I am learning that not all silence is the sound before something breaks.

For the last three Fridays, I’ve specifically gone up to the parkway where there’s no reception. Where lost signal takes away the music. Where only thoughts lay.

Each Friday is different.

Some days I pack a lunch.

Sometimes I make some tea in a canister.

I’m always there by 6:30 to watch the sunset.

I usually only stay for two hours and I write or I read or I stay quiet.

I’m now on chapter 3 of a short story.

And when I can’t write anymore, I stay still.

This seems like such a silly thing.

But my body learned fight or flight so well that stillness felt like surrender.

I am no longer asking every uncomfortable moment, ‘How do I get out of here?’ I am beginning to ask, ‘What happens if I stay?’”

And so I stay. Sometimes my thoughts have to stand up, make me cry, make me laugh, make me write.

But I stay.

The quiet used to expose me. Now it introduces me to myself.

It says, hello, we’ve been waiting for you.

Jerry Coyle

Tomorrow is the day my Dad died. I think about him often on this day.

What his full grey hair would look like.

The kind of Pap he’d be.

What state he’d be living in.

I could see him in the mountains. Maybe?

I always loved the first picture below of him helping fill sandbags post the flood recovery.

Isn’t it odd that he and I have both been through natural disasters?

Both helpers?

Actually I’m the sixth generation of my family that has experienced flooding.

I suppose it’s a right of passage.

His hair was so thick. I don’t remember touching it. But I remember seeing it.

His hands were small.

His laugh was distinct. Jolly but soft.

My mom says everytime I laugh she hears my dad.

She says my mannerisms are just like his too.

I was 9 when he died and the more I grow older the more I forget about him.

So I tend to write it down. Like this.

The last time I saw him alive he was in the hospital. I didn’t always understand everything going on. Baseball cards and basketball consumed my life.

I think now it’s because my Mom was trying to protect us. He was slow to move. Spoke little.

I remember the day he died. I ran into the house from playing basketball all day. My face beat red.

I walked through the door and my Mom was talking on most likely the first cordless phone ever invented because it looked like the size of a brick.

My mom’s voice on the phone directed me to her as I passed through the playroom. In that minute I looked up at my Mom and she was crying.

The kids in the neighborhood call my Mom Terry the Tiger. My mom did not cry. Ever. She yelled. She swore. She gritt her teeth. Those emotions I know. But not tears.

I knew then it was my Dad. Her first love. The father to her two kids. The high school love she chased for years. He was gone.

The next time I saw him was at the funeral home.

When I arrived I didn’t believe that the body laying in front of me was my Dad.

It didn’t look like him.

His face sunkin in.

His hair scarce.

His skin pale.

I grabbed his hand. It was cold.

Surely my Dad would show up soon.

But he didn’t.

So many people walked past me and hugged me.

They kept saying the same thing over and over “Your Dad loved you so much”.

I wish I could remember what that looked like.

Because there is no evidence of it.

A lot of promises unkept. Abandonment. And selfishness.

He was doing the best he could I suppose.

I wonder if he would have changed?

He was the starter of so many things:

A taxi business

A pool hall

A pizza shop. I still have the pizza shop sign hanging in my bedroom.

I guess that spirit of beginning left his body and landed on mine.

His pizza was my favorite. It wasn’t anything special. It was just his. And when you are 9 years old “his” was enough.

Miss you Dad, doing the best I can given a shitty deck of cards.

I’m actually pretty certain that when I transition I’ll look more like my Dad.

Good As Hell.

Little things make me happy.

Finding joy in the smallest of things.

My friend made me this Leshy and brought it to me today. A mythological creature (from Slavic history of mine) known as a protector of the Forest, Flocks, and Herds.

Symbolism for protecting my community they said.

Oh and Fall flavors are out and I couldn’t decide.

Not a big fan of the chai-der. Don’t do it.

The bullies are ready for fireplace cozy fall nights. And Edith Allen did their massive release and the friendly dear are visiting the rescue again.

Happy Wednesday friends.

Little Leaf

Felt like fall today.

A crisp morning.

A gentle humm of falls favorite tunes.

Doors open.

Bread dipping soup.

A gust of wind…

The start of green to gold…

The change…

A reminder to not let anyone doubt
the weather inside your own body

You can be proof
that something
can be leaving
and beautiful
at the same time.

Exit Strategy

A love poem of the past.

