Author: Katherine Westbrook

I am feeling so okay about everything, and I think it is only because I have been desensitized to all of the terrible things that have happened recently, or better yet, that I have just grown accustomed to it. I am swallowing myself whole and becoming another, just you watch me. After summer, when I come back (hopefully), things will not be like this. I am changing, and I will change. I will swallow myself whole. Just you guys watch.

There is a small piece of me that wants to fix old homes I’ve lived in- then, there is the rest of me. the rest of me is light and hollow and winged, and old me is not here anymore and it is anything but easy. It is brutally bruised into the side of my skull ( like that glass that cut into my scalp climbing from the window).

Things are going to be okay, they just, they have to. There is no questioning it anymore.

Guys, were about to start another chapter.  And it doesn’t matter how anyone feels about me, because I know how I feel about me. I don’t feel as uncomfortable, and I am starting to understand why things happen. Ill probably become religious over the summer, or read every book on my list, or go on trips by myself in search of nothing. I am different.

Life has this beautiful way of screwing us over every time we become complacent. I love it. Shaking things up in this fishbowl of a high school career is always needed. I am so ready to be shaken like the plates of the earth hand have to jump to the next great adventure in my life.

People come and go and change and writhe and blend and become, and it is beautiful. There is a lot of love and hate in that.

Love is peculiar and comes in different forms; sometimes it is not always approachable or tangible. Sometimes you just feel it. I’ve maybe not done everything right this year, but at least I did something. That is more than I can say for every year behind me combined. I have lived t his year, I have taken and given and learned and hurt along the way; I’ve never been more thankful for my let downs and mistakes, because it has taught me to believe in myself even when no one else does. To stay true and follow my arrow. To just, Be.

This life is a giving and taking thing.

Right now, all I know is, you just have to take it easy.

My mom told me something last year when I was hating my situation, she said: Grow where you are planted.

I think I finally understand that now.

here is a compiled list of organized songs that help me be a real human: (if you listen in order, you end up strange, i think)

 

(Also, hey! The pictures kind of represent how each song makes me feel!)

New Year’s Eve, Mal Blum

Emptiness is Like a Closet Full of Your Old Clothes, Wishing

Memento Mori, Crywank

Be Your Own 3am, Adult Mom

Baby, Born Without Bones

Holy Forest, PInkshinyultrabast

Sleep Talk, Diet Cig

For A Girl in Rhinelander, Washington, Wingnut Dishwashers Union

Wolves,  Phosphorescent

Just Like Honey, The Jesus and Mary Chain

How Simple, Hop Along

Phase, Hovvdy

No One is Ever Going to Want Me, Giles Corey

Heart Sunk Hank, Johnny Flynn

The Gun Song– no trigger version, Car Seat Headrest

Codeine, Trampled By Turtles

Brave as a Noun, AJJ

Bloodhail, Have a Nice Life

 

i was all over her, salvia plath

It’s So Nice, I Tried to Run Away When I Was 6, (But Got too Scared to Cross the Street)

 

 

there was a boy named dallas in my kindergarten class. i cant remember his last name but it doesn’t matter because  i loved him. he smelled like those prepackaged mandarin oranges you can buy in bulk.

i would carry my love for dallas home every afternoon, in the curls of my baby hairs and the paper cuts on my knuckles. i would carry dallas everywhere with me, like he was pressed lilacs or baseball cards. I would walk home with my mother, hand in hand, her palms turned inward, hiding the scars on her wrists, and I would make sure to stop at the house on the corner, the little blue one with white trim, to stop for a fleeting second, just to watch his bus drive by.

dallas had dimples and wore crayola marker stains like canvas paint. I thought he was beautiful.

when i moved schools my mother stopped walking with me. i would trace the sidewalks by myself, the lines in the earth like the broken lifelines on my mother’s palms. I would purposely squish the cracks beneath my chubby toes. i was usually late.

…

i always imagined kissing would be sweet, delicate. hollow kissing, like dancing with bird bones. i always imagined the regular things like graduating top of the class and dancing at prom and praying before every meal were stained into the religion of my adolescence, not worn as a blanket I could shrug off at fifteen.  i think it’s strange how things change as time unfurls, the way the ferns are unfolding outside my bedroom window.

my new house wilts when it rains. my mother is always sleeping in the bath with the door open, the last time I went to check on he running water I saw the blood and the body and-

…

i am the daughter of misfortune and dependency and it’s not complaining if it’s the truth.

