a letter to myself:
(a reminder, rather),
I know it feels as though you are now in the trenches
the mud clinging between your toes,
the walls too inevitably high to scale,
the rain beating and pouring down on your body,
and you see everyone above the surface hovering,
watching you as you try and clasp the sides of this hollow grave, frantically trying to escape
and you want to just lie in the mud and have the rain drown you until you are nothing
but you must remember this:
you will be fine.
And I know it feels as though you have been butchered, gutted and cleaned
ready to be thrown on the grill by he who so carefully flayed you open over time and space
only to have all your guts and bones trailing behind you, and thrown into a stock *** to boil away
and I know you miss his furrowed brow
and his incessant organization
and his frigid room
and you want him to call and say
"go to where we met and I will hold you and not say anything more than I'm sorry and I want you and you're all I see"
but remember this:
you will be fine.
And right now, I know you want to cover yourself in paint
all colours, but especially red; Tabasco to be certain
and slather it on until all the marks and scuffs disappear
until you disappear
and you want to refuse to let it dry; apply layer upon layer of every shade of blue from sky to navy;
from lime to forest green,
from sunshine to mustard yellow
and all variations of pink,
and your brush becomes heavy because this paint is caking your skin,
a cast of plaster holding your true self in
until you are as frigid as a statue; you are clad in stone
immovable and impenetrable;
your shield
but please remember this:
you will be fine.
One day someone will see your statue in a square or a park,
the sunlight beaming off your sheen,
and will see past that paint:
the layers of Tabasco
and emerald
and ocean
and canary
and pink
and see you
because you are a light
you are the last piece of pie that you know you shouldn't have, but take anyway
you are a phosphene that never disappears, even when their eyes are open
and he or she will approach your statue,
in a stance of utter uncertainty and self-doubt
shoulders hunched, spine pulled in and face blank and wanting
and will see you
and will take a chisel to your stone
and break off the layers
reduce them to dust, surrounding your pedestal
brush, blow and wipe it clean
and they will suffer from the heat and labour
but they will see you
and they will chip until finally you emerge
that light
and all will be gathered in that square or park
and as you look around you realize that they are the people you love the most
and the person who has broken your mould, your shell
is the one you love most of all: you.
Because you look in the mirror and you love you
you want you
you need you
and I know it's dark
and I know there are drills and hammers and saws
and I know when you sleep you are erased
but remember this:
you will be fine.
you are alive.
you are here.
you are better.
you will rise.

“I may be grown up but I’m only seventeen.”
The faded blue chairs were in rows, as could be expected. The building was old and the air was littered with dust; just like you would expect. The light shimmied through the draperies and tapestries and slithered across the floor in tiny slits that cut the room into pieces. The dark worn floors boasted years of scuffs and scratches. They were no longer mahogany for they were nearly black with age and dirt. The whole place was frozen in time. Even the air was reminiscent of years gone by. When you walked in you could expect to find memories nestled in corners or peeping out from one of the many books strewn around. The place breathed nostalgic fumes. Some might have called it “stale,” but many others would prefer to call it “alluring” or “curious.”

This was not her case. The door ****** the life out of the place as it slammed shut. The reverberations could be felt throughout the entire structure. Her anger fueled her along at a violent pace, sending chills up the drapes and swirling the dust into tornadoes of chaos. The floorboards rumbled and squealed in sheer terror under her feet. If you were here you would likely have tread softly and listened carefully just because you hoped the place was talking to you. But since this is her story and not yours, that is not the case.
She threw her body into the nearest chair and the force almost sent her backwards. The girl and the chair hung in time for a single moment, teetering on the edge of balance, but nothing happened. She kicked her feet up on to the chair in front of her out of utter disrespect.

