Darkness

He is darkness.

The place where monsters stalk their prey.

And he calls to them.

Each by their very own name.

Embracing one after the other after the other.

Even as they rip him to shreds.

But call him ‘friend’.

Dried blood washed away.

With scars invisible in the light of day.

Scars he can see and feel.

Scars he’s told aren’t even real.

Scars she traces with her eyes closed.

Wrapped in his darkness

All The World

Too many stages.

Too many players.

And not enough parts to go around.

Is this all there really is?

An act?

A costumed show?

And what part am I here to fill?

The fool?

Certainly not the princess.

And I’m always recast as the lover.

So maybe I’m the villain doomed to fall by the hero’s blade.

But when is my audition over?

When will my curtain call?

Center stage,

Spotlight on.

Waiting to exit stage right.

Waiting for opening night.

Last Sunday

Tendrills on my skin.

Digging in.

Tighter and tighter,

Until I want to give in.

So it’s one pill

Two pills

Three pills more.

Swallow them down

Until I hit the floor.

Sweating…

Choking…

Bleeding…

I’ve been looking for a reason,

But loosing the fight.

Ready to leave this world in the dead of night.

What do I do when darkness is all I see?

Waiting for the blackness to become part of me.

Hallmark

Have you ever watched a Hallmark Christmas movie?

Of course you have. It is literally impossible to reach a certain age and not see one. And if you’ve seen one then you’ve seen them all.

The protagonist and the love interest.

One LOVES Christmas and is all about that good ol’ Christmas spirit. The other… Not so much. All business, all the time.

One from the big city. The other usually from a town filled with that small town charm and holiday cheer.

By the end, whichever one doesn’t feel the spirit, does. And they get something better than a Disney happily ever after. They get a Hallmark Christmas!

Imagine a life filled with Hallmark Christmases.

Mistletoe kisses and hot chocolate by wood burning fireplaces.

Your family gathered around a Christmas table. The adults laughing and catching up on the past year. The kids running around, being kids. There’s usually a dog.

In my story, there is always a dog. There’s a dog sitting next to me as I type this so, yeah, there’s a dog.

Do they exist anymore?

Not dogs but the rest of it.

Christmas cards with the family on front in matching Christmas sweaters and long letters inside.

“You should have seen Susie! She wasn’t the greatest little ballerina up there at her first recital but I’ll be damned if she wasn’t having the time of her life. And Johnny. I still can’t believe he made the winning goal that secured his soccer team state. Guess all that practice paid off.”

Good job Johnny and you hang in there Susie! You’ll be the next Misty Copeland yet.

That one ice skating date!

It must be ingrained in us girls how to ice skate because we do it with such ease. It’s always our male counterparts that are tripping and falling. It makes you so endearing to us.

I’ve always loved those movies.

Yeah, they’re so cheesy they’re practically that nacho cheese that you pump onto chips and the gas station. But what’s so wrong with that?!

Pull me close and smile when I tell you you’re all I need for Christmas because I mean it. But we both know I still want a gift.

I sit here in February and write a post I’ll schedule to post the 1st of December and wonder if we’ll make it.

I wonder if you’ll be my nonbeliever and I your converter.

My handsome harlequin.

2017 was something we did.

Cleveland,

MGK,

You and Me.

But I had only known you two months. It was new and exciting. It didn’t matter that the Tree hated you or that Hop-a-long faked a panic attack because she decided she didn’t want to be there.

The lights went down.

Your arms were around me and the crowd faded away.

I didn’t even smoke but there were shot guns in our kisses. So, drunk and stoned I clung to you. The night you promised to never let me go.

Taco Bell never tasted as good as it did that night. Watching you eat taco after taco and talking to anyone you saw in that black bandana.

I could have said it then but I was scared.

My harlequin.

My entire Christmas list.

If your lips held poison I would gladly die on them. The way I nearly died of embarrassment again and again for the following two weeks as Tree and Hop reminded me that we weren’t actually as quiet as I thought.

Not that you cared.

I was yours and you were mine and fuck them if they disagreed.

2018 we were refreshed.

New again.

“I love you” rolled off the tongue like we had been saying it all along.

No shotguns but all the kisses.

Hate and bitterness wrapped in love and confusion and the unending gratitude of being back in your arms. All I wanted to do was be in that moment but all I did was start arguments.

We were bound in a single moment.

And you called me your girlfriend.

2019?

Hallmark can wait if I can have you.

Silver Lining

If I close my eyes I can still remember.
A little girl on a kitchen counter.
How happy she was to stir the gravy.
Or lick the spoon.
Please mom!
Maybe.
A skinned knee magically healed with a kiss and a bandaid.
Dancing in the rain,
And jumping in the mud.
Monsters can’t get you if you’re tucked in snug.
But the monsters are real.
I know.
I’ve seen them.

I’ve heard them.

And it’s impossible to hide from things that exist only in your mind.

Bandaids replaced with pills with names like lamictal and hydroxyzine.

And just like bandaids they only mask the pain.

But you’re still there,

With a hug and a reason to go on.

Tattoo Tour:

Every tattoo is a story. A bookmark in the story of my life. Each and every one of them means as much to me today as the day I got them. What follows is their stories.