And just in case I have not clearly and definitively stated this, let me do it now: I love you, I am in love with you. Truly and permanently. I want to be with you, I want us to be partners. I want to love you and protect you and take care of you and have you do the same for me. I want a life with you, kids with you, a house with you, animals with you, whatever version of all of that we want, I want that. I want you. As you come, good and bad, and all future versions of you.

What if the future versions of you are also lies?

Does that count?

A stranger….

A Thief of the night.

No empathy in sight.

I Wish You Had Been All Bad

I wish you had been all bad.

God,

that would make this easier.

I wish there were no mornings

you put medicine in my hand

because you knew

I would forget.

No “have you eaten today”?

No “you’re beautiful baby doll”

No electric between our kisses

No hours of getting lost in nothing but conversation.

And the magnetic pull of our hands on each others hips.

I wish you had never learned

how to take care of me.

My soft voice

My fresh haircut falling into your hands.

My tell me something’s.

The way my chin cupped your shoulder

Like a sock so worn in.

It fit just right.

Because now

I have to teach myself

not to confuse being taken care of

with being controlled.

And I fucking hate that.

I hate that I still remember

the softness first.

Before the hundred phone calls.

Before the anger.

Before the lies.

Before the jolt.

Before the ping pong emotions

again

and again

and again

and again—

Until your love

looked less like missing me

and more like making sure

I could never disappear.

You held me

like a fist holds something precious—

so terrified of losing me

you forgot

you were crushing me.

I wish you had been all bad.

But you weren’t.

You were deep.

Jesus Christ,

you were deep.

You didn’t just meet me.

You excavated me.

You found things inside of me

I had spent years burying

and sat beside them

like an old Mimaw in her rocking chair..

calm and letting the world pass by.

You saw the dark in me.

And you didn’t run.

Do you understand

what that did to me?

To be seen like that?

To have somebody look

at everything you are ashamed of

and stay?

Except—

eventually

you didn’t just want to know

where the darkness lived.

You wanted the keys.

You wanted access.

You wanted every password,

every answer,

every explanation,

every piece of me

accounted for.

And when I started closing doors,

you called it abandonment.

When I stopped answering,

you called again.

And again.

And again.

When I blocked you,

you found another way in.

You took my iPad

so you could track me.

Unblocked yourself

from my phone.

Lied to me about that, too.

You walked through my door

When I merely asked for space to just be.

Once, you got so angry

you slammed on the brakes

And my head snapped forward—-

And I ran out of the car down the road crying.

and I wish

that had been the moment.

The clean moment.

The movie moment.

The moment where the music stops

and I suddenly understand:

This person is hurting me.

I don’t love her anymore.

But that is bullshit.

Because I did.

I loved you

with

    my head

          still hurting.

That’s the part

nobody tells you.

Sometimes your body knows

you are in danger

while your heart

is still calling it home.

And I made room for you

everywhere.

In my life.

In my work.

In my community.

I brought you into the things

I cared about.

I introduced you to my people

with both hands open.

Here.

Come in.

There is room for you here.

There is room.

There is room.

There is room.

Until somehow

there wasn’t room

for me anymore.

Because when you realized

I was actually pulling away

Putting on my shoes and leaving,

you didn’t just lose me.

You started rewriting me.

You went to the people

I had brought you to

and handed them

a different version of our story.

You said you left me.

You made yourself

the one who walked away.

Because your thing couldn’t

fathom anyone knowing

the darkness that fed your control.

The kind of darkness

that blows out every candle in the room

and then asks

why you’re afraid of the dark.

You lied about still seeing me

while asking me

to lie to others about seeing you.

You lied about your anger.

You blamed me for your deregulation.

Said “it’s just me that caused this”.

“It was all my fault”.

That I deserved it.

“If you’d just act right”.

Gaslighting and manipulation

were two old friends you’d have dinner with often.

But we all know now that when someone

puts up a boundary

You call it bullying.

Its everyone else’s fault.

Any excuse to look good.

A narcissist with no self awareness.

And somehow

I became the villain

in a story

where I was still learning

how to say:

Please let me go.

Then I started finding

all the missing pieces.

The never having roots.

Easier to prey upon the kind when you move to a new town.

Because nobody can fact check your being.

And then I started discovering more…

And more.

The years unaccounted for.

No college stories.

No old lover pictures.

No trail of living.

No inside jokes of friends past.

No evidence of a life lived.

The education

that wasn’t what you said it was.

How do you lie about something like

that to a professor?

Wait. Hold up.

The better question is, how do you lie about something like that to the girl you wanted to start a family with?