Each breath that she blew carried venomous thought. Every air molecule expelled from her nose was laced with despise until it fell to the floor, devoid of life. You could feel the place shuddering with every breath. Or maybe she was shuddering. But it wasn’t important.
The girl let one lonesome anguished tear roll off her face, but since she was too strong for crying, she ****** her body out of the chair with every ounce of hatred she had inside. In one swift motion she swathed her face with her shirt to obscure and erase the tear. She stood there, filtering the air through her shirt, refusing to acknowledge everything the place had to offer. She dropped the weight of her head into her palms and bit her lip against the pain. She pulled her face back only to check the shirt. She knew it would be stained. She knew because every other time before it had been stained. She listened for a moment before she glided across the floor toward the nearest window.
When she finally came to a moment of rest, the place sighed in relief. The dust rested and the floorboards managed to quiet themselves. The drapes relaxed and everything paused again, settling back into a time of long ago. The place embraced her like the wind embraces a leaf. It helped her along gently as she was carried away.

Not wanting to be discovered, and not wanting to overstay her welcome, the girl carefully hid her soul behind the heaviest drape and emptily marched towards the door. She traced her finger along the scorch marks that marred the wood. The scars ran deep, evidencing a strong fire that had ravaged the place years before. The door oozed sympathy as the young girl shared her pain. Her heartbeat pounded out her sadness and resounded through the door and back to her. She clutched the **** in her hand and pushed it open. She slid through to the outside. She did not look over her shoulder. She did not carry a glimpse of hope within her. The flame in her heart was extinguished with the closing click of the door. She was outside. She watched as the place got smaller as she walked away.

His name was Devlin. “Dev” for short. It could’ve been “Devil.” It should have been “Devil.” He was the one who called the shots. This was his game; his rules. She was just a player who could be benched at any minute; suspended from the league in the blink of an eye. He knew the world. He had been learning it for years. As if the world was something that could be learned; that could be acquired. He missed the most important lesson for he never learned how to love. He had mastered affection and words spilled off his lips like honey. But love was not yet something he had come to possess.

Regardless of his material possessions, Dev knew he was missing something. He didn’t know what it was or how it could be acquired, or if it could be acquired. He only knew that the gaping black hole inside him was consuming him. There was no fulfilling this insatiable hunger. There seemed to be no solution. Only temporary fixes could easy the longing but with every dose the hole grew deeper.

           She too, knew that beneath his smile there was blackness. Not emptiness. Just blackness. There was no value, no gradation. No. There was nothing to hold on to, nothing to hope for. She would have enough black to cover the entire world if she had wanted to paint. But she was honestly looking to survive.


                Time had gone by, but only by the measure of light. Time had not elapsed to heal her wounds. She had covered miles on the feet of one thought. She had traversed only into one idea during her journey and yet she had already reached her destination. It was easy to fall to your subconscious when your body was tattered. When she stepped through the threshold she almost imagined the place. But she stopped herself because she didn’t want to take the chance of contaminating it.

                Her eyes were closing and the soft carpet looking appealing in all its graying and deterioration. The couch and bed looked inviting but that was suicide. She was fighting the urge. She had too. She had tried to purge her mind but one insignificant monstrous thought plagued her. “Don’t go to sleep until I get back.” Her eyes lingered closed for a moment. How beautiful and welcoming this blackness was. It was gentle and comforting. Her eyes jumped open. How long had they been closed? Surely no more than a few minutes. Fate laughed in her face once again. “I told you: Don’t get to sleep until I get back.”
                The first one was the most painful. Even though her eyes were blurred from pain she could still see the look in his eyes. She had to look. The simple thought of closing her eyes would earn her several more. She clutched the threadbare carpet with all the dignity she could muster and stood like a soldier before a firing squad. Every wince squeezed the tears in her eyes closer and closer to escape, but she held on through the miserable pain. It wasn’t even his hands that hurt anymore. No, it was the iron, or the bat, or even the brick that hurt. When it was his hands, he sympathized with the contortions of her body. He felt her pain. When it was some other object, there was distance between them. Six, five, four, three, two… She could time the blows. When he wasn’t so angry they came faster, just to put the girl in her place. When he was enraged, they came slower. Each hit was followed by an explanation or justification. “You have to learn the hard way.” or “How dare you get blood on your clothes?” The indignation in his voice made her sick. “Don’t look at me like that!” “I love you.” Over time she had learned to smile over time. To lessen the pain.

