painting by Peyton

"Here's Why I'm Going to New York City"

fresh time sounds into the heart
of grand rising toward the subway
into the sunshine city
buildings & mirrors
shaving fennel into
celery brought on trucks
ready to ride into
the sunrise and
around the world again.

apl, December 18th of 2023, completed at 1:42am EST

Welcome to New York

at sunset, on a Tuesday

(photos of NYC, above and below poem, by apl 2023)

Welcome to New York

oh that blue yellow

pastel home work

ready for pizza and

a comedy mic

joints inside the body,

not to smoke

take the A train

with a subway pass

location is everything,

her smile is

so happy in wintertime;

pacing is my

secret key to this

dark maze of life

a beautiful dusk with

dinner ideas

and music. She stands up,

vested and pink

sweater that

says San Francisco

but oh baby those amber eyes

speak pure New York City,

where dad was

born.

by apl

apl, 12.12.23, completed at 4:42pm EST

(poetry)

[redacted]

watercolor by author, for this story.

I sit down to write. My fingers freeze.

The currents of analysis is bursting from my brain, like a stopped faucet in need of release.

I can’t wait, leaning forward, hips tilted in my chair toward the screen. I am eager, enthralled and amazed, running hot to get these concepts into the world. Into the world…

Where is the world? Aren’t I just as much of a world as the world itself?

The internet is a non-place used almost entirely to describe the physical realities within which our human existence is located. We join together, from vastly different lives, with disparate data about the meaning of humanness, with increasing consciousness and fear of death, creating and absorbing into a virtual space.

A space with less than two dimensions, technically speaking.

Money. I can’t provide my ideas to the ether for fear of losing them.

I want money. I want money to survive more easily, better, and for a longer amount of time. I expect, with not much evidence, that this money shall be born from these ideas. That my creations are my future wallet.

That my brain is the source of my survival.

It is so much easier to write when comfortable. It is so much easier to do anything when we feel safe. My psychiatrist said that I need to adapt myself to challenges more effectively; that emotional and psychological resilience are healthy and protective factors in psychological outcomes. Or, that’s how I heard it anyway.

My eyes and head remember the feeling of grief. Loss after loss but almost none of them were death. I feel the experience of past elation in my body. I observe the fast undulations of emotional and physical sensation of being human. The rising pressure of having to pee, or not, or hydrate, or not, or get out of the sun, or get into the sun, or stretch, or sit still. These electrical machines of atoms, of cells, attuned to the minutia of being.

We inhabit delicate vessel, from which to create.

And yet we must trust the world to receive the projects and gifts that are born so gently of these vessels; the genius that is sometimes birthed so ferociously from the kingdom of our flesh.

Our minds and thinking and writing seem too often limited by our time and strength.

I write around the concepts.

As usual, I notice the tension of a gnawing desire to express and a deep fear of expressing into nothingness.

Of losing the expression into the abyss. Of sacrificial infant ideas, ready for consumption, afraid of being gone forever. Gone forever like hundreds of Docs forgotten. Like the ghosts of posts past. Like the memories of the money I could’ve made or the lives I could’ve changed.

I sense the internal wave of shivering that I indeed have some time left. I have life left within which to create. That I will probably continue, at least for a while, to survive. Praying to the internet for the spacious permission to create and create and create.

That the void is just a void and that we humans are nothing more than ourselves.

We weave the tiniest of moments into a fragile tapestry of mutual hope.

We seek the memory of our ancient bodies, decomposed. We tie down the sky to keep ourselves from floating away. We are the people of Planet Earth, of Earth’s internet, of the ideas and writing that bring us home to our own consciousness, over and over and over again.

I’m here to create, just like anyone and everyone else. I’ve suffered enough.

Now I want to use that suffering for something. For anything.

I am concerned to the point of stillness of losing my precious, beloved ideas. But it would be worse to lose them by never having offered them at all.

I sit. I write in circles around my greatest ideas. I cage in my fear, like a small rabbit. I let it hop, and sing, and chatter. I feed it carrots. I notice the rabbit pray, small paws like a mouse. A mouse that shimmies into the warm and protective palm of myself.

Last night, I dreamed of a nestling mouse.

The cutest, most puppy-like mouse I had ever seen. Then, something terrible happened. But I pray for her, dipping the idea of the tiny creature into the ether, alongside my writing. Loss is a myth. The mythology of death. We are just big stars crunched up into smaller bodies.

