They are prisms, not pinholes

 

 

Staring at a poster on the A train, I suddenly realized the concepts of 'Heaven' and 'The Past' might sometimes be completely synonymous.

My mom calls it 'Euphoric Recall', that thing that made it so hard for her to ever completely let go of my stepfather, the Boogeyman - remembering only the good stuff, the past as a warm, sweet thing, sans pain. I do the opposite, where I only remember the negative, and the past is a dark twisted corridor I refuse to glance over my shoulder at, lest it turn me to salt or stone. Maybe the night terrors, the words we couldn't say and things we witnessed and cannot un-see are the shadow side of the past, maybe that is the true/literal definition of 'Hell'.

When I was in the 5th grade, I made a collage in my Art class composed of star-scapes/astral planes, bodies seen through heat sensors in the infrared light spectrum. At the center of that piece I had cut out and pasted the words 'Hell is a State of Mind'. Apparently part of me understood something once, that took me two decades to remember, or fully understand.


It feels like my Child and Adult selves, previously unaware of each other's existence, just collided on that dingy, poorly lit subway car.

a throne fit for a tyrant, a lost soul, a woman-child.

i feel a little like alice almost everywhere i go, but at this stage of the game i feel like i'm looking into a slightly warped mirror, where all the aspects of my schooling that were so rigorous and seriously approached, are still earnestly being sought, but by people with a slightly skewed aesthetic. i can't tell if it's comical or scary, but along with the shock of my personal life enfolding viciously on itself, i find this skewed viewpoint wherever i turn, whatever mirror i happen to glance in, warped in so subtle a way it feels like i have no control of any of the elements around me. falling, as it were, tumbling head over heels into my own rabbit hole, my personal version of hell, where i have been given responsibility like a poorly beaded necklace, and have merely tangled and broken the string that held the pieces of myself, and the aspects of my world around me in some vaguely organized capacity.

this is my life now.

on the floor of my soul, scrambling around trying to scrape all these lost aspects of myself into some cohesive place of organization and prioritizing.

somewhere there's my fancy new degree, trying so hard to feed my body and mind, to be a light in this stupid, blinding darkness. but that is not all of me. that is not even half of me. my creative expression isn't simply bound by the context of my fancy art education, and my skills are much broader than that curriculum implies. i open the windows and sing like a fucking disney princess as a way of calming my soul, i model cause my body has a rough strong grace and fluidity that always craved the freedom and control of dance. i write with a fierce coyness, and make sharp stinging points, but where do i go to entertain those atrophied parts of myself?

after four years of college, i have to find them all, express them all. and like any body part that falls asleep and is slapped back to life, it hurts. i am more than just my degree. i am me with or without it. i am more than my looks, i am more than my fears. i am not just part of a human being. somewhere, at sometime, i was a whole one.