

Most of my friends know that writing is what keeps me going a lot of the time. Blogging and broadcasting my thoughts is a point of stability for me, where sentences and emotions can flow out of my head and onto something tangible. It’s said to “come naturally” but of late, words don’t have the same impact. I often feel trapped in my own head, despite desperately wanting to write, but not finding the right way to express that. For someone who is sustained my words and dreams, it feels like a huge blow that it just doesn’t seem to be cathartic for now.

Here comes the fear that felt so relatable when I read Michelle’s thoughts. I constantly compare my present self to my past self, where I have this idea in my head that I need to act exactly the same as past Elm did. That is, I become afraid when my thoughts about writing and the way I write drastically change. The fear also comes from disappointing people: I’m scared that if I don’t write, my “one” talent will be gone; I’ll just be wasted and no-one will ever want to read my words again because they’re different; they’re not like how they were. I think this ties into the pressure that most bloggers face, where a change of style causes worry that your readers won’t read any more. Of course, your blog is yours but at some point, the wish for people to like your content can win out and engulf you, making you scared when that content transforms.

It’s also that I’m afraid that the posts I do write won’t come out right. I hold myself to an unbelievably and sometimes unreachable high standard, where I think that everything has to fit together nicely and that I’m not good anymore if that standard slips. That “standard”, though, is massively subjective and change doesn’t mean getting worse. However, I still have that nagging feeling that my content will be unoriginal. Because of that, I lock myself into a circular argument, where I’m paranoid that I won’t write anything decent so I don’t write but then I think that makes me a failure and that I’m incapable of writing, etc, etc. It continues until I don’t know if I’m telling myself the truth or not.

A relevant example is two posts which I’ve been meaning to write for a week and a half and three days, respectively. The first was a recap and update post on how my Austria trip, with two of my friends, went (it was absolutely breathtaking, by the way); the second was a post on my Prom experience on Monday (also fantastic and it taught me a lot about my own personal limits). I’ve not written either of them. As time went by and the days stretched out, I felt guilty and almost ashamed of the fact that I’d not got it done. Who was I if I couldn’t write these important posts? Would I slowly start to share less and less of my life, until I didn’t at all? That genuinely distressed me.

The reality is, I built up those posts into a huge block of “YOU MUST DO THEM NOW” inside my mind. They became benchmarks of my writing: if I could write those lengthy, update-like posts, I was dedicated. I was good. However, I started to get really panicked about writing the actual posts. Though I wrote outlines (they’re still on my computer), every time I thought about sitting down and putting my words onto a screen I just felt upset. Why? Why would I feel upset when what I was writing about made me happy?

Was it just that it was too much work? Does my inability to put that much effort into a post make me lazy? Am I then worse than everyone else because I don’t do enough? These kinds of questions kept going round and round in my mind, poisonously, until I couldn’t bare to sit down and write them.

There’s this unpleasant point that you can get to where you think that people will abandon you if you don’t do a certain thing. It’s happened to me a few times over the last 3 years but never has it invaded my life so harshly. It surprised me: I always tell people that “your blog is your own” and “only write when you feel like it” but I’ve not been following my own advice. I took the thing I adored and made it into something pressurising, the act of “failure” that isn’t even failure turning into this monster and couldn’t, and can’t, shake. It’s upsetting simply because I want to follow my own words. Right now, I’m not.

I think I need to step back a bit. Writing has become so stressful that I’ve warped it in my own head; it feels too draining. I need to reconnect with why I’m passionate about it and I think that actually comes from not writing, only for a small while. I’m putting myself under too much pressure, when it’s not necessary; I’m done with school and work-related pressure shouldn’t be a feature of my summer.

This only means that I need to evaluate how I approach blogging and how I approach writing. I want to be as honest as possible here; this whole thing has been increasing over the last few days, making me unsettled and more irritable, less responsive to people and generally a bit of a bitch. I don’t want to hide that side of me and I think that I need to think about why writing is important to me, without forcing myself to write. I may have wanted to write about happy, positive experiences but I built that up to a stressor in my head, which turned the writing of the posts into some kind of negative force.

I’ve always loved writing but I think the expectations I set myself are too high. I can’t write if I’m not confident in the effect my words will have on me. It’s neither fair on me or you: I don’t want my worry to shine through in my words all the time.