As if I wouldn’t find out?

And what were we supposed to do-lie to the kids?

Continue the cycle of harm we’ve spent our lives trying to escape from?

Fuck you.

How do you say you care about a

community when you blatantly lie to it intentionally?

How do you say you do all the work when you are never present?

Good fucking bye.

Did you think you hid it well?

It wasn’t karma or coincidence.
It was the truth
finally learning your address.

And this time,
when it knocked,
there was nobody left
for you to blame
for answering the door.

There was no evidence of kindness or love in your past.

Just a scroll of damage done.

An envelope filled with lies.

Extra postage definitely needed.

And every new truth

made me question

an old memory.

That might be

the cruelest part.

Because now

when I remember you

putting medicine in my hand,

I don’t know

which version of you

I’m remembering.

I don’t know

what was love.

What was fear.

What was tenderness.

What was possession.

What was you.

What was the person

you needed me to believe you were.

And still—

I miss you.

Fuck.

I miss you.

There are days

I want the impossible version of you back.

The woman with the medicine.

The woman asking if I ate.

The woman calling me beautiful.

The woman who could sit beside

the ugliest parts of me

and hand them tea

and a blanket.

I want her back.

But I am finally beginning

to understand

she does not come alone.

If I open the door

for her,

The lies

walk in behind her.

The manipulation walks in.

The control walks in.

The anger.

All of you

comes through that door.

And I cannot keep loving you

by cutting you into pieces

and only remembering

the ones

that didn’t hurt.

So I wish you had been all bad.

I wish I could hate you.

I wish hearing your name

didn’t make some stupid, loyal part

of my heart

turn its head.

I wish leaving you

had made me stop loving you.

It didn’t.

I love you.

And I left you.

I miss you.

And I don’t want this anymore.

I remember your tenderness.

And I remember being afraid.

Those sentences

do not cancel each other out.

Maybe that’s the hardest truth

you ever taught me:

someone can make you feel

more loved

than you have ever felt

and still not know

how to love you

without hurting you.

So no—

I don’t need to pretend

you were a monster.

That would be easier.

I just need to stop pretending

the girl who reminded me

to take my medicine

was somehow different

from the girl

I had to escape.

She wasn’t.

She was you.

And I loved you.

God,

I loved you.

I just finally understood

that loving you

did not mean

I had to survive you.

(I wonder what excuses you’d make up for the truth now. Wonder what stories you’ll tell the people you continue manipulate. Or if you’d finally own up to your harm? Nahhh).  Who’s the healed one now? You never did the work-you just painted a picture and thought people wouldn’t question its originality.  You had it all wrong—-you didn’t deserve me.  Lover, do not call me anything but right.

That’s Dr. Mac to you, and I have receipts.

Grounded and Skinny?

Today was a good day.

Today at softball someone told me I look skinny.

And Today at lunch someone also told me I seem very grounded lately.

While I don’t mind looking skinny (thinner, definitely not skinny) the latter comment meant so much more to me.

I finally feel like I’m reaching a place of calm.

I’ve been using the Life Wheel and the Feelings wheel by Dr. Gloria Wilcox. (For someone who likes tangible small things—I recommend you try it).

By working on just two new practices per week you can alter sometimes up to three of the spokes. And so on. And so on. My goal is to move each spoke up 3 points by December.

I’ve been writing daily. Getting outside daily. Shutting my phone off. Making new friends. Cultivating old friendships that I never had time for. Trying new things. Doing therapy weekly. Those things could not happen when I was in active fight or flight. I was just trying to survive then while trying to meet the demands of everyone else’s needs while not being able to focus on my own. I was forced into a corner of doing what everyone wanted of me and felt guilty when I couldn’t deliver. Now I understand the power of a boundary. The power of saying no. The power of taking space if someone cannot respect what I ask for. The power of not letting someone else’s deregulation make me feel like I’m too much, too little, or cause it. I am only responsible for my own feelings, not others.

Todays writing:

For a long time, I thought being grounded meant being calm.

Now I think it means knowing what belongs to me.

My feelings belong to me.
My choices belong to me.
My mistakes belong to me.
My apologies belong to me.

But someone else’s anger does not.

I spent a long time in a relationship where anger was handed to me like an invoice.

I’m not an angry person. You make me angry. She would say.

Look at what you made me do.

There is something powerful about that sentence when you hear it enough from someone who is supposed to be a protector and partner in communicating. It quietly teaches you that another person’s emotions are your responsibility. That if they yell, you should examine what you did. If they lose control, you should ask how you could have prevented it. If they are hurt, furious, jealous, or afraid, you should immediately begin searching yourself for the crime.

