A Hurricane of a Girl

A Hurricane of a Girl

I once tried to love a monster of a landslide, but his muck and mire and mud,

Buried me in wreckage, filled my lungs. I was lost in the flithy flood.

I dug myself out, trembling in the rawness, gathered my power, sent it flowing,

Languished in the tropics, simmering and burning and growing.

Heartbreak transformed my summer showers into a violent hunger.

My winds gathered, my rains became weighty, my anger wrapped itself in thunder.

I spun, ravenous for destruction, to make mankind pay for the landslide’s sin.

Then another reached out, touched me and his tide pulled me in.

He himself was always spinning. The earth never solid beneath his feet.

Without a touch, I felt him, deep inside, where the heat and cold meet.

He saw me churning, but for once stood still and watched me come.

Didn’t leave as the clouds blackened, as I blocked out the sun.

He was the fire I had been looking for, suddenly spoke my name.

In a lightning spark, we came together, became one and the same.

Then he hushed my madness, found the truth in my lies.

And he fell in love with me in the calmness of my Eye.

He never stunts me, but let’s my squalls swell, ebb and flow.

He surrounds the gales of my monsoons, never lets me go.

Once the torment subsides, he carries me back to shore.

We cling together, survivors of a self-inflicted war.

The need to fight turns inward, to a passion for only him.

He is chaos with a wink and a smile, a cyclone that allows me swim.

So we dance together on the breeze, in his arms I twirl.

A tornado of a man, the only one strong enough to love me, a hurricane of a girl.  

I have always loved hurricanes. Instead of terrifying me, they've intrigued me. I never hid from them but loved to stand in the middle of the torrential downpour, face turned skyward, arms outstretched, the rain pelting my skin. The thunder and lightning crackling around me as I soaked the storm's energy in. I have often felt like a hurricane myself, something more always brewing beneath the surface. The forecast tells you I'll be a little ole Category One, but then the winds will shift and I can lay waste to everything in your world. And like a hurricane, I can be intense, too much to handle if you aren't prepared.

Sometimes I think it can't be easy to love me. I'm irrational and anxious and question everything. I'm demanding and impatient. I will fight you and rage. At times, I will feel trapped and long for freedom. The next I will cling to you in despair, needing reassurance, an overabundance of accolades. My depression can creep back in and my world blacks out, and I hate everything, especially myself. Most people love the calm, but it makes me anxious. The stillness makes me nervous, makes me lose my mind. Like a hurricane, I need to be in constant motion. I live for the deluge, for the never-ending high tide, for the waves that don't kiss the shore but crash into it. I like the churning of the water, the howling of the gusts. I'm at home there. 

But my fire can be more sunshine than a blinding blaze. My light can warm a man who has been cold his entire life. He will now feel a sunrise in his bones. He will never be bored with the ever-changing tides, of a girl tied to the cycle of the moon. A girl wrapped in skin, but full of stars and scars, heartache, and illuminating brightness. It will be a challenge, but it will be worth it. It's better to love a hurricane than to wander in the barren wasteland of the desert, where you will die of thirst.

If I love you, my love never falters. I will hold you when your own fury tries to consume you and everyone surrounding you. I will love you out of it. I will save you if you let me. I will love you when you're desperate, when you're happy, when you're absurdly angry until the all the storms are over and there is only peace and wisps of white clouds in a cotton candy sky. Until the end of time, this hurricane will love you with such a passion that the sun will be jealous of the glow I give.    

Serendipity and a Hurricane

Serendipity and a Hurricane

Once you were a stranger, your name unknown, your story untold.

But there was something familiar in the way your eyes took hold.

Hours and drinks later, your hands were in my hair, your teeth against my throat.

A happenstance meeting right before a hurricane, a history rewrote.

You opened up, invited me into your life, your bed, your home.

You steadied my nerves and stilled my restless need to roam.

In your arms, you filled the empty spaces that were never whole.

The walled off words unsaid, you could always read them in my soul.

Now I know how you sleep with pillows surrounding you to ward off a nightmare.

It’s like you can read my mind, and yet we always lose my underwear.

We eat breakfast together on a lazy Sunday, bacon, toast, and eggs.

You get lost inside my mind and in between my legs.

When we make love, your fingers press into my hips.

You always know before I fall. You never let me slip.

Now your name is always on the tip of my tongue.

We may be older now, but this feeling forever makes us young.

One man changed my view on mankind.

Every insecurity, every doubt left behind.
You never were a stranger, even the night we met.

You were unavoidable. Everything about you was kismet.

Now our story is interwoven. Your eyes open to mine in the night.

Every darkness in my life burst into rainbows, happiness bathed in light.  

Every day, I thank serendipity for that hurricane.

It brought us together, flooded the city, and I’ll never be the same.

