Tag / guilt

by Isla

Schrödinger’s envelope

In which I do myself no favours

I’m waiting for a letter. It exists in potentia every morning I approach the letterbox, a Schrödinger’s envelope that only resolves itself as my key turns in the lock. 

The letter will contain an appointment date, one that I can hang on my empty reels of calendar. It will let me pretend to myself that things will one day revert, the threads will once more be woven into a tightly held pattern of predictability. 

In the meantime, the future unspools wildly and puddles at my feet, shapeless and purposeless.

Of course, my former self resented those tight wefts of work and travel. The endless predictability of the future chafed and bit, and left no thread free for a spontaneous embroidered trill. 

Yet despite the benefits to my current state of uncertainty, I remain blind.

Society isn’t all that keen on people having unplanned futures, or unpredictable and potentially unstable paths. It likes individuals to snap into acceptable roles, populate and pay up. Faltering in no man’s land is a sign of weakness, laziness, fecklessness, or failure, so people self-flagellate until they implode or fit back in. 

I circle myself in my mind and snap at my heels whenever I start enjoying myself. I can’t relax into this state in case I start liking it.

Instead, I remain vigilant and wait for a letter, listening for the click-clack of a loom re-started.

by Isla

Aglow

In which I catch the sun

I struggle to exist when I’m out of sight.

When I’m with you, I’m lit by the blazing sunlight of your presence. Everything becomes more entertaining, more challenging, more exciting.

But I fade from your brain as soon as my footsteps recede, and I only buzz a mental alarm clock when you encounter an overt reminder.

I know it’s just the way you are – I’ve always known. It’s an integral part of you and it couldn’t be changed without everything else changing.

I learned to let go of expectations because there was only ever one result: I would get hurt and then the same thing would roll around and happen again. Expectations form a wedge of resentment that slides between your heart and mine, but I’m the only one who knows it’s there.

I catch myself now and then, caught between hope and waiting. Gilded with the bladed edge of bitterness. And then I remember that there is no decision between you or the lack of you. I cannot live without the sun. 

So I store up those glowing hours and let them cast light on darker times. I absorb apologies into my skin and know that they are completely sincere in the moment, for all that they may scatter into ashes in the next.

And when I walk into the sunshine once more, it will burn away all but the heart you hold in your hands.

by Isla

Even keeled

In which I send my love

It takes hundreds of miles for her to feel free. 

To chisel away at those layers of sediment worry,

Until she gleams beneath.

It takes a bitter wind to steal away her fears.

To rip at eyes and skin, until there is no room left to dread,

Only a world narrowed to a single, simple opposition.

It takes a problem solved to remind her of power.

Amid all those wicked chains that whip wild at the future,

This, alone, is in her hands. This she can do.

The sky folds down on every side,

Slicing through the heartstrings that she gifts so easily.

No longer pulled by faraway hands, she rocks on her feet, 

And takes her moment.

by Isla

Close to the bone

In which I listen in the dark

I can hear the skeletons in my closet.

There’s a constant skittering, hollow clatters, the gentle knock of a skull against the door.

They’re pretty well behaved really. There was this one guy in the building next door who had a mammoth skeleton that he couldn’t close the door on, so it used to just follow around behind him. Man, you’d know he was walking down the street by this constant knocking sound, loud enough to shake your knees. He went crazy, that guy. Always screaming for the hulking thing to leave him alone. That’s what happens when you don’t deal with your skeletons. 

I took time to get to know mine after I saw what happened to him. That one, the one that’s scraping on the closet hinges, it hatched that time I turned someone down while in queen bitch mode. That one, with those elongated digits, it showed up when I didn’t send a message to someone I once loved. 

Skeletons hate being shut away, they want to lick up every drip of negative emotion you leak. That’s how they grow, tastes of guilt and shame and fear and regret. Sometimes mine escape the closet and run cool and smooth over my skin, chittering with delight when guilt blooms over me. They’re a bloody nightmare to get back in until they’re fed. Once they’re high on emotion, they slump into snoring piles on the mattress. I can scoop up a softened handful of bones and dump them back in and close the door. 

Sometimes I pull open the closet door to take them out. It’s kinda perverse, I know, but there’s something about staring right at the scabs of your past mistakes and wanting to peel them off till they bleed. Probably not so smart anymore, some of those old bones are getting hefty. 

Some folks say they don’t have anything in their closets, that you can beam pure positivity and starve those skeletons till they shrink up and die. Seems pretty unlikely to me, seeing as they’re dead to start with. 

But I do know that one of mine once disappeared. 

It had been made up of all these articulated segments of regret, they’d click one after the other against the door when it slithered free in the night. I’d first heard it after I’d lost someone I love in a messy puddle of pride, confusion and misery. It was years before luck struck and healed the heart wound that had brought that skeleton into being. And then the next night there was no click of coils in the closet.

I don’t know if I could heal those other wounds. Don’t know if I’d want to try either. That might just land me with something bigger clawing its way out.

And there’s something to be said for my skeletons. 

They’ve got spine.