I just need to relax, really. Writing isn’t a chore or a necessity. It’s something I do when I want but most importantly, it isn’t my enemy.

From Elm πŸ™‚

Too Lonely for Poetry

Elm19 Comments

There are things I know I like to do. One is to write creatively, another is to act, another is to have constant personality crises and shout about them on the Internet. Actually, I don’t really like doing that last one but it’s part of my writing and existence and is, occasionally, what keeps me functioning.

Sometimes, I combine all three of these things. I act on the Internet, pretending everything’s fine – or that I can adequately write poetically about my crises and feelings. Most times I can manage but what’s harder to admit is that sometimes it feels like a facade. I want to get rid of that paper lantern and show you what I’m like when I just don’t know. Too often, I find myself harnessing an articulation I don’t feel, to spin sentences out of silk that just isn’t there. See? I’m doing it right now.

When it comes to love or a step away from it, I have too many feelings to process and unpick. I don’t know how to handle any of them. It’s got to the point where it’s impossible for me to talk about them on this blog because I’m desperately scared of sounding immature and also because I’m irrationally paranoid people will find out who it is I talk about and ridicule me forever. In counselling, I attempt to get this out but it doesn’t always work, as I’m still yet to understand how I should approach this.

On one hand, I know what I want to do about my feelings. I know I’m fine with having them – but what are these feelings? How deep do they actually run? What worries me is that I’ll do my usual thing: run away because I convince myself that no one cares and then deprive my own heart of anything that remotely resembles a positive experience. Finally, I thought I was getting somewhere with showing myself I was able to deal with any potential fallout that might happen but, well, no.

Not that there’s a hope in hell of any of my feelings ever being returned, of course. It’s a given now; I’ve lost all hope of ever, genuinely, being what someone would look for. I know I shouldn’t base my worth on what people think but it feels ridiculous to me that anyone could “love” me’ least of all want to tell me that. I keep trying and trying and trying to be strong and secure in my own mind but it’s difficult when I can feel blocked from talking out of fear.

How can I get across the panic I feel at me fucking up again? I don’t know. The best I can do is to tell you I’m scared I’ll be the one to make things too serious, too weird, and then that I’ll show my paranoia and emotions to someone and they’ll just go. I have such a low opinion of myself; I have such deep-rooted and unprocessed issues and the most recent people I’ve had feelings for wouldn’t cope with that. Would they? I don’t know. I don’t like taking chances because when I do, it seems I take the wrong ones.

This was too rambling. This wasn’t detailed enough: I wish I could do an analysis of my own mind. If I’d talked about everything from day 1, not hidden my thoughts from myself, it might be easier. In this post, I’m barely a writer but I’m an actor – I’m still holding it together, surprisingly. My structure and grammar hasn’t gone totally out of the window. I’m still pretending, just that little bit, when I shouldn’t. Blogging is where I can be as honest as I’ll ever be and I can’t forget that.

Maybe I should let things be but I’ve let things be for so long that I’m restless. In a weird way, I want to be proactive. It hurts that I can’t express any feelings openly and one of the only people who could help me with that would never read this.

I feel adrift in a jumble of useless words that mean nothing. I feel powerless and hopeless, unable to express, enclosed and trapped. Fear clenches in my stomach; I constantly have this tightness in my throat because I’ve been here before and it didn’t end well.

The worst thing? I can’t even be honest with myself.

I know exactly how I feel right now. I know how frightening that is. I also know that there’s nothing I can do to stop it and that I need to wait it out until I figure out a way to reconcile myself with it.

Do you ever feel this lonely, too? Do you ever want to ask for help in figuring out your mind but you don’t even know where to start?

From Elm πŸ™‚

A Firebird’s Song

Elm29 Comments

You thought I was cold
Didn’t you, unable to burn
Like a sparked-out fuse,
Ice-blue and unfeeling, thousand-year-old
Stardust that only hits your eyes
When your love’s been sold.

You thought I wouldn’t open,
That’s true, stark lines on ashes
When I had nothing to lose,
Thoughts on lips, shivers on hands frozen
To your wavering, silk-thin wings
As you flew me words unspoken.