Do you still remember the electricity in the air the night we met?
Thunder and lightning and a storm no one can ever forget.
That spark is still between us, a fire in our eyes.
I'm drawn to you like the tides to the moons on the rise.
You were the poem I never could find words for.

The story I could never write, an unsung song at my core.

Wake Up

I started taking something for my depression and anxiety. So far,
it makes me feel less crazy, and I am enjoying the part where I
don't stress out and obsess about literally everything. I didn't
realize how bad it was until now. Before I started taking these meds,
I was in a dark place. A place I've been before, and always hate to be. But
the sun had never been so eclipsed. Whenever I find myself in that hole,
I always call out to my grandmother who passed away a few years ago.
She had always been a source of strength when she was alive, and I continue
to depend on her, even in her death. When things get bad, I remind myself that
Edith Jenkins wouldn't stand for this. I often feel her with me, guiding me.
She was with me when I was losing my mind.
She helped bring me out of it. She helped me wake up.


Wake Up

She buries herself in a porcelain grave,

The water turning pink, lapping at her skin,

The warmest embrace she’s felt in a while.

Last night she scratched through the thin flesh

Of her wrists, trying to pull out the pain.

Searching for a word that no one wants to speak.

For years she’s suffered, silent, motionless

From a sickness in her blood, her brain,

Passed down from mother to daughter, mother to daughter.

She holds her breath until her lungs burn, sinks deeper.

All of it fades, blurs around the edges.

But suddenly her grandmother’s voice echoes

Wake up.

Thank you to the people who stuck by me during this frantic section of my life.
Thank you for not making feel crazy. Thank you for sitting by my side and waiting
for me to wake up.

Living in a Box of Darkness

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. It's fine."

This has been my mantra, and I have hoped that if I say enough to you, to myself, to the world, that it would be true. That I would really be okay. Mind over matter. A placebo pill, if you will. But fact is, the words don't work, and I'm not okay.

I have debated whether or not to share this, but I am finished being afraid to talk about the bad stuff. I'm sick of being ashamed of something I can't control. I'm done with people thinking a person has the power to just stop being sad. Have you ever told a chemo patient to just stop having cancer. Nothing is that simple, especially this. 

For as long as I have memory, I have battled with depression and anxiety. But, Lauren, you're so happy! You're always smiling! Your glass is always half full! Believe me, I have wanted to deny it, and a lot of the time, I am truly happy, but with light, there comes darkness, and sometimes, mine is more powerful than anything else. I have hidden from it, pretending there hasn't always been this big, black box full of darkness beneath my bed. I have tried cutting it to bits, locking it away, boarding it up, wrapping it in plastic, suffocating it, but the darkness does not die. It always seeps out, always consumes, weighs me down, heavy bricks upon my chest, slowly crushing my ribs. The sadness isn't constant. It ebbs and flows like the tides. Sometimes the darkness is bone-dry, nothing but soft, wet sands, filled with ripples and seashells. I can sink the soles of my feet into it and peace is all I know. But then as the summer sea breeze flows through my hair, one second warming me, bringing me light and love, but suddenly the waves rush in. The rip currents pull me into the deep, drag me under, and I can't move. I can't feel anything, not even the wet. Water fills my lungs. All I can do is sink deeper, watching the world overhead through the clear brink. Unable to scream for help. Unable to breathe. And always, right before drowning for good, the waves subsided and I can gulp in air once again. I can go on living, a little damp, a little exhausted, a little less alive, but I am still here.

But the thing about my depression is I've always been able to keep it in check. I've always been able to wrestle that blackness back into its box, but this year the darkness has done me in. It has overwhelmed me, depleted me, threatened to block out the sun forever. I have let only a few people know what's really going on behind my bright, brown eyes. And this last week, I have scared them. I terrified myself, too. Last week, something within me slipped. The resolve to hold it all together, my last ounce of sanity--it all left me. I went numb, the world blurred as the blackness slipped through the cracks of its box, and filled the spaces in the hollows of my heart, leaked into my brain.

There is such a stigma with mental health. I, myself, have cracked too many jokes about how long and thick the crazy branches are on my family tree. I have always thought I was stronger than this. That I could will the sadness away. But if I had cancer or a broken leg, there would be nothing holding me back from going to the doctor. All of our brains are made differently, and my brain makes me overreact, or go paralyzed, or hate myself with such intensity that everything but that antipathy is all I can feel. How can someone so pretty and healthy and smart and funny, so seemingly perfect, wish she was someone else? I know this doesn't make sense to you. I don't understand it myself, but it's my reality. And there is a way to fix this, to make my brain better.

