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o Oct 2015
I’m a freckled 5'5'' solider.
I like wrestling with my dogs so that my jeans retain a layer of fur -
even if they were my favorite pair, I will wear the hair with pride.
...but I wear make-up to make up for the way I lose my face
looking in mirrors, measuring my stomach by fingertip lengths,
wondering how the 5th grade girl who’s lungs wanted too much air
would care about the way I carry my chest now:
like a treasure that’s been too long held under the sea
If that girl could see me, she’d write an entry in her Lisa Frank diary
about hope, instead of fear, rejection, fear of rejection and God -
I remember praying God would change me and I’m so glad he didn’t.
I’m glad that I got the chance to do this one on my own.
I have grown into a person, with a weird shaped head and too small feet,
with a spotted heart that finds ways to beat.
For those who call me damaged, including myself (mostly myself) -
like hell.
I’m still as completely as valid as a function as I was
as a small purple infant with light blonde fuzz
I was what I was and I am what I’ll be:
a freckled 5’5’’ ocean tide, shifting into me.
Wrote this over the summer. Figured I'd post something that's a bit more full of pride. Here's a video of me doing this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzH9T-zMwms (at 2:50)
Em E Mar 2015
This murky grey of the everyday, of the ubiquitous pattern and structured time - these are the illusions, the straws to which I clutch and cling like a child at her mother's skirt. Afraid of the unknown, afraid it will hurt. Looking only backward at my old stories and truths, growing shabby with constant use, poor curating, and increasing age; I wear my willful blinders like a self-constructed cage. Wide roads open ahead, ready to explore, and yet I cringe, I cower:  weak, small and unsure.

Small spikes of... awareness, sharp sudden connections to the divine, in the midst of mundanity I am hit with moments of expansion, of elevation and escape. A soaring stretch of the soul, reaching its arms upward, yawn and strain, trying for something, reaching beyond its usual scope as if hoping to catch a half-remembered dream, yes -- chasing the remnants of a fantastic dream --

Is it still within my scope? This rush of potential, this flush of excited possibility, of hope? Am I walking into it, or waking from it? That feeling of joyful freedom - surely that is our natural state, when the mind and its anxieties are forgotten or put to rest. That heady elation that makes me feel larger than life: I will it to be so, for that stretch to stick, to rearrange my shape, the space I take, to alter the way I think, the decisions I make.

It could be, can be reality, can be more real than the press of uncertainties, the weight of worries and restless unease.

— The End —