Seven years later

I think I am on more stable ground but then I go to Take Back the Night and for the first time in three years I realize that everyone else's story is like my story and that's something I own, too. That those stories are the same words I can tell and that maybe I need to go back to that place for a while, to live in the sadness and the fear and the anxiety because otherwise it's all just emptiness.

That other girl who shared my name and shared her story and it was so different and yet exactly the same as mine, and I saw myself through a prism reflected in a million different colors but it was still me, a part of me I hadn't seen in years -

For the first time in three years I want to change what I look like, I want to hide behind short hair and beanies and hoodies because inside of me there's a little girl who doesn't want people to look at her like that.

I want to be little.

oh virginia

I went to see Tori Amos last night. It's been about three years since I last had the chance to see her in concert, and as usual, it feels like someone kicked down the doors to a blast furnace. I was shaking by the second song in, totally blindsided by the setlist, and honestly blindsided by my feelings since I haven't listened to her since winter. (She's winter to me, completely and fully, and for some reason her music seems so out of place at any other time.) I forget how much power her music holds over me and how it can send me right back. I started having body memories about midway through the show.

I almost welcomed it because I have been struggling so hard accessing my feelings and memories over the past couple of years, accessing anything that feels real is a relief. It doesn't feel so much like lying, then. It doesn't feel like everything is a lie, or that I'm losing the past 7 years to the same void, the one that holds all the shit I don't want to or can't remember.

I didn't expect to hear Bells for Her - I get pulled back so hard with that song, a very specific bus ride, a specific moment. Winter fucked me up and it's been fucking me up and I'm not sure I can tell anyone why. I've never heard Blood Roses live, and that one was the song that really dragged me through the dirt.

Still trying to process it. Still feeling sick and sad. But all I want to do is go back.

you can't even remember your name

I wonder if this is how it's always going to be. It's worse when you're blindsided, I think.

internal

I think that maybe I'll spend the rest of my life
over thinking everything I do
doubting it all

I mean what is happiness anyway
I don't think I've ever known

ending up crying into my Chinese food
feeling like a failure while
everyone
stares

at this point I've learned to just stop looking for a light.