On Softness

God, I am tired of writing about you.
Downbeat. Upbeat. A pretty metaphor about geese
and Indian Summer.

I am so sad but I am still shaving my legs.
No one is touching my shins but I still
rub coconut oil into my ankles after
I shower. I spray rosewater onto my cheeks until
I glow. I am so soft and I run my fingertips over my
stomach when I miss you, palms whisper soft like kissing
a stranger, a hundred peach fuzz hairs, duckling
new and I love every one (everyone).
I am soft as the sweet, wet bruise on an overripe plum.
Soft as grayblack winter slush. Soft as the flame
that licks your passing palm.

Once, I slept beside you so often that when I smelled
perfume on your pillow it was my own.

Once, I burned myself boiling water in your kitchen and you
cupped your hands around my fingers like you’d captured a moth,
your face like my hand was something fragile and winged.

Once, we were arguing and you said “God, we are married,”
but I don’t think you meant me to remember that.

When I think of you, I think of sunrise, the way we always
fought it to keep talking even when I was sleeping with
my phone in my hand.

When I think of you, I think of heavy blankets,
hot coffee, a valley of pillows.

I told you I am good at math but I do not know how to add up a year.
Still, next week I may miss you less.

For now, I do my laundry, kiss my cousin’s
baby girl on both cheeks, put on lipgloss just to
play piano in my robe.

I still write you into all my lists, try to stitch
you into the bindings of my books. Once, in a poem,
I called you a church but you are not an image
about the fragility of stone. Missing you is not a tornado.
We are neither the wolf nor the lamb in its teeth.
We are not epic, not myth, not legend. We are not simile.
There is nothing we are like or as.

Here is the truth:
Once, we were two people.
Once, we curled toward each other like a pair of parentheses
around something secret.

Here is the truth:
I am still softening my edges.
I am still wearing the same perfume.
I am still hoping that I smell like home
even when home is not with you.

Tomorrow I will miss you less.
God, I am tired of writing about you.

- J.S.

You deserve to discover the joys of life

When you
find yourself drowning in
self-hate,

remind yourself - you
weren’t born feeling this way;

remind yourself - somewhere
in your journey
some person or experience
sent you the message
that there was something wrong with
who you are,

and you then internalized
those messages and
took them on
as your truth.

But that hate isn’t yours to carry, and
those judgments aren’t about you.

And in the same way that you
learned
to think badly of yourself, you can
learn
to think new, self-loving and accepting thoughts.

You can learn to challenge
those beliefs, take away
their power, and reclaim
your own.

It won’t be easy, and
it won’t happen over night.

But it is possible.

And it starts when
you decide
that there has to be more
to life than this pain you feel.

It starts
when you decide
that
you deserve to discover it.

-- Danielle Keopke
(arranged, edited quote)

Young Man

I seemed always standing
before a door
to which I had no key,
although I knew it hid behind it
a gift for me.

Until one day I closed
my eyes a moment, stretched
then looked once more.
And not surprised, I did not mind it
when the hinges creaked
and, smiling, Death
held out his hands to me.

-- John Haines --

The only struggle that really counts

when you realise you've gone
a few weeks
and haven't felt that awful struggle
of your childish self—struggling
to lift itself out of its
inadequacy and incompetence—
you'll know you've gone
some weeks
without meeting new challenge, and
without growing, and
that you've gone
some weeks
towards losing touch with yourself.

The only calibration that counts
is how much heart people invest,
how much they ignore their fears
of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.

And the only thing people regret
is that they didn't live boldly enough,
that they didn't invest enough heart,
didn't love enough.

Nothing else really counts at all.

It was a saying about noble figures
in old Irish poems
—he would give his hawk
to any man that asked for it,
yet he loved his hawk better
than men nowadays
love their bride of tomorrow.
He would mourn a dog
with more grief than men nowadays
mourn their fathers.

-- Ted Hughes
(letter to his son, Nicholas, 1986)
(contained in Letters of Ted Hughes)
(arranged quote)

Fulfillment

Fulfillment is a function of time.

The search for pleasure is
circular, repetitive, atemporal.

The variety seeking of
the spectator,
the thrill hunter,
the promiscuous,
always ends in the same place.

It comes to the end
and has to start over.

It is not a journey and return,
but a closed cycle,
a locked room,
a cell.

It is not until an act occurs
within the landscape
of the past and the future
that it is a human act.

Loyalty, which asserts the
continuity of past and future,
binding time in a whole,
is the foot of mans strength;

there is no good to be done without it.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
(arranged quote)