The Weight of a Word

My friend once told me, “Every word feels so big to me lately” and I have never quite let it go.  Do these words sit like a lump of food that won’t digest or a scream lodged in the back of the throat? Do these words come up when a friend rubs your back after you said just one more?

These words are bruised.

I wonder when the words do come out if they will make sense. If the volatile material inside will not spontaneously combust with oxygen entering the body.

 I remember seeing a group of children on the beach while I sat on a train in Dublin. They tripped up sand along the coast to keep pace with my line of vision. I think about how they were running between two of the greatest forces of the world: the sea and the immovable weakness man has with machine. The grit of salt mixed with the taste of copper and blood. Eventually, life will stain their pink gums and baby teeth and fill their heads with the desire for the ordinary. For now, however, the three Hail Marys and wine-stained lips really do let you into heaven.

Say a prayer for the youth that has yet to be lost.

These kids, all they were looking at was me. And suddenly these kids were me. They flailed their arms in a desperate attempt to make me, a stranger, be known of their existence. I haven’t quite forgotten the discomfort of seeing their mouths moving to exemplify importance but hearing nothing past the sterile glass. I imagine them yelling, “I’m here! I’m real! Can you see me?” The human desire to be known, it’s so unbelievably silly. Why do we all fall for it? We are all kids waving at the train hoping someone waves back. Hoping the words find their way outside of the body.

On Being a Woman in 2022

Go back to your feminine roots

Pull on the edges like 

Squeezing into a pair of jeans from high school or pinching your cheeks upward, Smile. 

Eventually, these roots are torn from the land like a weed in the pavement or dirt under your fingernail

And your laws will be decided

By men who don’t know the difference between a church and a courtroom, a uterus and a vacancy sign.

July, In Note

Expect more in the following months…it’s a work in progress.  

A random list of July: 

• Kate Bush
• Daisy Jones and the Six
• Olive oil cake
• Red hair
• Iced espresso
• Brown sugar 
• Writing with your friends
• Sabrina Carpenter, Emails I Can’t Send
• Almost Famous 
• Thunderstorms