I don’t talk about my father much because there isn’t much to say. i don’t want to be my mother but i am i am i am, and it hurts the way the leaving does but here is the pain that i felt when she left.

…

there are bodies inside of my body, there are lungs within lungs within lungs in my chest in my throat and i want them all to breathe at once, but each takes their turn while the others are choked down to my hips in pooling green ivy.

so much breathing. the in and out and i think about you a lot more than i should. i say that i shouldn’t not because it’s not nice to think but because i cannot explain the way i think when it’s about you.

i am having trouble calming my mind. the blood is green and sopping and thick like the sweater i have stitched on my body since seventh grade, and i am so tired.

i imagine all fairies drooped over their guest beds, quietly becoming their alcohol poisoning.

like tinker bell with tunnel vision. neverland fading in and out of view from tiny, blinking irises.

i believe it is fitting how my faith is dust.

Revelation 12:11
And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.

And so it was,the eyes were swords wielded on girls half- drunk on their lover’s cars outside of the bar last Tuesday.

My mother overdosed on hymnals six weeks ago, leaving me with ma man and two options, flight or fight.

I chosen either and now I’m wearing two pairs of socks; if were going to be honest, it doesn’t matter how many socks I put on because I hate socks and I wish I didn’t have any on.

To me, LBJ is a con, just like Jesus and seat belts and all the dying men who still have teeth in the bottom of their closet.

Someone probably forgot to brush their teeth today, which doesn’t bother me one bit, but might bother you, so I thought i would include it.

 

I want to be teeth and tongue and the weightlessness of bird bones.

Cane is asleep on my doormat like a dead dog and it’s blasphemy if I do it, but I bring him inside anyway,his eyes broken and bleeding,weeping for a bottle half full.

And still it seems, a life half lived is all were ever gonna be.

“Death is swallowed up in victory. O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?

 

There’s no daylight in Vietnam.

These small pieces of prose are inspired by pictures I use for my daily wallpapers and collages I have made in the past.

(Angelic provision of Jesus Christ, O Lord, be with thee!)

My blood’s got it’s own pair of eyes now, Christ. The only blood I’ve got left.

To Death, my personal angel:

To the one who got rid of the babies and the broken bottles. I’m listening to trash indie on a speaker in the shower, shaving horizontal with the bloodstreams and the veins and watching green vines overflow on my hips like milk in the pitcher. And yeah, I’m angry.

 

 

 

I’m pissed, this sloppy red mess is all I’ve got left and the bottle hit me on the jaw and threw me in the kitchen at three am, in a puddle of my own spit. They tell me I’m a daughter of a man with stains on his hands and I believe them. They tell me my rigor mortise is setting in a few decades early and I sit back to watch the dog tags slip between my broken left tooth.

In Luke 22:43, we find Jesus in the garden again, but this time,strangling the roe bushes. The angels it on Calvary’s tree, letting apples fall from the stem to rot.

Lazarus was escorted to the snack machine when the commercials rolled, he passed while eating a corn chip. I hear the understudy is taking the job quite nicely.

Some songwriter is going to put it like this:

When there’s nothing in your face screaming

hell is the enemy,

who’s to judge when you leave this town?

The gate is open and burning, but so too

are you, and again,

the circumstantial crucified by prophecies and the

provisional holy one.

 

 

 

 

I love your earthen smile and the sadness quilted in it. The way the ocean stands startled at the blue flecks in your irises…

 

 

 

…

 

 

I want to peel my skin off with how pathetic this is.

(That was supposed to be an example of some of the cliché writing I create on a daily basis.)

I am not good, I am not anyone, and my poetry means nothing only because absolutely nothing drives it.

Nothing has really ever driven me besides fear. And now that I am not scared of anything, anyone, even, I don’t know what to do with myself.

There are fragments of my fallout that keep catching on people I’ve connected with.

My pieces. Me, rubbing off. I have lost myself; everyone keeps pulling me apart.

(And I let it happen.)

I’ve never cared less about what happens around me than I do now, and the thought used to scare me. I think I have been caring so much, for so long, that, I finally busted. My insides aren’t feeling inside of me these days. My face is one that is photo-shopped, incorrect, incomplete.