                …Her face was burning. Every fiber in her body wrenched with pain. Every breath brought tears to her eyes. The shaking was uncontrollable. She never should
have fallen asleep…

                You see on the inside he was just a child who never knew love. But that was her job. To love him. He was one of those “monsters,” or rather a vortex, something to be awed and feared. A display of powerful destruction. But that was the point. He was ******* up everything good while furthering his own self-destruction. He would eventually collapse in on himself. It was inevitable. It was not a matter of time. It was not some probability that fate would determine. It was not plausible to think, no matter what length of time you were thinking for, that time could, and would, heal all wounds. This was not something that would fade into the background and blend into a dull gray. This was not something that could be fixed by a miracle of God. There was no twelve step program with guaranteed results. The only thing that could happen was the elimination of time. If this happened, then there could be change.  


                She had figured it out some time ago. A long while back before she knew the place. The only answer was destruction. You might even call it ******. But since it involved no bloodshed or munitions or hatred, it seemed to be a good idea. Even the victim was ultimately willing to go through with it. The only factor stopping the girl was love. Her love for him. She did love him. She truly and justly loved him. She loved everything about him. She loved him for chaos and instability. The only solution was to destroy time. Without time, there is no way to measure. There is no structure. There are no rules. The only structure is what you make in your mind. That was the easiest way to escape, the easiest way to ignore the pain, to ignore the love.        


                  However much she thought about it, she never thought about it enough. The hours she spent on the floor in utter stillness were useless. When her breath was shallow enough, she nearly died. Her shirt was stained with blood. It was severed from her hip to her elbow. Her face was swollen purple and blue. Four of her ribs were shattered. Her left ankle was swollen. Her eyes were sealed shut by dried tears. Her lips were pale and chapped. She could not breathe out of her nose. It was filled with blood. Her pants were a rolled in a crumpled ****** mess several feet away from her. Her legs were patched with bruises. Her fingernails had blood under them.


This was love.


Eventually. Not relative to time. Not relative to the beating, but relative to her. She crawled over to her pants and began to restore her dignity until a foot crashed down upon her hand, jarring her body into a fetal position on the floor. She forced her eyes to stare at her hand turning from pink to white to purple. She hung her head in shame and hoped for mercy or forgiveness. The crushing weight of the foot began to ease the slightest bit. “You didn’t learn. You never do.” She stood perfectly still, waiting. The foot lifted. He pulled her to her feet and bestowed a kiss upon her forehead. “That’s why I am here: To teach you.” He took the crumpled pants from the floor and removed her bloodied shirt. Then with **** of his head he motioned to the floor. “You will learn the meaning of humble today.” She lay back down and tried to glean warmth from the carpet. She was cold. Desperately cold.

People ask me all the time what my major is, what I’m going to do with my degree, as if that somehow defines me, somehow is a mold into which I should fit. As if being a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a mechanic, or a nurse makes me real; as if calling myself a statistician, a technician, a psychiatrist, an ophthalmologist, a zoologist, a gynecologist, an herbologist is any more definitive than calling me by name. Because somehow the letters AA, BA, MFA, LDS, EE, DD, or PHD are supposed to make me who I am.

I cannot be defined by the classes I took or the papers I wrote or the tests I failed. I am far more complex than that and I refuse to be satisfied with a label, so when you ask me what I’m doing in school, what I’m going to do afterward, and I tell you I’m gonna teach home economics, don’t look at me like I’ve gone off the deep end, like I’m wasting my brains and wasting my time and wasting my money, like I’m negating every feminist victory and reinforcing female stereotypes. Don’t look at me like I’m never gonna make a living, never gonna make anything of myself, because it’s my brains and my time and my money, my living and my self.