You thought I was freeing
For you, a tick to pass the time, fire
Flickering out as soon as you blew
Out the sparkling light. But for me,
Standing unmoving, thawing heart a shade of wrong,
I could never quite stop seeing

The firelit need to belong-
Never touched you, your glowing eyes
A step away from the truth,
Oblivious as they whispered along
To the melody of another dance-
You made my love a burned-out song.

Sometimes, I pretend I’m cold inside. Sometimes, the people who burned me the most have made me shut down my emotions. Sometimes, I just can’t hold that in any more.
From Elm πŸ™‚

Replaced in Stasis

Elm14 Comments

I am frozen.

It’s like I’m ice, cracked, sparkling and yet breakable when dropped on the ground. It’s like I’m snow, tumbling down in little flakes, trying to be 3 at once and melting as soon as I flitter through the air. It’s like I’m dust, flailing into existence, twirling through that dance by myself with a thousand others never quite touching me. It is like I am invisible.

I am a mat, coloured in soft greens and baby blues, furrowed and nondescript. For people to pass over me is okay, to exchange me for an intricate rug, threaded with beads and starbound circles. I am content to lay dormant, only rising to be a cardboard cut-out whilst those worth more than a rusting sixpence fly. Bitterness is beneath me, stamped out by my paper hands. I refuse to feel unfairness trickling away like sand. Cardboard doesn’t feel, right?

Snow is content, time and time again, to let others fall past them with delicacy. Ice does not feel worthless when broken into the sea and replaced by sturdier, stronger, surer ice. Cardboard does not scream when it is replaced by glossy paper that understands emotions, that can be flawed but still retain humanity. I am no paper, no better snowflake, no alluring ice. I am cracked without the allure.

Reassured while my plummeting heart tries to thaw, I am told I am everything, yet shown I am nothing. Smoke falls over my hands, reaching, asking, never quite touching. The whispers of others, better, better, better, roar into my ears. They fall away. Actions cry louder than words. Therefore, my heart blanks over again, cardboard sliding over chipped stone.

I am cold, receding into thinness and terror and flawed passivity. Threads of gold stretch on into the distance, snipped half-heartedly yet not enough to sever ties. It is only enough to hurt, the sibling of fate rushing off to take care of another thread. It is left hanging by an atom, the last string of hope clinging desperately. It frosts over, hiding something explosive beneath a mirror of frozen hopelessness.

β  β ƒ I am burning, too bright, snuffed out like a spark of candle-flame. I am raging, self-contained and shaking. It is like I am a volcano, lain passive for so long, finally about to erupt.

When I break, I will leave destruction like petals in my wake. There may be a circle of my presence, trembling at the depth of humanity. When I shatter, people will glance over, never quite knowing that this is real. If I finally realise that I am worth something, I may change the world.

Before it changes me.

From Elm πŸ™‚

Side Character in My Own Story

Elm27 Comments

I am the comma
In a sentence, the afterthought
To a word, trailing off in the middle and
Never the important sort
Of ellipses.

I’m the backing vocals
At the height of a crescendo, hope
In quiet harmony, unheard,
Falling down a slope
To lie, a discarded melody.

I am the old love interest,
Story-tired, something better ready to leap
Over my head, the readers
Never thinking how much it hurts to keep
Smiling, hiding, smiling…

I never finish the glorious tale of two
Who are happy without the underdeveloped character
With too many tears, whose chapter
Ends with a question mark.

I am the sorrow and muted horror
When love gives way to nothing-
The writer spirals somewhere different,
Pain too lonely, too boring,
But where’s that story arc for that?

The words write me,
Heartbreak created from an apostrophe-
I, a possession, owned by failure,
Vanishing into a sidestory
Of the story’s saviour.

From Elm πŸ™‚

A Note to a You I Knew

Elm20 Comments

Sometimes, I don’t know how to talk about things. I’m doing this in the only way I can – I’m opening up, in a way, bit by bit. I’m sorry this doesn’t make much sense: it’s me expressing my thoughts after months of not understanding how. A little unpolished, wild and confusing, it’s basically me.

There’s a certain freedom in talking in circles, using flowery language to get my point across and in spinning around a point but never stating it plainly. However, doing that too much makes me feel trapped. When it comes to you, I’ve spun around too many points and I’m dizzy and lost and here I go again, using metaphors. I’ll state it as plainly as I possibly can. 1. This ‘note’ is to someone I don’t know how to talk about; 2. If they read this, they’ll forever think me tragic and 3. I care far too much about that.