The mouse is just a symbol for the rabbit of my fears.

The sad fate of the mouse, which I shall not write here, is just homage to my deep caring, my small heart of compassion for the writing. For all of our writing. For the humans that, so small in this galaxy, continue to pull from the fabric of the cosmos, into consciousness, as we create, create, and create.

We are nothing against the backdrop of possible bravery.

So, as always, I will not forget to create. I will not stop myself. I will ride the tides of fear or sorrow, and dive into the black water of the deepest oceans. I will pull up fishes and pray over them; water into water, with a shimmer into the sky.

I will soothe lost beach mice along the shore. I will write my ideas privately, and consider their lifetimes. Where will these ideas live, if not in the possible awareness of other human beings through the portal of our virtual realms? Where can I place them?

Ideas so delicate, like living beings, ready to scamper toward the bright shores of existence beyond just me.

Photosynthetic ideas, like underwater algae, breathing into the symbols of lifetimes beyond me. Giving energy into the ocean, available nutrients, awakening over the course of time.

I want to offer my mind to the future. I want the future to offer abundance to me.

Into the Broken Snow Globe

A flash autofiction description of physical pain, medical experiences, and past eating-disordered-behavior. →[content warning]←

photos of author (left to right, taken in 2011 & then 2023)

When I first felt the searing of shin splints, I was hobble-sprinting toward a dance class in below zero weather. I was about 95 pounds of ballerina, cold, and in pain. Tears were dusting the icicle of my sharp little face. I felt very, very frustrated to be so very incapacitated by who knows what.

It began when I was born. Obviously. Or, maybe it began in utero. 

Or maybe before that in the cosmos, as some sort of angelic being that decided to suffer for the sake of learning. But that’s pretty much how every single story in the history of humans begins, which you also already know.

So I was hobble-sprinting (TM) like a lonely leprechaun, at only five feet tall and with almost no physical health left in my body. I was searing, burning, and angry, but also urgently sad. My heart ached for a change — any change — to something easier. Anything, really, where I wouldn’t have to suffer every moment of every day.

At this point in time, I was more comfortable with a toothbrush down my throat for no reason at all than I was with my boyfriend, or with a nighttime spliff of weed, or with my delicate and strained shin bones and lifted tibias. I was sick of everyone, but especially sick of myself. Sickness seemed easier.

I got to ballet class 7 minutes late, which was four minutes too late to get credit for that day. I wasn’t really much of a ballerina. I was, more so, an 18 year old biology major who needed a physical education credit. It was part of the general education units that I did not want. And also a near-cliché aspect of my childhood extracurricular history.

Did the toothbrush comment feel abrupt? Part of the conundrum of being a limping dancer with medical problems galore is that I lost a great deal of my human compassion. My selfishness increased with my pain levels. So, basically, I don’t have enough energy to consider your personal history of eating disorders or not. I should. But at least I’m aware (and telling you directly) that I don’t.

I danced while crying. Small, small tears until later, after class, at which point I began to silently sob. I hid into the crevice of a wall within a behemoth chrome arts building. The facility felt much more elegant than my emotions. 

That large metal architecture held all of our emotions. The other dancers were not unlike me. Different injuries, different salt levels in their tears, different mothers on the phone with varying levels of narcissism or kindness (rarely both). 

The dancers all had different boyfriends or fuck buddies, or girlfriends, or lovers, or friends. Or crushes on professors. Or obsessions with essays. We all had different levels and details of social prowess. I was an extra-social-ballet-focused-student with a boyfriend on the basketball team and a burning brain. A girl with a need for eyeglasses that I hadn’t let myself wear since 4th grade. 

Who was, up until the hospital, actively acing her core genetics lab. A paradoxical yet surefire sign of a soon-to-be inflamed brain, born of an increasingly unstable mind.

As the Vivaldi played, we tripped, fell, and quietly compared our bodies. Or, mostly it was me who tripped and fell. I have weak ankles and flat feet, which should normally dissuade any continuation of classical dance. Apparently not. I had dance in me and it wouldn’t let go. It held onto my heart like the tension in the skin of a drum.

The leotard squeezed onto my nothingness. The tights made my skin itch. Clean tights are best, but my body still doesn’t like those much. And the feet. The angry, aching, amber-red feet. Plus the shins, plus the mind.

I held them inside of me. Hugged them into my soothing soul, pulsing with empathy for the plight of my insides. 

