rec·​og·​ni·​tions

even if you promise to listen, if you promise to sympathize, can I trust you'll hear? I'm recognizing a deep desire of mine to be known, in all of my complexity. I'm recognizing a tendency of mine to frame conversation as if an issue is already present. I'm recognizing a fear of mine: that I am replaceable, imitable or imitating. I'm recognizing a distaste of mine: dishonesty, exemplified by overgeneralization. I desire to have someone hear what I have to say and respond, even if I've said it before. Because when you listen to my stories, you hear my life. When you hear my thoughts, you know my brain. When you know my feelings, you hold my heart. I feel known by some, and that's a great treasure. I feel their knowing as a thick, knit blanket draping over both of my shoulders, giving me a hug, loose but secure. Present, committed, and aware. I tend to start conversations with "I" and to follow that up with "just feel like," and then often after that comes a bit of "it's hard when…" From there I can get a little more creative. Oh, and I sling these sentences like a line cook, baby. If each day were a kitchen table, and my words were food, and the chairs around the table were my people, I can only imagine what the scene would look like: very Count Olaf's theater friends. There would be soup everywhere, to start, and on top of the soup would be piles of raw kale and underbaked, salty breadsticks. Sometimes my words flow faster than my brain can cook them, and sometimes that means they're messy soupy sadness. And I forget that some people don't like soup or kale and are allergic to gluten. I fear coasting through my days, because I fear coasting through my years. I fear being a consumer and a passerby, a marble in a channel, rolling through a pre-made track, one of many. It may be satisfying, the gentle whirring of my shiny orb as it races on for an indeterminate length of time (we're far too zoomed in to tell how long the track is exactly). But it's an imitated, imitable image, like a promposal or an embroidery kit. I guess I just don't want to be someone about whom they say, "Oh! Sure, you could invite him, he's cool." No, not cool, Beth. I'm kaleidoscopic and dry, and I'll sweep red velvet cake crumbs under your favorite rug to spite your ambivalence, I swear I will. I cannot tell a lie. And if I do, I freak out and correct myself as soon as possible. I probably look like a frightened crane, verbally splashing water and knocking over poolside vases. I'm terrified of people believing that everything I said is what I meant when really I haven't had the chance to spell out my conditionalizing caveats yet (which typically number somewhere between three and nineteen). Sometimes I cheat when I play cards (because I think it's funny and adorable because I'm a minx), but I do not let myself get away with it. Within 3 seconds, I blurt out "I CHEATED OK?", to the reception of re-deals and eyerolls. I cannot sit with dishonesty. Blanket generalizations, claims that opinions are facts, advertisements and religious propaganda, etc. are met with walls of ice. Mine to share, yours to hear. Just know that I reject veneer.

lit·tle weirds

by Jenny Slate

If I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can't add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps // 14

But what am I supposed to do with all of the parts of my heart that are only there to be given? // 36

I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up. // 41

I have been lying in order to be a part of something for almost forever. // 43

I want a prize for how well I can love. I want to be a prize for love. // 44

My physical heart feels so exposed, so shallowly planted. It feels like it is in my mouth. // 52

If you don't think it's important to hold hands and you are lukewarm about snuggling, don't bother sniffing around my stall… This exercise is actually too sad to do. All I want to do is disappear deeply into my own thing and you can decide whether or not to join but I'm pretty much going to enter my own vortex. But are you there? Please come close enough so that I can see you, and then I will try to do the rest for both of us, because I have not learned my lesson yet and do not possess the faith to believe in the partner who does his side of the thing. But I would love it if you would, because that would be dreamy and then I would also have that faith. // 56, 57

As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love. // 85

And we fell in love and we were together for a long time but it only felt like a zip, because that's what true love feels like. And we saw the sun and sipped our coffee together every single morning with our legs all tangled up under the sheets and we snoozed together every night and were each other's only boo-boo until the day that he croaked. // 105

I feel very lonely sometimes, and I felt very lonely when I bought the house. But I walk through the back door into the kitchen and I say to the oranges that they have made me the happiest woman on earth, and I say to however many ghosts might be watching me that I am so glad to be in the house, and I let my loneliness be there too. // 124

It is not natural to be a master in a casual way, to some of us. // 130

I never really want to argue with anyone ever again, nor am I under any sort of obligation to do so. // 143

Well, I am so sensitive and I am very fragile but so is everything else, and living with a dangerous amount of sensitivity is sort of what I have to do sometimes, and it is so very much better than living with no gusto at all. And I'd rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts. // 162

I am wild and I want to be that and to belong to the greater group and have everyone know that my wildness is nothing but a bit of my colors and has nothing to do with whether or not I can be trusted. // 169

There is nothing sad anymore, there are only tiny and tart truths. // 184

Who knows how to do anything, but it's not nothing that I know all my feelings and I have trust in their changeable nature and I am an expert at making treats out of tribulations. // 187

And sometimes I enact destruction just to reenact my faith that things can be built up again. // 190

You are dear to yourself in the morning and it is the morning now. It is very private to have such a love for yourself. // 208

The reason I think that it will be hard to meet someone who I am actually interested in is that I cannot stand these preliminary moments when you can't deeply know each other and be together forever. My ex-husband says to me on the phone, after I tell him that I am lonely and I think I am weird around men, that I am not weird but that I am trying to force an intimacy that needs time to grow. He is right and he knows me very well. The other problem is that lots of people are simply not the right fit, but somehow I always make it my fault, even though it is nobody's fault at all when you don't fit. // 212

I can't become smaller to fit into a crouching love in somebody else's meager world. // 219

ra·​chel

I'm looking out, daisy, at a room-- robin's egg. and white. You're next to me, splashing in Audrey Hepburn, cinema hue. By the light of just the tree I wrapped that which you said to me. The highest rate of fidelity, this view I see.