sight_unseen
I can’t control dreams,
But if I could,
I would steer them away from you.
I have no desire to dream of utopia but wake and live in reality.
Dreams bring me to you, to us; to our other dimension, as we used to say.
The dreams aren’t real but the feelings I awake with sure are.
If I can only have moments of you in dreams, perhaps I should stay asleep so I can keep dreaming.
Alas, I cannot control dreams.
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Hope this finds you well,
-L
I’ve been trying to write about myself but all that comes easily to paper is you.
That’s all I have left.
Maybe if I write enough, I can let go.
With each swoop and loop, may the ink take away the knowing and the missing, the feeling and the lingering.
Take the vividness and the longing.
May all the memories be the ink that comes to dry across pages instead of tears that streak across my cheeks.
I don’t really want to forget.
I can never really forget.
I’m certain that eventually all pens run out of ink.
Here’s to writing and to hoping.
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Hope this finds you well,
-L
It doesn’t matter.
I’d do anything for you.
These lines we’ve crossed,
The lines we will cross.
They do matter.
We put ourselves here.
And yet,
They don’t matter.
We wish we could believe ourselves
And our lies.
I’d cross an ocean for you
And every line we could dream of.
That’s what love is.
It follows us still.
Love has drawn the lines,
And love crosses them.
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Hope this finds you well,
-L
11:04pm
9:59pm
00:05am
10:27pm
Relegated to darkness; our connection never allowed to see the light of day.
Thank the guilt for that, perhaps circumstance.
We burned too brightly then, now, so much less deserving.
Still we linger, clinging to that promise of darkness.
Never chancing dusk; never daring morning.
I’ll take it.
I’ll take any time with you.
The stars we traded from sunlight will have to do.
I just wish us many more starlit nights and moonbeams, my love.
May the darkness hold us close and cherish our secrets as much as we do.
Hope this finds you well,
-L
You asked me once how I healed from a breakup, and I told you it was time that took care of it. In a way, that’s true. That’s not what it feels like sometimes.
So what does it feel like sometimes?
At the halfway point between my home on the farm and my home in the city, alone in my car: that’s when I feel it the most.
It feels like I’m living without half of me. It feels like I’m always searching and waiting. It feels like I’m looking for something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It feels like my heart has been cleaved in two; or like it has gone missing from my chest- I can feel where it used to be. It’s excruciating. It’s indefinite.
I have lied to my heart and have told my soul a fairytale. I have convinced myself that I believe in soulmates and dimensions. I need to. I cling to my hope that in another dimension we’ve found our way back to each other; that our ragged edges have met and joined again. In another lifetime, perhaps, our paths have crossed with better timing and the fates have kinder plans for us.
A love like ours cannot have been for nothing. The sheer amount of it can’t have just faded away into nothing. Surely the laws of physics apply to love, for what is love if not energy? It feels consuming and electric. I need to believe that it still exists out there somewhere. The heartbreak cannot be larger and longer-lasting than the love that caused it.
These are the lies I tell myself. They must be working and maybe I have successfully fooled myself. It doesn’t always hurt and I go about my life as an ordinary person. But, oh, those moments. They take my breath away and I feel like half a person, a hollow shell, like only arms and legs. I have no heart, for you have it still. I can tape together the edges where it once was and I can pretend.
If only reality and fates and fairytales could meet with kindness. Until then, and until another lifetime, our souls exist only as halves; incomplete.
I know you feel it too, you’ve told me so. That doesn’t make it any easier, even if that’s what you had hoped those words would accomplish.
It’s indefinite.
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Hope this finds you well,
-L
Spending time with family used to bring me a little slice of contentment and peace, just knowing they were safe and happy was all it took.
Now it slowly slices off pieces of my heart. They are happy and safe, and they feel contentment and peace. I feel years removed from them. Their joy is no longer my joy. Time spent together is like rubbing salt in a wound, like hand sanitizer on paper cuts.
I spent so much of my life protecting them and shielding them and all I get for it is pain and faked smiles.
I was invited over for supper and by the time I got there, everyone had already eaten and the supper was cold. Their uncaring sliced deep. They were a family without me. I had worked thanklessly over Thanksgiving while they all spent time with loved ones but I did not get the same courtesy.
I spend so much time picking out presents for them that they will need or will find useful and I get not a one in return. My only gift this year was a jar of lotion in a scent that makes me nauseous, from my mother who doesn’t even like me.
It’s just one thing after another. There’s been times where I haven’t felt loved, but I’ve never felt so unloved.
I’ve always hoped to feel love from my family; true unconditional love. Now I don’t think I ever will.
I’ve loved them with my whole heart for my entire life.
I suppose I stuck with life partly because I always hoped I’d eventually feel love and that my family would feel like warmth and security. Family has been my safety plan for 20 years.
That’s what the books say, isn’t it? Have a safety plan. Create a safety plan. Have your friends help you make a safety plan.
Mine has been crossed out, scribbled over, crumpled up, and now it’s finished.
What is there left to live for, if not love?
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Hope this finds you well,
-L
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If you or someone you know needs support right now, there is help available.
I can’t explain the feeling other than to say it feels like I’m dying. It feels like a process and it feels like I’m fading out of my own life. Everything seems like it should be goodbye.