I sensed that I wasn’t the only human existing in this gritty and gutty world of silent suffering. My pointed toes pushed downward into the glassy wooden floor of the studio by the tragedy of not knowing who else. How many of us were there? I wondered how to find them; how to help us all.

As an active anorexic [ED-NOS, according to Kaiser Permanente California Medical Center,] one glance downward from another dancer meant the world to me. My heart would flutter at the smallest moment of jealous eyes touching the non-curves of my disintegrating frame. Weakness, however fraught, was beautiful to me. That is to say, only true frailty could express the level of rage I held inside my collarbones. 

I twisted the rage around my bonesome fists like a rope. I felt it inside my sore eyes. The fury lived inside of the viscera of salted memories, housed near wounded flesh, an existential gnawing toward my terrorized child within. (An inner child who is now safe and loved. She’s here, with us, writing this story, as an adorable aspect of retrospect.)

The girl danced, a hypermobile ballerina from Petaluma, California. A girl who sure knew how to win.

The ligaments didn’t make sense, technically speaking. Neither did the joints or tendons. But, luckily, I avoided the doctor. My body could pretend to be normal for as long as I needed; this cost me the price of my mind.

 Without getting into it, the psychiatric expense was just about the size of my destiny.

I walk out of Kaiser, now 31, like a spy. The man in the physical therapy department has helped my poor, poor feet more than any doctor ever could. I praise him and feel like I’m going to cry. 

He calls me to follow up. I thank him five more times. When we get off of the phone, I actually do cry, overwhelmed by gratitude and the humanness of it all. Technically, he didn’t actually help yet, but the suggestions felt distinctly helpful.

I sit on the bench under the sun that they only provide at the offices in my hometown. Back home, still or again, at 31 years old. That’s what that glamorous eating disorder stuff will get you, kids, so don’t do it. It was one thousand times over not worth the subsequent suffering. 

Really, it wasn’t even worth the suffering of the times of fasting themselves. Living through self-induced torture felt like a disgusting and strange way to be. The anguish of repetitive fasting wasn’t physical; it was a high and an addiction. I was getting a fix of weightlessness. 

But the superficial and enraged obsession with smallness created a type of existential shame that I hadn't otherwise encountered.

I open my Chromebook as I wait for the pharmacy. The pharmacy closes as I write this, dramatically, so I’ll wait for the bus instead. I gently complain to the guy behind the pharmacy door. The hot younger security guy offers to open it for me. I decline, partially because I’m nicer now, but also partially for the theater of it. Both motives feel just fine.

The older man who closed the sliding glass doors comes over a while later, after everything’s locked up and the coffee cart is inside, and softly apologizes to me, too. He commiserates. He even adds in how much he dislikes Kaiser. 

I thank him for being generous and reassure him that I found out later that they ran out of my mood stabilizer anyway, so he doesn’t need to feel bad and it was entirely alright all in all, and that I hope they can still change the pharmacy for pickup and he suggests the app and then he does prayer hands and gives many smiles in a row and I put my computer away and walk toward the bus stop.

I experienced the thrill of non-ceremony degree conferral earlier this summer. It was a balmy July while staying with my Aunt in Rhode Island. That day, I could practically feel the paper passing through the hands of the dean to be signed on the other side of the country. Dominican University of California, Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with a Narrative Medicine Emphasis. 

I sit quietly with my past child self at the bus stop that day. We are in the September sunshine. I am illuminated by the California air, correcting my posture for a recent crook in my neck. 

I get to listen to the worries of this little girl, of seven-year-old me, a figment of self-therapeutic practices and maybe spirituality. I comfort her, I comfort me. She asks questions, gives me encouragement. I sit and breath and meditate. We become myself, merging into a nice timeline of a non-ballerina. We sit, and hold the crazy 19 year old young woman in our arms, on each side with her between, melting the icicles of the insides of her mind. We give her the sun. The bus arrives. I smile at the driver.

He says, “I’ve never seen someone so happy for the bus to arrive!”

I’m the only one on the whole bus. I laugh, smile, and thank him.

“Well, I mean… I’ve been waiting a really long time and I’m just glad you’re here!”

The little girl of my past self doesn’t leave. We sit in the middle of the seats, alone and together on the bus, child and adult. In the golden hour, I take a photo of myself, smiling. I am a little less than 200 pounds. I feel happy. I feel safe. I feel healthy. I am beautiful.