So you become hyperaware.

You explain yourself before anyone asks.

You apologize before you even know what you’re apologizing for.

You start measuring your decisions by the emotional weather they might create in someone else.

And eventually, guilt starts masquerading as accountability.

I am learning there is a difference.

Accountability says:
I hurt you. I need to own that.

Guilt says:
You are hurting, therefore I must have done something wrong.

Those are not the same sentence.

Being grounded has meant learning to stand still long enough to tell the difference.

It means I can listen when someone tells me I hurt them without immediately deciding I am a terrible person.

It means I can apologize when an apology is mine to give.

It also means I can refuse to apologize simply because someone is angry that I made a choice they didn’t like.

That has been one of the strangest markers of growth for me:

I don’t feel guilty about everything anymore.

At first, that almost felt like becoming colder.

It isn’t.

I think I’m becoming more honest.

Because when you stop taking responsibility for everyone else’s emotions, you finally have enough room to take real responsibility for your own.

I can ask myself harder questions now.

Was I kind?

Was I truthful?

Did I act according to my values?

Did I cause harm?

Is there something I need to repair?

And if the answer is yes, I want to own it.

But if the only thing I did was disappoint someone, choose myself, establish a boundary, walk away, or refuse to carry something that wasn’t mine—

I am learning not to manufacture guilt just because guilt feels familiar.

Maybe that’s what grounded means to me now.

Not becoming impossible to shake.

Not becoming emotionless.

Not always knowing whether I made the perfect decision.

Just putting both feet underneath me and knowing:

This is mine.

That is yours.

And loving someone does not require me to confuse the two.

Community.

When bad things happen:

Good people show up

Businesses show up

Volunteers show up.

Thank you to all of those that reached out this week. Who shared. Who showed up. Who donated to all we have going on.

And thank you to the Scottsman and DJ Shay for hosting a benefit for us. 💙

Just maybe.

So when you find me
standing beneath an Appalachian oak,
feet buried in moss,
listening to a creek
carry yesterday downstream—

don’t ask me
what I’m doing.

I’m learning.

How to bend
without disappearing.

How to carry history
without drowning in it.

How to lose something
and still grow.

How to let the mountain
make me softer
without making me small.

And the trees?

They lean over the bank
like old Appalachian grandmothers,

watching,

knowing,

whispering—

Honey,
we have buried things
you wouldn’t believe.

We have survived fires.

We have survived axes.

We have survived men
who looked at mountains
and saw only what they could take.

And still—

every spring,

we turn green.

Every.

Damn.

Spring.

So maybe that’s the lesson.

Maybe healing
was never supposed to look
like forgetting.

Maybe healing looks like a tree
growing around the place
where the blade went in.

Perfect Rope

I wish loving you had ended
the first time you hurt me.

That would make this easier.

I wish love were a light switch—
something I could reach for in the dark
and click
off.

But love is crueler than electricity.

Sometimes it keeps running
through houses that should have been condemned.

And I still love you.

There.
I said it.

Not because what you did was okay.
Not because I have forgotten.
Not because forgiveness is something
you can demand from me
like another password,
another explanation,
another piece of myself
I have to hand over
to prove I’m not hiding anything.

I love you
because love does not always leave
when safety does.

And God,
I hope you change.

Not for me.

Not so we can rewrite the ending
and pretend the middle never happened.

I hope you change
because somewhere underneath
all that fear you called love,
all that possession you called protection,
all that control you dressed up as caring—

there has to be a person
who understands
that love is not surveillance.

Love is not interrogation.

Love does not need to know
where someone is
every second
to believe they are coming home.

Love does not punish honesty
and then complain
that nobody tells the truth.

Because honesty
is authenticity.

And authenticity is terrifying
when you have spent your whole life believing
that if you can control the truth,
you can control whether people leave.

But people are not possessions.

You cannot hold someone tighter
and call it intimacy.

You cannot make their world smaller
and call yourself their whole world.

You cannot clip someone’s wings
then say,

See?
You never fly anywhere without me.

That isn’t devotion.

That’s a cage
with the word LOVE
painted above the door.

And maybe the hardest thing
I have ever had to learn
is that someone can love you
and still hurt you.

Someone can miss you
and still manipulate you.

Someone can cry when you leave
and still be the reason
you had to go.

And I can love you
and still choose distance.