And how else can I be, how else can I fit my definition if I give in to the pressures of you, the pressures of him, the pressures of them, the pressures of it, and do what someone else thinks is right for me because they want me to be defined by what I do instead of who I am. I am a girl who snores when she’s sick and hiccups after she eats. I’m the girl who dated your youngest son and had a crush on your older brother. I’m the wild woman in love with her mountain man. I’m the girl that is sometimes eloquent and often awkward and twice as likely to hug you as shake your hand. I am the adult who eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with a tall glass of ice cold milk and the Floridian, who if offered a slice of pea-can pie would say “Don’t you mean pe-cahn?”

I’m the girl who loves to cook and cooks to love, and if you don’t know what I mean by that think of how a homemade meal makes you feel and then get back to me. Sometimes I’m the girl who crochets and is learning to knit, but I don’t know if I like it yet. I am a victim of the techie generation and I am helplessly addicted to facebook and youtube and myspace and stumble and twitter and flicker and all of that stupid stuff. I am a ****** who loves movies and has to get there early because it’s just not the same if I miss the previews and I’m the girl who loves to eat but hates to exercise and always complains about her flab.

I am the daughter of a sweet southern woman and a hard working ex-Marine and I am the sister to the brother who is almost taller than me and the granddaughter of the four most amazing grandparents you will ever have the chance to meet. I’m a family and consumer science major who loves biology and algebra and is fascinated with the manipulation of words and sometimes sings a song or two and used to play the flute and is practicing piano. I’m the girl who works in the weight room and turns on the light when you come to play racquetball in court number three and mops up those scuffs you left because you didn’t wear non-marking shoes. I’m the neighbor at your apartment who’s always sewing late at night and parks her car in your space.  

I’m a best friend, a sister from another mother, a daughter, a niece but not a nephew, one day an aunt, a roommate, a one-time lover, a student, sometimes a teacher, a cousin, an employee, a visitor, a customer, a someday-degreed-and-lettered member of society, but before that, during that, and after that, I am Jennifer Marie Cassell.

My father's long fingers smooth
over the aged scratchy pleats.
The Kilt is magnificent. It has the
fleeting beauty that only a well
kept antique has, that warm
firelight glow of the past.
It has a few scuffs and holes,
but the somber reds and greens of
clan Mackintoish have settled into
the cloth and darkened pleasantly.
The kilt is always the most important detail,
it has passed from grandfather down,
and it looks as handsome now
as in the sepia photographs on our shelves.
The dirks black ornate hilt rests
heavily against his hip, and the
belt is cinched tightly to hold it up.
you can practically hear bagpipes
My grandfather's dark green cotton socks
sit near the top of my father's calf
and he leans over to adjust the frills.
And as his tan wrinkled brow furrows
in concentration, and his admittedly
attractive white whiskers scrape
across his collar, and the image
nears completion, the drum beats louder.
Reaching up from the ancient past
and grasping the future in tradition,
the ghosts of ancestors enter his poise,
and he suddenly appears less like
my father and takes on the swagger
of a cocky fisherman, of pirate.
He is swinging swords
and playing pipes, and cobbling, and
setting stones upright in ancient
forgotten ritual, and tossing cabers.
I know looking at him now,
what my own ghosts will be
when my time comes.

I'm wearing my favorite boots today
They fit perfectly,
Since Ive finally broken them in
It took a while to wear my footprint into their soles
But now my body has beaten the leather
Until it curls around me.
They are comfortable, practical
The tongue used to stick out and squeak with ever step
But don't worry, I silenced it.
I've laced my boots up tight
Don't want to be too big now
Don't want to be loose
I can't let you slip away from me again.
I top the knot off with a little bow
Still got to be pretty
What are you if you're not pretty?
They have scuffs and scratches and cuts and bruises
But that's just because of all the fun I've had
Sometimes I clean them up a bit
A little spit and polish, and they're good as new
A little spit and polish, and everything's okay again
But they're getting worn down, I can see it in your eyes- I can see it in their eyelets
But I know they can't walk away
After all, who else could they fit so perfectly?