I wrote this ‘note’ in pieces, paragraph by paragraph coming at different times. That’s kind of what happened when I processed that things wouldn’t ever be the same, when I admitted that I fucked up a tiny bit and also when I realised that there was no closure to be had with this. I waited for closure, holding on and on and my heart broke so hard that I couldn’t even think about it. When I realised I wouldn’t get to talk, that I’d essentially taped my own mouth shut, that you’d given me the tape and other people had held it there, I kind of collapsed. I only have the energy to be so desperately unhappy about it that all I can do is laugh.

On a train once, I thought about you and my heart thumped because I couldn’t wait to see you and to just talk. It made me smile. The last time I said “I love you” to a friend, my mind screeched back to the time I said it to you. I remember the laughter and the drifting away and the loneliness when I said the words, “All I want is for him to be happy and if he is, I will be too.” and “You are a very lucky person, you know.” Oh, and “Your happiness comes first, remember?” I wish I had been lying when I said all that and god knows if you even know I said those words.

It’s ridiculous how much it hurts. I sit alone and wonder why the hell I approached things how I did; then I wonder how you could do what you did and I realise that you had no idea what you did, then. Is it because I didn’t tell you? Probably. Is it because you wanted your own happiness and I dragged you back from that with my sad hopes? I don’t blame you for that because I should have done the same. I didn’t tell you what I felt when I should have; I didn’t present my tears and terror in the way I wanted and I broke down on someone that wasn’t you. I broke down on someone who held me and understood’ instinctively, what I needed and understood that when I couldn’t speak, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. It was because I didn’t know how.

I seem to mess things up a lot now. I talk to people too much, send messages when most likely, people you know are whispering and laughing about me and telling you you’re better off without that stupid bitch. Would they be right? Is my self-esteem so low that I’d consider myself an obsessive, clingy, awful person? I think about how I am when I act myself, like with you and the people I’m as close to as I was to you and I laugh because it’s so different to how I feel at this present moment.

“No wonder they don’t care about you any more because you have no sense of who you are,” I tell myself. Then I flinch because I don’t know if it’s just me being paranoid. I run after feelings, desperately searching for happiness and it usually ends with me shoving my own happiness to the back of my head because if I took the chance, I’d be selfish. It’s little wonder that I break down and push my identity so far away to try, and fail, to help others. It’s not healthy and the times I’m happy are the times I help others whilst also being secure in who I am. With no closure, no nothing, I haven’t been able to do that.

People have said that I get and got too involved, that I did something to try and prevent everything from turning out how it was. Yes, I got too involved and I shredded my heart like it was easy. What else could I do but try and when the trying failed, I forced myself to get rid of bitterness. I questioned why I hadn’t been open, why I hadn’t said anything and if I had, I would have been happier. But if I had done something to stop it, it wouldn’t just be me that was unhappy and if you know a single thing about me, you know that I try to put people’s happiness above my own as a form of coping. When I don’t know how to do that and I break because of it, I self-destruct.

I’ve tried to shut it out. I’ve tried to stop myself from wincing every single time I say the words “I love you”, even as a joke. I’ve tried so fucking hard to not care, to become unfeeling, to just accept that this is how it is and that I lost out. Sadly, I can’t. Not yet. I’ll get there, sometime, and that’s what I hold onto.

If you’d like me to be honest, I’ll say that I don’t know how to fix this and that in even speaking about you, I’m misjudging who you are. I don’t know what you think of me; I don’t know what I think of myself; I don’t know how to not break whenever I think about you and about how much you cared for me. I’ll have to face it one day but now? Sorting through all the memories, all the confused emotions and “why’s” and “Is it my fault?”s is too much. It doesn’t stop how I feel, though. You can shut a box but you can’t get rid of what’s inside the box if you can’t open it.

If you’re thinking, “This is disjointed,” you’d be right. I didn’t plan this. Every single thought I express right now is one I want to say to you, in huge detail, on and on until you get sick of me and tell me you hate me. If you think, “She’s got no answers,” you’d also be right because there are 1000 questions going round my head and only one answer. That answer is simple: “I don’t know.”

