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October 13 - October 23, 2019
I feel dry up inside of me. Every day feels like I’m falling deeper into a hole of myself, one that ain’t got a floor or even a hell. Just a nonstop falling flight into my insides. Every night, I cry until I’m weak and sleep catches me. I wake up every day and I hurt more than the day before. Like my skin is made from iron, my blood is lava, red-hot, breaking and moving. My bones are a magnet to the core of the earth, locking me to my bed. Every feeling is too much, and I am too little to feel them. Through my curtains, I see the sun is shining, too hopeful for the life I’m choking on.
Incarceration is a sustained, lifetime lynching, meant to discard your soul and make a shell of you in plain life. Make you into your monster self, the beast that comes out when you are forced to survive in the absence of love and safety. Never mind that most of us come broken and traumatized, we still are no longer worth our own humanity.
I protect that young boy’s soul by reminding him he is infinite, like the stars and the blackness between them.
I looked at the ink sky and the silver scatter of stars above us. After that I started to pay attention to the stars and if they held messages for me.
That
by the time you see a star’s light shining bright, it could be dead already. Its brightness is a remnant of ancient creation. The star is the bright pinprick of heaven shining through darkness, an imploding message sent from a burning ancestor. Its illumination offers an arrangement of meaning from the sky. Sometimes, I think that is what astrology is: wisdom from our ancestors, the stars.
What is it like to be an astronaut of incarceration? It’s stomped wings and a choked heart.
Remember that you are from the stars and that you can return to them. Remember you are a sacred being of love, no matter the darkness of an earthly life.
Sometimes this book is real hard, but it’s worth it. Not hard as in reading it, but hard as in feeling it, the unfairness of life and how it impacts people who could be something else to this world.
I guess, in a lot of ways, I try not to think about it too much, ’cause it is a fact: We all die, we all gonna die. I remember when I was first sentenced, death scared me. Death felt like it was the clothes I wore every day. And someone so special to me, my friend, was taken from me and that felt like my death too. I guess life has a lot of little deaths before we leave this planet officially.
I used to feel alone even before I was in here. And in ways we are always alone, and in other ways, we never are, since there are feelings and beings that are unseen and unknown in this world that are around us and protect us.
Whether any of our souls continue to journey into other stars and worlds (which is what I believe) or if this life on this beautiful and bitter rock is all there is, you get to choose your relationship to life. And it don’t got to look like no one else’s.
Where do broken hearts go? In this country some might say prison. To be honest, in my life I have met a lot of broken hearts, inside and outside these fences and walls. We stay wondering where we will go. The answer I found for myself is that we must go within. Within us is a universe that no one can touch. When you can find that inner spot, even for a moment, that is Goddess.
Just warm and safe, but wild too, like the hurricane in my dream. Lying there with her, I feel like if I could be as perfect as nature, maybe I could live forever.
Even the bad stuff, over time had begun to reveal a certain silvery emergence within my soul and a recalling of lessons. And sometimes there was no lesson, just an ambiguous abyss of loss, like in the death of my friend and my own unjust incarceration. Loss, plain and simple.
I’m still scared and can’t think about my future very much without it feeling foolish. And at the same time I feel like I can imagine myself being more than an afraid girl dying but a soul that can return again and be a multidimensional being.
When we spoke it was soul to soul. My body felt her stories and poetry, and I would just surround myself in her day after day.
I is feeling like I ain’t know what to do and my spirit feel so heavy, it so dark and cold here and it feel like my spirit is that way too.”
you only dream when you are awake everything so ancient it is happening in the future to survive on this earth we escape into ourselves hide in plain sight, finding solace in vice and lovers
no light, no air, no need all this is a dream anyway mysteries only the ancestors know how to swim to the bottom of
they ain’t want to give it to she,” I say. “Hold up, wait, what?!” Jazzy pulls over. We is still a
they collect the wisdom in the heartache and accumulate secondhand books to waterfall they lives and they make queendom from the forgotten spaces we was banished to and laugh when the sun rise on they dynasty.
“Life is hard for women, because we strong and the world ain’t wan’ to love us for it.
“You need a sense of freedom and also for things to be deep. You love the world, and a love relationship for you has to be intriguing on more than just physical ways,
The cool air feels refreshing on my face. The sky on the water transforms before my eyes, giving colors to the sunset. Nothing else seemed more perfect to me. I swear there are pinks that I’ve never seen before, and I want them painted on my memory. Wild blues and several kinds of purples. Then the sun swallowed up the layers of gold it gave to the world, slid into hiding, and the sky started to quietly bling stars. I start to think of each star like they are an ancestor, wondering about what life and death felt like for them. Were they scared? Do they feel me wherever they are? I wonder who I
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The sparkling lights of the rides and food stands are dazzling against the plum alchemy of the sky becoming. With rickety boardwalks, dried and smoothed by salt and sand and people. The air feel hot like a kiss, and the ocean breeze find its way to my scalp and cheeks and it remind me to slow down and take all of this in. The sky and the way my body feels.
I felt something limitless in my heart, when we was arm and arm and we give them white flowers to the goddess of protection and the mother of all waters. She, the one who cleanse our sorrow and hold our dreams. I felt it again when the sky was merging with ocean as they were devoured into twilight and then night.
I feel she, a sweet electricity that has belonged to every heart that has known this ancient and sacred kind of loving. The kind of love you eat like a raspberry from each fingertip or like a mango, ripe and unleashed in love and sharing. A love that carries lifetimes of sweetness and care.
These coilings was anointed like a real love. We was a cosmic conversation, before I even met you in this life.