I am here. I am human. I’m me and I am alive.

In honor of the Full Blue Moon in Pisces, I want to practice radical honesty.

In the fast economy of today, if writers don’t cut out anything overwhelming, people stop reading. If we don’t add in enough that’s relatable, people stop reading. If we say too much or too little, that’s it. They click away.

Yet there is a great painlessness of this contemporary conundrum. We aren’t confronted by their absence. Rather, we notice only the ghostly non-presence of the humans that click.

Our numbers are driven by internet phantoms that are all human beings living (and clicking) somewhere else in space. Yet, like most platforms, the results aren’t exactly real-time. You won’t know until later — moments or maybe days — how many visited or for how long.

Good results are when people stay. When they engage. When they wait, watch, or read, before they click away. The goal of humans creating online is to delay the click away.

And most humans that click also create something of their own online, too. It’s usually not as voyeuristic as we might want to believe. We are all simultaneously asking one another not to click away.

Or, at very least, to spare a moment or two before doing so. We are begging, as click-people, for other people to not click so quickly.

Maybe it was one episode of a now long-gone podcast, or a few posts on a quote page that you hoped to maintain. The discouragement of our own internet specters feels all-too-real, even with so little to hold onto. It flits and fleets, like the cosmic cycles. Like a small asteroid, rushing quickly away from orbit.

I type and I edit, hoping that I’ll write well enough to have a chance at some kind of life (read: more sustained housing). I break the fourth wall, admitting this. I stand up, hands aching. I walk a few paces in the room where I stay today, and look out of the window at the August blue moon. The moon glows right back.

I sit down. Reread. Think about the pain of the early clicks goodbye. But why, right? Why do we need the eyes to stay before they leave?

Often for money. Or self-esteem. Or, for the ephemeral promise of money down the road. Maybe we’re just supposed to want the views.

As for the youth, I’m not really sure. Probably some combination of building their sense of parasocial identity or feeling uncertain to question the status quo. Or, very possibly, because young people have only even known this. Nothing more nothing less.

I want to spend time with the moon. But I can’t until I know where I’ll live. I want to explain myself without giving too much detail, but my parasocial insecurity about psychiatric diagnoses pushes me to say more. I don’t want to say more.

The secondary irony is that there is no promise of success. Yet as someone who can’t work most jobs without direct medical failure, promises of success are rare either way. So, I bargain with the universe for usefulness. I offer up this request — out toward the moon, the ice sky, and the sharpness of the stars.

I ask that my writing finds the humans that need it most.

Even in its rawest, most ragged, and tangential forms, my writing has helped me. My thinking has also helped me. My resilience, what’s more, has kept me alive.

And yet, the discrepancy between my internal fire and my external creations is stunning. I am sent into utter inaction by all that I have left to say (so, so much).

I have hundreds of books to write. I don’t know if I have the physical or medical stamina to do so. I will find the stamina, though, despite the burning in my fingers and wrists and back and my eyes, and despite the rest of the problems, too. I mean, we all have problems.

Don’t worry, though, because the pain is not contagious. My obsessive compulsive disorder wants me to remind you, dear reader, that you are healthy, in some way or another! Your body and mind, like mine, have places of wholesome and sustainable good health. I promise!

In many ways, I am also healthy. Like the sky, dotted with both beauty and discrepancies. We all have places of healthfulness.

There is always, much like in the dips and divots of the moon, some beautiful silver area to be found. I seek the nuances, nestled into the grey of shadows beside the brightness of speckles of light. Cool, soothing dark silver nuances, to balance everything.

Luckily, my enthusiasm, optimism, and gratitude are quite catching. Thus, I hope that my words might catch you from ever falling into the internet abyss. We don’t need to fall. None of us do. We can weave the threads together — rather than sit, alone and tangled, within the web of empty thoughts unseen.

The rare full blue moon in Pisces reminds me that some occurrences are healthy, special, random, and only known by their announcement. Maybe breaking the form of relatable writing is similar.

Maybe I can hold the reader such that they want to stay. Maybe I can create a safe and gentle set of moments. Maybe I can benefit people, even as phantoms, floating around the internet, such that they will feel safe to lean in, to learn, to listen, to share, and to ask.

Sit down, my love. You are welcome here. Stay for a while, in the light of the full blue moon.

Full Moon, Being Human, Prose, Digital Philosophy, Mental Health

Extraterrestrial Design Collage