Here is the real thing I want to say to my dad:
Are you a member of the human race?
you will not put a blanket over me you will not smother me forget it i’ve come too far to be suppressed again i’ve made it out alive and i will stay alive and i will stay true to what’s inside me even when i can’t see it anymore
I feel better? At least now I’m pissed off instead of wallowing in self-pity. I’ve stopped caring what they think but sometimes I forget. I think it’s because some part of me still wants them to understand, even if the rest of me has given up.
I could really use a ridiculously long car ride so I can figure some things out.
I won’t torment you any longer. Here is a poem I wrote.
Radio Silence
It seems that the vacuum we’ve thrown ourselves so willingly into has
Obscured all traces of our former life and rendered it all meaningless.
I curse myself for it, but it’s hard not to believe in something so all-powerful.
Just like I could never pretend I don’t love you, it would be cruel to look
God in the eyes without the faintest stirring of faith from even the utmost
Picture of depravity, like a wild thing waking from hibernation. It would be sacrilege.
All of the unsaid words have strung together into a dark and looming elephantine figure
That crushes every room. Omission is a powerful tool.
I feel silence like a heavy presence, something irretrievable
At the bottom of a swimming pool. Irresistible, like the sleep-deprived static
That pulls on your eyelids when the world is still fuzzy around the edges,
Ill-defined and not ready to be understood.
Silence, like heavy curtains, like the iron on your chest, obscures
Visibility and makes the air thick and hard to breathe. I can feel it
Pouring over me; creeping in until it overwhelms, like water filling a tank,
Until you can’t breathe in it, until you can’t speak in it.
You are a red light, You make my eyes flicker,
Like you’re the fire in a snowscape, the sun against the night sky,
The splash of red in a bull ring.
I’ve stopped, I’ve sunk into the silence too, like it’s a transmissible disease.
Your silence feeds mine, and the feed is the blue electric light
That haunts my bedroom nightly: ghostly, moving, sad and still.
Your idleness feeds mine; we are both bound by the unbreakable laws
Of inertia that we so desperately believe in, and nothing breaks the spell.
Maybe we don’t believe we are capable of breaking it.
I feel us breaking up like a bad overseas connection;
We could hear each other clearly if only the line wasn’t so weak, so anemic.
It’s dwindling, eating away like rotten wood; it’s breaking up over the ocean of the summer,
The expansive void of time. The line can’t bridge this gaping gap,
So wide open and unnatural that it sucks all light into it like a black hole.
You are on the other side, but you’ve hung up. I listen to the dial tone
For hours, but I feel it fading, too, in restless frozen terror. Against my will, I feel myself
Drop the receiver to sleep, finally, sleep, against my will I feel myself
Close my mouth and shrivel up like a plant in a sunless room,
Brown like an overripe fruit. Suddenly there are buttons over all of my pores.
I sink into a contagious radio silence. The way you take care
Not to notice me fills me up with solid, sticky bile that turns me
Slowly to stone. We’ve ghosted
Each other. I feel like a deadly apparition haunting you, constantly waking you up
And putting you to sleep as I come and go, drifting through the walls of empty rooms.
I have sunk into static. I am the walking reminder of something that you used
To feel, and something that you used to want so badly,
You’d bend over backwards for it. Well, you bent so far back,
The spell busted and shattered and broke,
Like the mechanical engine of a slow and rolling turbine.
The fire trembles with its cold extinguishing smoke.
The candle begs for its electric warmth back.
My first instinct was to water the vacuum like it was a flower I could revive. My second instinct
Was to hammer the void with the hail fires of cold, hard ice,
As if drilling into it implied there was a bottom to the whole ordeal.
As if it ends. As if it obeys. As if it isn’t the ever-expanding cosmic abyss.
Your radio silence is contagious, is infectious, like my laugh.
Like my hands. Like you. We are a bad connection
On an overseas telephone call. I’m still holding the line open
For you. Any second now, jump.
I sink to the bottom and you don’t stop me. I’m submerged up to my neck.
Up to my chin. Finally I’ve quieted and settled down. And given up.
And given in. It’s over my ears. I couldn’t hear you if you screamed.
Is this what you wanted? You’ll never find me now in this dead water,
Currentless river, waveless sea, A stone sunk to the bottom,
Away from the storm of the surface forever.
It took me a long fight to settle down into this long flat line.
I’m sedated, I’m sunk. I’m all out of lights in my head.
I’ve settled like debris, finally flooded over enough to sink
To the bottom, join you in the stillness and the silence.
Radio silence. Are you holding?
~Kasia
Tired of Earthly Concerns 