In Pirates of the Caribbean they have the black spot.
In Harry Potter they have The Grimm.
You can choose your own omen of death.
Reality has a dark cloud.
I just have this feeling.
It feels inevitable. I expected it to feel suffocating and am almost surprised that it doesn’t.
It feels like I’m just going through the motions of living my life, which is nothing new to me.
At this new stage in my life, I assumed things would be better than this. I have an actual chance to live the life I want to. I have a degree, I have a nursing license, I’m living by myself, I have a steady income. However, these check boxes and milestones do not guarantee happiness. I assumed they’d bring me the feeling of security I’ve been looking for all my life.
I still feel like I’m just walking on the edge. Added to that now is the dying.
I wish this feeling would tell me how much time I have left. I can’t help but wonder if it’ll progress and then I’ll know.
It’s still May. June is close but July feels as though I won’t make it that far.
Maybe I’ll just be forever fading away.
Hope this finds you well,
-L
“You don’t owe anybody thinness” is what I keep repeating to myself every time I find myself sucking in my stomach or hunching my shoulders in public. After a million or so times it should sink in.
For good measure I try to follow this up with “It’s okay to take up space.”
How silly it is that we live in a world where we’re judged by the amount of space we take up to go about our daily lives and that somehow our value should be derived from how much or how little space we use.
Has anybody directly told me “You take up too much space”? No. Is that message present in marketing and clothing sizes and diet culture? Yes.
My favourite feature is my face, I like nothing about my size or about my body. To even myself, I’m only just a pretty face.
Hope this finds you well,
-L
Trigger warning: suicidal thoughts
From where I stand, the future looks nothing but daunting. It’s hard to remember the good at the end of such a terrible year. Each disappointment and struggle seems like a heavy stone in the backpack of life that I insist on carrying around.
The weight has pulled me off the podium I stood on at the start of the year and dragged me to where I teeter on the edge. Will I be just one more casualty of this year? It seems more appropriate to close my eyes for good when it’s still a terrible year, instead of souring a new one.
People are looking toward 2021 with hope, so much hope. All I feel is dread. Once the new year starts, my life has nothing left for me to do but to be tugged along with the passing of time. I have a degree, a license, a job, a life, and a home. I’ve lived so much life in these years, I don’t feel accomplished, I just feel old.
My friends are all moving on. They have their own lives. They have relationships, pets, children, homes, and triumphs. They look forward to adventures, to new beginnings, and to a future. Joy and love fill their lives with so much colour. I’m glad for them and envious at the same time.
I can’t feel the colour in my life anymore. I’ve learned how to avoid disappointment by avoiding expectations and hope. Each day is a consistent defeat in itself, why add to it? Food is bland, tea is lukewarm, sleep is fitful, and warm is never warm enough.
A bleak winter’s day with thin sun and glaring brightness is my reality. Nothing has colour and everything is too bright to be enjoyed. The trees are bare and the wind whistles enough to chill my bones. It is silent except for my trudging foot steps. I pass houses with warm light shining from festively decked windows and see smoke from what I imagine to be a warm fire inside. These houses are not for me. I have never been inside one, nor will I ever know the love and joy bottled within them.
My chest aches with the cold, the emptiness, and the loneliness. It is as familiar to me as my breath and the beat of my heart.
Despair.
Sorrow.
Hopelessness.
I used to long and now I find myself longing no more. I don’t want to find the energy to enjoy life. I’d rather fade away into this bleak winter’s day and never trouble the sunniness of a new year.
Maybe in another lifetime I’ll see colour again and find the warmth. That, too, seems daunting but it’s the only hope I cling to, the hope that lies in death. Hope that death will be kind to me as this life hasn’t been.
I’d like to fade away in sleep, though rest is something I never find at night. Perhaps that is the secret to the kindness of death. Dying instead of sleeping doesn’t feel so daunting after all.
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Hope this finds you well,
-L
If you or someone you know needs support right now, there is help available.
I had to get this out somewhere.
At the moment, mandatory mask policies are in place for schools in Alberta but not for Saskatchewan. Neither province has put any more thought into returning back to school than that, unlike they did for bars and restaurants to reopen: no reduced class sizes, no increased staffing, no change in hours, no change in sanitation(other than a school in SK that decided to save money by decreasing janitorial hours during a global pandemic), and no attention paid to the disastrous school reopening currently happening in the states. There was a lot of consideration given to reopen the economy and the money-making businesses, schools don’t make money and weren’t given any extra funding to help enable physical distancing and cleanliness. It is sad that the students’ only protection is that which their parents can afford to send them from home. Not all families can afford the necessary PPE on top of already costly school supplies. The virus has disproportionately impacted those of lower socioeconomic standing and and BIPOC communities, this will play out at school too. Teachers are going to be essential frontline workers very soon and they get nothing but extra demands and expectations while the world around them has shifted. It can’t be “back to school as normal” if the rest of the world isn’t back to normal. Why should children be the ones left to forge ahead, unprotected by those elected to keep them safe?
This is my perspective, but I am not a parent. I am a healthcare provider.
Hope this finds you well,
-L
Sight Unseen 