shades of blue

When it rains, it is for me. I prayed for this. I stood outside knowing it was here for me. Here because whatever was inside me hated me and was ripping me apart and I couldn't make a sound. Here because everything I felt unable to say was still something that needed to be expressed, somehow. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I stood outside in the rain and cried.

These strange feelings lingered like dreams. Nothing I did could dispel the sensation that my life was not my own, and that whatever was happening to me was happening beyond layers and layers of shimmering, gossamer fabric. A cocoon I was powerless to break free of. I was falling down a tall well and it was not my problem.

More than anything, I felt defeated. Whatever was happening to me felt inevitable, like something I'd been waiting for since I was a little girl. Sometimes the sound of the room I was in faded into static, and all I could hear were waves on sand. Like holding seashells to both ears.

Something happened to me once, at a beach.

If I closed my eyes I could go there. So dark you couldn’t see the horizon. The water was warm. Bioluminescent krill scattered under my fingertips. I remember my goosebumps casting strange, barely-there shadows on my forearms in the muted moonlight. I remember wondering whether I was dreaming.

My elastic self flung from my body, housed under the rooftops of memories I couldn’t escape. At night, I asked the moon to lobotomize me.

Have you ever had a dream where you were trying to run, but you felt like the ground was a cartoon rug treadmilling underneath you? Like your legs were trapped in quicksand? Like—

Sometimes, like the snap of a rubber band, I was ricocheted into the current moment and disoriented by how loud it felt. One night in March of 2023, I remember standing in my kitchen in the dark, wrapped in a blanket, looking out my window. The lights from downtown bounced off the low clouds and cast my neighbors' houses in shades of yellow. It was around three in the morning and I couldn't stop crying. I felt like a shadow of myself. I felt like a wretched, awful thing.

At night in my bedroom, moonlight would reflect off my walls and hang in the air, settle into my cupped palms. A glittering stranger my desperate hands. Sometimes I would pray to the moon. Sometimes I would just cry. I developed the idea that I had done something to anger her. The moon, I mean. I started thinking that the moon hated me.

On May 9, 2023, while sitting at my computer, a yellow warbler flew directly into my kitchen window and died on impact. I was in a work call and I had to excuse myself to have a breakdown on my back porch. Later that same day, three more birds did the same thing. I imagined seashells in both my hands, and lifted them to my ears.