Get a tattoo was an item on my bucket list… I just think I over did it a bit. No regerts. (Spelt wrong on purpose)

Broken: Its pretty much self explanatory. I got this tattoo when I was at my lowest because I truly felt broken. I can’t say the feeling has changed much but every day I feel like I get a little bit stronger. 99% of the time it’s hidden under my pants or shorts but it occasionally comes out to play. The point of it, for me, is that it’s a constant reminder of my starting point.

I touch the part of my leg that contains my secret and try to remind myself that broken can be beautiful too.

My most basic of white girl tattoos. A wave on my foot so I can live my life with one foot in the ocean.

I’m an Aquarius.

A water sign.

And I never feel more at home as I do when I’m in the water.

Give me a pool, a lake, or the ocean and I’ll be a happy kitten.

See I’ve been searchin’ for somethin’ out there
When is it comin’? Tell me
What to tell myself
When I drink so much that it hurts my health
‘Cause I stay up way too late
And I owe a million favors
I can’t overstress myself
So I wrote it down to express myself
I’m lookin’ in the mirror tryna find
Peace of mind in a piece of my
Inspiration back from the beginning
Life’s a movie, I can’t make revisions
Ate an eighth of shrooms and started trippin’
Had some visions that were nonexistent
I think I just left the solar system
Doesn’t matter, I still kept the rhythm
Diamonds still gon’ light up like a prism
That’s from years of grindin’ independent
What was at the bottom now has risen
If this isn’t Heaven then what is it?
Always real but never realistic
Want the world but nothin’ in specific
Don’t need shootin’ stars to grant my wishes
I’m a superstar, let’s go and get it.

-MGK

The lyrics mean the world to me and have helped me. Even when shit gets hard. Not to mention it’s a tattoo written in MGKs own handwriting and he has the same tattoo in the same spot.

This, I think, is my saddest tattoo to date. One day (as this blog is my story) there will be a post about a cat and a Tree but today is not that day. I had this friend, we met at a haunted house and quickly became as close as two people could be. Sisters, if you will. I loved her, love her still. And so, on her 18th birthday, I got her her first tattoo. We got ghosties. Different aesthetic to match our personalities but the same basic concept of the ghost. She picked hate over love and my heart is too big to have hate in my life.

I still love her and would take her back in a heartbeat.

But she would have to be the one to reach out.

She would have to accept that my heart is mine to love who I love. If my heart gets broken than that’s my choice too.

Alice in Wonderland has a thousand great quote and I could list them all from memory but this one has the most significance to life.

Life is a curious thing,

And getting curiouser by the minute.

It says live now and don’t panic with a semicolon between them. It’s in my mom’s handwriting. Every time I look down at it, it’s like she’s here with me. Telling me not to panic. That everything is going to be okay.

Okay so this one doesn’t have a story.

It’s a unicorn.

I’m a unicorn.

I was feeling like shit that day so I got a tattoo.

So the story here is that a long time ago a courtesan by the name of Lady Rosalyn, fell in love with a married Italian diplomat. Their love affair was scandalous and very public.

Eventually she fell pregnant with his bastard. Upon the birth of their child she was gifted a necklace with a pendent on it with her image.

Or so my Nonna told me.

This tattoo is based on that pendent.

I mean…

Ravenclaw here.

This is my haunt tattoo. An adorable bat that thinks it’s spooky. His name is Ned and he’s my spirit animal.

Fear him.

So while we were working on Lady Rosalyn my artist and I started talking about Aquarius tattoos. Originally we were talking about a mermaid and a water bearer.

Somehow we ended up here and I love it.

Her name is Barbie.

The Bucket List and the Done List…

A bucket list is a very simple thing to have. I imagine, as you sit wherever you are in the world, you have one. Maybe it’s not written down on paper but we all have things we want to do before we die.

See your favorite artists live in concert and be right there at the stage.

Bungee jump.

Meet your birth parents and ask them why they gave you up.

It doesn’t matter how deeply personal or absolutely silly it might be.

We all have things.

We all have desires.

We all have wants.

I am not the one to tell you to go out and do those things. Hell, if I showed you my bucket list right now, all two hundred and something items on it, you would be exceedingly underwhelmed. The number of items I have completed in my 28 years should probably be higher.

I went through this phase, you see, where I wanted to see it all, to do it all, to live a life that I wouldn’t be able to tell my children about.

How is anyone supposed to be old and wise if they aren’t first young and crazy?

So I added item after item after item to my bucket list but I was never actually doing any of it. That was fine when I started writing it. (I was 15)

But 18 passed.

Then 20.

Then 25.

At some point in all of this my bucket list got tucked into a journal and forgotten. Life happens and there isn’t always time to follow your dreams.

But when those half dozen pages fell from that journal, written all over, doodled on, and stained, it was like the universe was trying to tell me to start living.

If I’m going to have regrets some day, they sure as hell better be for things I’ve done and not things I wish I had.

So instead of focusing on what I haven’t done on my bucket list I’m going to focus on what I have done. And, more importantly, my done list. The things that happened while I was busy not paying attention.

I don’t know how many more weird cliche sayings I can fit into this one teeny tiny blog post so let me leave you with this…

These are my stories, these are my chapters, because my life is a choose your own adventure novel only there’s no going back. If you are reading this and you truly don’t have a bucket list I challenge you to grab a pen and pencil and write down something you want to do before you die.

What could possibly be the harm?

All of that being said, I’ve been going through my bucket list and I started to turn the journal I found it in into a ‘Bucket Journal’ I’ll be posting the ones I think are worth reading about as time goes on. The ones that are relevant to my story.