Melissa Perri Smith's Blog, page 2

Am I only a good writer when I’m sad?

“Sad” is such a simple word in this case. I write about ache, melancholy, depression, suicidal ideation, the existential dread that is inherent in living, but in the end, does it all boil down to this?: She was sad.

To be honest, I’m not sad right now. I’m a-okay. Maybe the new dosage of meds is working or maybe, since I’m on the final days of my period, my mood has leveled to less of an extreme. I’m not happy. I’m not sad.

I am, I am, I am, I am.

Subscribe now

Last week, I took on a new ghostwritin...

We will never know peace

The consensus is this: I have never known peace.

Truthfully, peace is a rare occurrence and maybe even a fallacy. How can it not be, when I live in a country marred by “peace” while my brain is a war zone? How can it not be, when I fear for my life when I step into a school or university or a grocery store or a mall or a movie theater or a church or a synagogue or a mosque or past a police car or—

You have three wishes. A few restrictions, a few quick quid pro quos. No killing or reviving, no maki...

ache:relief

Titling has never been my strong suit. To label something so completely, and with such strong SEO appeal? Nah. Won’t be bothered. Also, can’t. Physically incapable.

Who will read this post with a title like “ache:relief,” or my Substack itself for that matter? But, in my small-minded ruminations, from labeling this site as my diary to a duty as a writer, it feels most prudent to turn my flesh inside out for the world. Pardon the grotesqueness, but that is what I am. An ache, followed by absence, ...

I am too old now for melancholy

Once, when I still had a job, a coworker read a piece of my writing, sighed, and said, “Oh, to be young and write angsty poetry.” I was twenty-one at the time, a month out of undergrad, and never had I been so insulted. I was an adult! I could drink! Older men could hook up with me without going to prison on statutory charges. How dare she! But I never said that. I blushed, crumpled the paper into the shape of my fist, and never showed her my writing again.

Was it angsty poetry? Probably. Adolesc...

I’ll believe everyone in the world is worthy until I look in a mirror

Lately, I have been doing nothing but writing smut and listening to smut and scrawling every word I want to say onto drifting sheets of paper, on the backs of receipts, on the free space of my body, places where random little bits of me will be found when they eventually pack me up and ship me to the morgue.

I used to write in my diary growing up, pretending that in the future, someone else was reading, someone else was wondering about me, wondering how I lived and who I loved and how sad she was...

The only time I will see heaven

How frequently do I write about ache? A disgusting amount. Maybe because it sits in the cavern of my chest, sounding alongside my heart in a syncopated beat. In that way, it creates a constant buzz. I am achingly alive because of this.

Every time the sky becomes a cloudless expanse of reflected radiation, I lift my face and breathe in the ache of my childhood. There is no sky like a desolate Midwestern one. When I was a child, I asked my mother if the sky was all around us. Where did it end and t...

Sex Obsessed

My family is prone to addiction. I learned this around the time I started hiding in the garage to burn my fingers into the shape of ice cubes, to taint my taste buds into gasoline, black spots aged against the anemia I experienced when I got my period for three months. I didn’t tell my mother. Instead, I fell asleep on the living room floor and boiled my uterus into womanhood. How unkind thirteen was to me.

So many cruelties in adolescence. I don’t have to explain it to you because how patronizin...

The space between us

“Digression is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time within the work, a perpetual evasion or flight. Flight from what? From death of course.” —Italo Calvino

Look, there are inches between us. I am not one for filler. Perhaps that’s why I stand with one foot hanging off a cliff edge. Isn’t it lovely, the view? Imagine the ocean. Isn’t it always an ocean? Never a forest or a mountain. For me, it is always the waves. Violent? No, not really, but I can appreciate the thematic s...

The pest control man left, and now I am free

I am beholden to appointments. They render me near non-functioning, comatose on my couch while I wait for my lack to fester.

Dramatics aside, he is gone now, and I am free. But of course, I have boxing in two hours, which means I only have an hour and a half before I have to leave, which means I can’t start on anything significant, like this blog post, because then I would have to stop, and if I stop, then I can never start again. Everything must be finished in one go or else I will perish.

Dramat...

Love, or a kidney infection

Two weeks ago, we got married. It doesn’t change much, or anything at all, but I prefer that lack. Should marriage feel monumental? You and I exist to love and be loved, acts we have accomplished for years without consequence. Is it nauseating to say our love is as ancient as it is fresh?

One of our lovely engagement photos by Hannah Testa with Happylandic Photography.

It is nauseating. Two weeks ago, I vomited spam musubi until my heaving lungs collapsed. This was not due to love but a kidney inf...