You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

This is a tell-mine, and the mine keeps changing, because I keep changing.

oh maggie smith your writing is sooo IT!!!

I’m trying to get to the truth, and I can’t get there except by looking at the whole, even the parts I don’t want to see.

Spoiler alert: It’s there. The beauty’s there.

the way i would get this tattooed

on our last family vacation, when I packed my sadness and took it with us to the beach;

He talked about secrets—their weight, their heft. He talked about how carrying them affects your breathing, your speech, your movements.

Setting is not just where I am, it’s who I am and what I am and why. It’s not just where I live, it’s how I live.

hi importance of place and my asian/pacific islander american class

isn’t this what I’m tasked with now—making sense of what happened by telling it as a story?

thats def why i started writing too

When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.

I don’t have to understand everything, and I don’t believe understanding is owed me.

okay cbt phrase!!

We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.

THIS IS WHAT I WANTED TO SHOW WITH MY WTF FALL ISSUE

It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

She thinks she needs to send a stronger version of herself into the future,

What does it mean to write about trauma in real time?

ouch

She lets the loss touch everything, as if she has a choice.

this wouldve made me bawl in march 2024

I’m out with lanterns, looking.)

"i am out with lanterns looking for myself" -emily dickinson

Knowledge came disguised in sweetness

I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.

factory setting is GAF. She gives so many fucks.

wait realest ever

“maternal impression.” If anything was wrong with a child, that

no because dominant male psychologists were such misogynist fucks

like me: too raw for the world, nerves too close to the skin?

cried. Oh this book knows my heart

and I suffered, and that suffering was loud.

twin

Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.

Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change.

tbt to when i heavily considered converting to buddhism

It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.

dw its what drove me to delete hinge

I want to be able to say, Thank you, pain, for being my teacher.

my offering. Please take it. Taste its sweetness.

This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

so :( its the hope that the future will be brighter, that we will become greater than the sum of our parts

And why would you expect me, or anyone, to grit my teeth and quietly carry my story? I could say there is a cost to carrying your truth but not telling it.

oh my god it will eat at you

I’ve been thinking about how sometimes we write the truth before we know it.

me to my roommate predicting every freshman year heartbreak

To go away and come back, again and again, and to miss so much living.

How in my mind and my heart, I can chew and chew on a thing and never swallow it.

There is what happened, and then there is the meaning we tease from it.

I made myself small, folded myself up origami tight.

I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you. I need to trust that you’ll know what to do with it. Here, take it. Is this enough?

I’d packed my sadness, despite its enormous size.

my grief was such a heavy thing to carry to the water.

I was ashamed to think of how I’d leashed my joy and tugged hard every time it tried to run.

I thought about dying all the time. Or, not dying, but disappearing. Poof. I didn’t want to die, not really, but I wanted relief. I wanted to stop feeling what I was feeling. I carried all of that with me

I wrote poems at the beach because I needed to make something more than sadness.

I was wild with emotion; he was hard, distant, sarcastic.

i think ive seen this film before and i didnt likw the ending

I folded and folded my happiness until I couldn’t fold it anymore, until it fit under my tongue, and I held it there.

as if part of me wanted him back, and part of me wanted him to disappear, and nothing in between would do.

hey is it bad if i say huda from lovw island

the best things remain.

having children,

maggie smith im sorry im scared to love and scared to have kids even when i said that was what i wanted

I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.

oh and im crying

You carry the past with you, but you can’t go back.

Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.

The sails were full of wind and the sun was shining, and there was nothing in the water below the boat, nothing that could harm us.

is it horrible for me to hate change?

back to where? Where was it safe?

Because time is recursive, because we repeat ourselves again and again,