Starting out with a gut punch. I'm stable now. I'm happy in a way that I could never have imagined in those days, back when the wounds were open and bleeding. I remember how much the bleeding hurt.
But in those days I was also raw and wild and searching and sometimes I look back and miss the kid who convinced her friends to pack into a shitty old Toyota so that she could drive them into the middle of the Anza-Borrego desert at four in the morning. Who taught them to light cigarettes without flame, just a giant magnifying glass that she had stolen from the fake office of a suburban model home. The kid who slept in stairwells and ate out of garbage cans and howled at the moon.
I don't want to go through it again, but sometimes I do. And I miss her.
It’s a bittersweet grief, homesickness for a stranger who wasn’t always. Part of me grew around the shape of you and occasionally winces when it doesn’t find you there, like a phantom limb
this is so beautiful. it reminds me of a passage from Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein, that I read only yesterday and it's echoing in my mind:
"What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be — until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically?
I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas.
The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her … as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me.
Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she — that is that I — can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself — were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself — would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one?
Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists."
gardens need light and heat to thrive my love
This is so beautiful and painful. Your writing is both poetic and raw, and the art compliments it perfectly.
"I keep it down."
Starting out with a gut punch. I'm stable now. I'm happy in a way that I could never have imagined in those days, back when the wounds were open and bleeding. I remember how much the bleeding hurt.
But in those days I was also raw and wild and searching and sometimes I look back and miss the kid who convinced her friends to pack into a shitty old Toyota so that she could drive them into the middle of the Anza-Borrego desert at four in the morning. Who taught them to light cigarettes without flame, just a giant magnifying glass that she had stolen from the fake office of a suburban model home. The kid who slept in stairwells and ate out of garbage cans and howled at the moon.
I don't want to go through it again, but sometimes I do. And I miss her.
This makes me tear up a little, I feel a lot of these feelings so hard and the art is beautiful
It’s a bittersweet grief, homesickness for a stranger who wasn’t always. Part of me grew around the shape of you and occasionally winces when it doesn’t find you there, like a phantom limb
Someday I'll be able to be as pure and raw as this...thank you ND for this
this is so beautiful. it reminds me of a passage from Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein, that I read only yesterday and it's echoing in my mind:
"What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be — until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically?
I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas.
The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her … as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me.
Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she — that is that I — can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself — were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself — would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one?
Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists."
my god how this hits. i immediately sent it to my therapist.
I love how you combine poetry and comics. It's just so cool
Prolific in sentiment and discovery
I promise not to destroy what I love 💗 🥹
This hit me in the Nimona feels.
That spark
In the dark
Makes a light
So bright
It's dazzling.
It's frazzling
To realize
Everything dies
When the light
Burns so bright
It's life-giving.
Right in the gut. Beautiful melancholy. Love it.