I can remember the softness
without denying the violence.

I can miss the version of you
who made me laugh
without handing my life back
to the version of you
who made me afraid.

Both things can be true.

That is honesty.

That is authenticity.

I will not lie about loving you
just to make leaving look stronger.

Leaving was strong
precisely because I loved you.

Because sometimes
the bravest goodbye
is not spoken with hatred.

Sometimes it sounds like—

I love you.

And this is unhealthy.

I love you.

And you cannot control me.

I love you.

And I hope you become someone
who never makes another person
confuse being wanted
with being owned.

I hope someday
you learn that trust
cannot be squeezed from another person’s throat.

That accountability
is not humiliation.

That boundaries
are not abandonment.

That another person’s freedom
is not a threat to your worth.

I hope you become honest
with yourself.

Tell the truth of your past and present.

Brutally, beautifully honest.

Because maybe authenticity
is standing in front of the mirror
without excuses
and finally saying:

I did this.

I hurt someone I loved.

And I have to change.

Not—

Look what they made me do.

Not—

I only acted that way because I cared.

Not—

If they had just listened to me.

Just:

I did this.

And then doing the impossible work
of becoming different.

I hope you do.

I really do.

Because despite everything,
there is still a small room inside me
where I remember who I thought you were.

And it’s so fucking beautiful

But I don’t live there anymore.

I don’t sleep there.

I don’t leave the porch light on.

But sometimes
I pass by the window
and wonder
if one day
you’ll finally become
the person
I kept believing
was inside.

And if you do,

I hope you understand
that my love was never permission.

My compassion was never consent.

My hope for your healing
was never an invitation
to hurt me again.

I can hope you change
without waiting for you.

I can wish you healing
without becoming the place
where you practice your craft.

And I can love you—

quietly,


from somewhere you cannot reach—

while finally loving myself enough

to stay gone.

I deserved more. I deserved truth.

I deserved an apology.

And Until you stop lying gone is a place I feel at home.

Sideways

Did you think I didn’t see you smile.

Sideways towards the sun.

There should be a word
for wanting to touch someone
you are not allowed to reach for.

Someone that’s no good for your heart.

But maybe good for your body.

There should be a word.

Something heavier than missing.
Something more honest than longing.

Because longing sounds beautiful.

And this—isn’t.
this is standing three feet away from you
and learning that three feet
can be an entire country
when you are forbidden to cross the border.

I want to kiss you.

God,
I want to kiss you.

Not the kind of kiss
that fixes anything.

Or that heals the hurt.

Or that make your hands safe again.


Not the kind they put at the end of movies
so everyone knows the story turned out okay.

I want the kind
where my mouth remembers yours
before my mind has time
to remind me—

you can’t.

You can’t touch them.
You can’t talk to them.
You can’t reach across this impossible space
and say,

Do you feel this too?

So I become fluent
in not doing things.

I do not text you.

I do not say your name
when it climbs all the way
to the back of my teeth.

I do not let my hand
follow the instinct
to find yours.

I do not tell you
that sometimes I still imagine
what would happen
if we forgot the rules
for five fucking seconds.

Five seconds.

That’s all.

Five seconds
where nobody belongs to the past,
nobody owes the future anything,
and the only thing that exists
is your face
this close to mine.

But five seconds
can ruin everything.

So instead,

I stand here.

Hands to myself.

Mouth full of sentences
I have nowhere to put.

And maybe that’s the cruelest part:

I have so much to say to you
that silence has started
to feel physical.

It sits beside me in the car.

Sleeps on your side of the bed.

It hands me my towel post shower.

Follows me into the tattoo shop.

The bathroom.

Aisle 6 in the grocery store.
and all the ordinary places
where the world has the audacity
to keep happening
without asking whether I’m ready.

I wonder if you know.

If somewhere inside your own silence
there is a version of my name
you aren’t allowed to say either.

I wonder if your hands
ever forget the rules.

I wonder if your mouth does.

But I don’t get to ask.

And love is strange like that.

Sometimes loving someone
is reaching for them.

Sometimes
it is learning exactly how badly
you want to—

and keeping your hands
at your sides.

Submissive.

So I won’t touch you.

I won’t talk to you.

I won’t cross the distance
we’ve been told must exist between us.

But don’t mistake my silence
for absence.

Because there are nights
I still close my eyes
and remember your mouth.

And for one impossible second,

there are no rules.

No distance.

No before.

No after.

Just you.

Just me.

And the kiss
I keep having to swallow.