Mud Vein

by Tarryn Fisher

Her parting words to me had been, You’ll feel me in the fall backwards.

simplicity speaks the loudest.”

“You need simplicity to create complexity,”

“When you get raped, and when you get breast cancer, you have to tell people about it. And then they look at you with sad eyes. Except they’re not really seeing you, they’re seeing your rape or your breast cancer. And I’d rather not be looked at if all people are seeing are the things I do, or the things that happen to me instead of who I am.”

I categorized people by whichever one of the four senses they exhibited the strongest.

“To know who a person really is, I believe you have to know first who they were.”

Fortune favors the brave.

fortes fortuna juvat

Everything brave was a little bit crazy.

If you formed a woman’s soul out of black graphite, bathed it in blood, and then rolled it around in the softest rose petals, you still wouldn’t have touched on the complication

“It’s your darkness that pulls me in. Your mud vein. But sometimes having a mud vein will kill you.”

People lie. They use you and they lie, all the while feeding you bullshit about being loyal and never leaving you. No one can make that promise, because life is all about seasons, and seasons change.

He kissed me with color, with drumbeat, and a surgeon’s precision. He kissed me with who he was, the sum of his life—and it was all encompassing. I wondered what I kissed him with since I was only broken parts.

“You’ve been silent your whole life. You were silent when we met, silent when you suffered. Silent when life kept hitting you. I was like that too, a little. But not like you. You are a stillness. And I tried to move you. It didn’t work. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t move me. I heard everything you didn’t say. I heard it so loudly that I couldn’t shut it off. Your silence, Senna, I hear it so loudly.”

Wow, Isaac

I am an animal, bent on surviving. I let nothing in. I let nothing out.

Sow sadness, reap tears, my mother used to say. We delve solely in sadness in this house. When will my reaping come?

Trying to make sense of crazy makes you just as crazy.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked him. “Between the love of your life, and your soulmate?” “One is a choice, and one is not.”

LOVED this

Every time you want to remember what love feels like, you look for me.

Isaac is touch, and he is sound. He is smell and he is sight. I tried to make him a single sense like I did with everyone else, but he is all of them. He overpowers my senses and that is exactly why I ran from him.

That’s why writers write—to say things loudly with ink. To give feet to thoughts; to make quiet, still feelings loudly heard.

“The truth is for the mind,” he says. “Lies are for the heart. So let’s just keep lying.” I kiss the man I lie to. He kisses me with truth. I am set free.

I push away these thoughts and focus on my pain. Pain will carry me through; pain will help me focus.

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

You made me feel so much good, then you made me feel so much bad. So I decided to just stop feeling.”