I’m still here, heart still beating, still feeling and living and breathing. I’m the same Elm, like you were the same you. I lie to protect myself sometimes and when people are unhappy, I rush to help others without considering that they might want to help me too. I can no longer think of a city without thinking of dances and heartbreak, gripping a hand so hard it hurt and sitting on the stairs, alone, because I didn’t know what to do.

You won’t read a word of this and if you do, I want you to remember that I’m not angry. In any of it, I was never angry. I was just hurt because I feel as if I have no identity and no way of expressing any of my feelings. I feel as if the ability to speak my mind has been taken away from me in this situation, which has made my ability to speak about anything difficult.

There’s no one to help me reconnect to you but you. I think I’ll just have to help myself.

Love from Elm πŸ™‚

Things I Miss About Love

Elm13 Comments

I miss the little things. Interlacing fingers, or the memory of them; I miss waking up in the morning and smiling at the knowledge that feelings were okay and that if nothing came of it, at least I would be. Talking until late, laughing and seeing a name on my phone without being afraid that the name hates me. Simply put – I miss it feeling okay that I love someone.

I miss the leaping spark in my heart, catching with the wind and flittering until it grew stronger. The fire burned like it was meant to burn, red and orange flames coiling around my happiness. I miss the warmth, not shaking uncontrollably when I said the words “I love you” because the fire and little sparks felt like a friend. I don’t understand how to be friends with the fire any more.

I miss feeling whole, the solidity of a presence and the surety of feelings completing my heart in a way it hadn’t been in such a long time. Like sand on a beach, it’s sifting through my fingers; I miss wave upon wave of “this is real, the truth – this is how I feel!” crashing over me. I’m prone to fancies and running but that time, I didn’t chase after an empty hope in a heart-shaped box. I miss not feeling frayed, whether it’s because I was in love or because now I feel unhappy all the time I don’t know. I miss feeling like the connection from heart to love was a lasting thing, a silk-red ribbon braided up like it was meant to be twisted.

I miss feeling truly right within myself or right around someone else, suspended in a moment without panic. “The moment between breaths,” I call it, the quiet contentment that this was correct and that I was not misplaced and not an “other”. I miss laughing with the person whose feelings mirrored mine, twin smiles on different faces and, for one second, a shared happiness. Now, with the love gone it would have been bearable but with the heart broken, it feels so suffocatingly wrong.

I miss songs playing and associating them with happy memories, sweeps of violin and voice coupling in a dance. It seems as if songs hold a crushing weight, not delicate like the way you spoke to me or straightforward, like I’d like to be to you, if I can. It has a double meaning, marinated in lies and love and sadness for 3 weeks until the melodies set themselves on fire.

⠠⠊ miss my insecurities about my body not mattering for a while. I miss feeling as if I were confident in one way – although love could never wipe away my mind like love was a “healer” – but I miss remembering that at one time, my feelings were returned. I miss being enough for just one person, not feeling attention-seeking and being justified in my feelings.

I miss counting the days since a beautiful time happened – 4 weeks since I felt “I love you”, 9 weeks since my heart broke, 2 weeks since my hopes got lost and 1 week since I cried. I miss imagining counting the stars and it not hurting, as if something so infinite as a star would care.

I can’t wait until I no longer miss these things. When you feel like you’re breaking from missing someone, when they have no idea, it’s so hard to remember that one day, it won’t hurt so much. One day, I’ll stop missing feeling like I can think of things without something welling up inside me.

I’ll fall in love again and I’ll miss it again and it’ll be okay. I just have to get there. Can I do that?

I don’t know any more.

From Elm πŸ™‚

Locking My Thoughts Up

Elm14 Comments

There’s a little key, silver, that my mind holds in shaking fingers. It’s so real and so there that you would think I hadn’t imagined it up. That key is the words said to me; that key is the words I say to myself; that key is the “Don’t think about it!” key. Sometimes, that key feels like the only thing separating my mind from screaming but most often, it feels like the key that, if lost, would unlock things I’d love to be able to say.

The key locks a box – a basic one on the outside, plain wood and inconspicuous if it wasn’t sitting right in the middle of my mind. Among other boxes, you could not pick it out: it has hinges on the lid that creak; they aren’t used to being opened. The lock itself is surprisingly ornate, as if a lot of thought had gone into it and the key usually fits in perfectly. When it doesn’t, it makes a horrible screeching noise and no matter how forcefully you try and turn it, it won’t budge. That box stays locked.