I steal the blanket on warm or cold nights with no regrets.
I’m a good kisser, but probably much worse in bed than
I believe. I wish you would believe in God. Stranger,
the air pressure is lower next to skyscrapers. When you leap
off, the building ***** you back and slams your body
against it. Again and again. My grandfather’s safe stands hidden,
built into an end-table at my brothers house. I have always wanted
to open it. A friend I once loved wants to swim naked with me
in three of the five great lakes. I want to take her down the west coast
on a motorcycle. If I could afford it, I would only wear underwear
made from bamboo plants. Both soft and eco-friendly. Green ones.
In 2004, I stopped talking to a girl I kissed. Second kiss. The
last time I saw her was during a fire-drill on Halloween.
She was wearing a cat-costume. Black. Please come find me.
We danced when younger. My legs swung wildly
beneath my knees. The scuffs on my shoes always remind me.
There is a photograph in my mother’s house of me flying
through the air on a skateboard. My mother was so scared
and proud in those moments. We still don’t get along.
I am not strong enough to tie my feet to science and jump.
In the moments of falling, I need God. I know I would fall
too fast to cross myself. The truth is, at the end of the night,
I am always afraid. I hold the pillow at different angles to feel better.
I make different shapes. Some nights I don’t sleep at all.

You who have never known the loveliness of love,
Gather your heads on the torn pillow’s edge of mud,
Under the wood-tar shadows of camphor-aided sleep,  
Where your low-flung groans are starvations of sound,
And the amputated clouds, insinuated with gangrene
And blood-stained woods, are still bound to the shooting
Stars that fell beside you and flung up hissing rays of grass.

Parents of the midnight sky, the stolen stars of your children
Open their broken mouths to the battlefield heart of trespass.
To their soldiers’ eyes, the floor of heaven is uncut grass,
Wet with rain and mold and the unlifted wings of Pegasus,
Whose unearthly hoof to unearthly earth scuffs the clod
Of the lunette for the cannons to divulge the great, stuttering
Coda of everything old, malformed of breath and bone.  

Some grass somewhere will now seem the hair of a sweetheart,
And those dead eyes will aways stare, too fond of love unknown.
So the dead soldier and grass and sky conspire to hold a woman,
So the soldier makes the truce between earth and sky,
Between man and the divine, though the chestnut trees    
In red human tongues, pay their deep-forested encomium to distance,
In misspilled gorgeousness like Apollo surveying his own tomb.

Spider web crick-cracks on eggshell skin
Raggedy Ann rag doll made of porcelain
Second-hand bruises, scratches, scuffs, and knicks
In the healing shields of my hands, quick enough to fix
Super glue and elbow grease I knew would save the day
So full of good intentions, I carried her away
The best laid plans of mice and men, all buggered by my feet
The jingly song of transience played out on cold concrete
A mindless second's trip-up, the crystal princess killed
Her splintered features looked up, haunt my memory still
Lips forever frozen, screaming "Please, no more!"
In kaleidoscopic pieces scattered on the floor

Scuffs in walls have always interested me. They are both mundane and mysterious in their nature. Perhaps they were made during the process of moving, or while a careless mistake had been made by innocent children.
But perhaps
they were made through mischief and secrets. Perhaps they were made on purpose in an effort to leave a scratch on an already-ruined canvas. Perhaps it was not a mistake at all.
Scuffs on walls are quite similar to scars left on strangers skins; we know not the story behind them or their meaning, whether or not they were made with purpose. All we know is that they are present and that they could be simple or vastly interesting. We know they exist, and that is enough.