This is all supposed to come full circle to my New Year's Resolutions for 2018. I will be kinder to myself. This is something I have always, always struggled with and it has caused me to suffer. How do you deal with an enemy when it's you? How do you love yourself when everything about you is wrong? This is what I need to figure out. This is what I must reconcile in 2018. Get right with myself and get to a happier, healthier place. My mental health is my top priority. Most importantly, I'm going to the doctor to get on medication for anxiety and depression. I'm also going to stop eating cookies for dinner. And love more freely. Oh, and run a marathon, maybe? Nah. I'll just keep going to the gym. 

Wait for It

Patience is a virtue that I have never mastered.  Maybe this impatience is innate, caused by being the baby of the family, but when I want something, I want it now! I want it yesterday. Then the writer in me says, just make it happen. My fate is up to me. I am the author of my story, so write the dialog, write the emotions, breathe it all into life. In writing, I can make the characters to do exactly what I want. Life isn't like that, though. I know how storylines, character development, and plot points work. A story is over before it begins if our protagonist gets everything she wants in the first three paragraphs. It's pointless and boring. She character must struggle, face conflicts, and overcome it all to make it to the final chapter. The good one. The one you endured 365 pages for. The waiting builds dramatic tension, and tension is meatiest parts of the book. The pages you dog-ear and read over again and again. I need a slow burn, a building, not a bright burst that fades. I want embers that never go out, keeping me warm for the rest of my life.

So here I am, practicing patience, maybe for the first time ever. I'm not being demanding. I'm not forcing my hand. (I am internally screaming and stressing. I can only handle mastering one virtue at a time.) I'm waiting, and in the waiting, I am still. In the stillness, I can think. In the thinking, I can decide what is worth the wait and what is not. What belongs to me and what has no place in my life. If something makes it through the waiting phase, and the stillness, and the thinking, it is worth it. It was stronger than my restless mind.

I have never really believed in fate, at least until lately, but there are just some things that happen no matter how much I fight it, no matter how I wasn’t expecting it. I have learned that I have to allow a natural progression to things. I have to let life be organic. Because the things that you don’t expect are often the most beautiful, the most life-changing. Everything you’ve been waiting for. See. I'm waiting.

I can't control how long it will take, but I know it's coming. And I can control how I react. I can remind myself to stay calm, to find joy here in the Waiting Place. The happy ever after doesn't come in the first chapter but on the last page. So I'm willing to wait for it.

Do Not Love Me Gently

Come in like a hurricane, reckless and real,

Demanding to feel everything all at once.

Lay waste to the dry rotted foundation. Destroy it all and rebuild,

A rebirth of everything that was broken and dying.

Pull my hips in like the rushing water of the tide that is called home by the moon,

Like you have no choice, like the coming together is fate. Serendipity.

Morning, noon, and night, coax the shores open, the barriers to the beach. To my heart.

Come in without invitation and pull me back out to you.

Touch my neck, a brush of fingertips, a pressing, a possession.

Let the core of your light leave a mark, but not a bruise, not a hurt.

A sunburn that blanches into an eternal tan of summertime.

Let the sizzle of your sun be brighter than my darkness.  

Be a rollercoaster of my life, full of thrills and stops and starts.

Steal my breath, but revive me, bring everything buzzing to life.

Fill my ribs with the pulsing reverberation of your story, of your truth.

Take everything of me in, let it fill you up until it’s all overflowing, brimming together.

So please don’t love me gently, too soft to feel, too inane, like a plot without a point.

Be a still point in a spinning world, an anchor, but also a fire.

Love me wildly, freely, make me feel it in my bones.

Consume me like the eye of the storm, reckless and real.

Abuse: My Own Personal Voldemort

He didn't come in swinging, instead with vows and silky words. But those promises were pawns, the softness shards of glass. The bend, the break, the hurt wasn't in my bones, but in my soul. In my heart.

Abuse. It's such a lumbering, heavy word. I don't even like to say it out loud. It's my own personal Voldemort. He who must not be named. Because if I give it a name, I give it weight. I don't like to talk about it because I don't like to admit that it was real. That it happened to me. It was my reality for over ten years, and sometimes, even though it's over, it's not.

That's the worst part. He's gone, but he's not. (Don't mistake me. I'm beyond over him. He's nothing to me.) But he's still here inside my head, still taunting me. He gave me a box full of darkness, and sometimes it still eats me alive, blots out the sun. How do you exorcise a demon as slippery as a cuttlefish that sloshes ink into your veins every time you try to catch him? It's a daily thing, the shutting out of his vicious, cycling words.

So, I can't be afraid to talk about, scared to say the word abuse aloud. Because it happened, because it hurt, because I healed from it. It will always affect me. It's the reason for my self-doubt, for my anxiety, why I can't sleep through the night. That box of darkness is mine. I'm not afraid to own it. It was freedom and finding what was lost. It forced me to become the best version of myself. It was a gift.