When it does open, though, it’s a mess. Little dividers separate compartments of thought: here’s terror, here’s being left behind but they’re only small. They get released a lot more now. Next to them are the beautiful memories that I’m too scared to think about; they collide with the last time I said “I love you” to create a whirl of sick, sick happiness. Crossing over them is the knowledge of love, the lake of confusion and hurt that flows into it so that I can no longer distinguish one from the other. The neat little boxes within the box have had their walls broken down so that if one emotion is released, another will surely come along with it.

Sometimes, little thoughts trickle out of the keyhole. A bit of sadness when I hear a song, a sharp twang of remembered beauty when I’m sitting alone with nothing to distract me; an echoing emptiness that’s a follow-up to being forgotten. The key lies on top, taunting – “I’m only going to let a little out, just so you feel like crying but not enough to make you cry.” Is the key being kind? Does it want to shield me from a breakdown or is it letting me go to the brink of tears and not giving me the satisfaction of crying them?

There are knocks on the box, from fists that are gentle and fists that are not. “Let me in, will you?” they ask the key and the key laughs and cries in their face, somehow unable to move. It would love to and when it does, the box opens with a squeak of joints and lets out a torrent of “Why, why, why!” before slamming shut so hard that it’s a wonder the key doesn’t get cut in half.

Outside the box, it is a little silent. Blank. Imagine it lying on paper, blue lines snaking out from it to create a picture of an ocean. A week and a half ago, when the happiness snuck out of the box to find its freedom and was so sharply pulled back, it left a silver spark on the paper. It’s still burning there but it isn’t as bright; the key came over and called it back. “Look, it’s over,” it said. “I know you want to stay but you had your fun.”

I ask myself now: is this box my whole mind or only part? Does an emptiness subsist around it or is it speckled with complex stars of love, thought and poetry? I can’t tell. The only thing I can think of now is that box and how I would love to open it. The only thing I can think of is that box and how I’d love to rip it open, tear the wood to pieces and expel the key. The only thing I can think of is that box and how opening it might break me, worse than I feel already.

That box and that key are what has kept me silent. That key is the key that makes me feel guilty when I explain how I feel to people who should not hear it, to people who should be speaking themselves about how they feel. The thoughts in the box are the desperate ones that ask why things went so wrong; those thoughts are the ones that I don’t let myself feel any more for fear of making people think I’m pathetic. Wood, hinges and rivers of thought swirl around inside that box, faster and faster, until they will all explode outwards. I want to avoid that.

I want to open the box before it opens itself. Slowly, so as not to scare anything, until all the thoughts are mixed together and the box has disappeared. I would like to write about them, to tell people how I really feel without being afraid. One day, I will. I just hope that day can be soon.

I’m sorry for my silence. At some point, a proper explanation will be posted; I don’t feel like myself at the minute and I feel very very out of control and so attempting to sort through it all will make no sense and you’d just get capital letters everywhere in my posts and phrases like “AARGHH WHAT THE HELL!” all the time. I can’t quite express how I feel currently but I’ve tried with this and I’ll succeed. Hopefully, it can let you understand a bit about how my mind works.

From Elm πŸ™‚

I Think I

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I think

I am falling apart, pieces

Of a jigsaw, spinning

Out of control, never quite winning

The fight to keep my hopes alive.

I believe

I hate myself, twisted, ugly

Thoughts sickening, screaming; funny

How I run to save my heart

When it’s too late.

I wonder

If my heart is thumping, eyes wide-

Awakening, slowly, sobs that I cried

Silent. Suppress. Gone.

I might be

Ruining myself. Day by day,

Sick, sicker, sickest-

In my head, my mind

A fucking self-made mess and

Is this all I can be?

I am questioning

Lies caught in a freezeframe, my mind

A lie, my heart

A lie, myself?

Who am I?

I think

I am falling back together; I believe

I am fake, too broken; I wonder

What the point is; I might be

Hopeful and hoping and hopeless.

And I do not like that.

I don’t know how else to explain my thoughts other than a poem. My head’s an utter mess right now but writing helps, a little. I’m really sorry if this comes across as attention-seeking or if this upsets anyone.

I hope you’re all doing well. If you can relate to any of the words I’ve said, I’m always here to talk.

Love from Elm πŸ™‚