I am not sorry about hurting people, or maybe it is that I have become so sorry that I do not understand the emotion anymore. (Sorry doesn’t mean much and it’s because I overuse it.)

For the most part, I want to do better.

Not because of any other reason I’ve ever had before, mostly because I’m running out of time.

(Time for what? )

I’ve got no clue. I can just feel all of my life slipping away before I’ve even gotten a chance to begin it. I want to scream. This font isn’t big enough. The words don’t mean anything. Life tends to be irrevocably terrible, at times.

I start counseling tomorrow. I feel like a story book character. I don’t want to talk to anybody. I want to be better. I just don’t want to be normal.

…

Hey, me again. I’m doing a little better than when I started this blog. I still want to scream, pretty much always.

Big things sometimes happen without me realizing it. I am just now in my life beginning to understand how much I’ve looked over in my past. I have a lot of feelings in me, always, and I have trouble expressing how much I care and don’t care and feel and just cannot feel sometimes.

I think this me is for the best. Being strange is like sitting in the part of a pillowcase that only holds air. While the rest seems tucked away tightly, I am feeling a little spacious, floating around above everything else, cotton clear. I keep seeing things.

(That metaphor was stupid, but I am not going to change it.)

There is going to be a lot for us right now, and there is going to be a lot for us tomorrow. We just have to wait it out.

To the people I’m hurting, the ones I’m hurt by, and the people who I have broken,

There are so many pieces of myself that wish to become someone else. I am myself, but I have several separate selves inside of me. I am usually surrounded with this idea that my freedom is found in the gut, that one day I’ll get out of the hole I’ve been digging for the last seventeen years and just run across the expanse of the sun, feet catching fire and not caring. I am careful with whom I let see my ruffled feathers; I try to persuade my body to bend with the wind, but my spine chips every time.

I miss so many people that have fallen out of my life. I used to hate the color blue, because it didn’t feel smooth or warm or even real, and now, it’s yellow that I cant stand. Blue is stitches and patches worn in to the side of my jeans, it’s bloodied knuckles for no reason and flower petals, but from the side of the road on the way home. Blue is my detrimental state, and I feel too whole in it these days. I miss yellow, but am glad to have busted out of it. I am, in a sense, broken into different people now. My head spins just to think of all the changes my life has rolled across in the last year and a half.

Seventeen.

 

I can’t keep from looking back and letting myself rot. I am perpetually eaten away by the people I cannot see unless I close my eyes. I want dark things more than I need to unhurt the hearts I’ve squeezed a little too tightly.

And pretty soon, pretty words aren’t going to be good enough for me. Pretty soon, I’m going to need something to hit hard like concrete and stick past the slimy surface of what I’ve been skating on.  This is the most terrified I have felt in a while, and I don’t know why. I don’t want to know why, but I think I already have a pretty good idea of it.

I can’t look in a mirror without seeing the cracked shell of a halo, cast along my ears. I can’t feel anymore. I can’t see or be or do because I am not whole enough. I am not enough for my situation, or the people around me, or anything like that. Life has no meaning, at least, not when I’m looking for a reason every night to not swerve off the highway and drive until my truck hits an irrevocable future. I can’t talk like this without wanting to break all the mirrors in my house. I already miss you, and I haven’t even tried to leave yet. (I haven’t really been here for a while.)

More love than I thought possible, all the pretty words and pathetic poetry I write for the wrong reasons, all to You (and You, and You too),

Kate

 

Over the course of a year, I have been trying my absolute hardest to change. At my old school, I was, well, weird. This ideology (that people enforced around me) reminded me of a hamster ball or even bubble wrap, something to encase my “all-around strangeness”. No one wanted to get my kind of personality on them.

In my head, I have always seen myself as the equivalent of human sludge. Slow moving, never taking form, and leaving traces where I go. This doesn’t bother me, as I want to make an impact, but other people tend to see me as some sort of detriment because of this.

I know I am a freak of nature. I am not wanted in a regular conforming society, nor do I want to be wanted.

Its as simple as this: conforming would kill me. To be the same as another carbon-cut life form drains me of my personal whatever-it-is I’m trying to seek. I purposely broke the fourth wall with the intentions of finding the fifth, if that makes sense. I am beyond the realm of normal, and I am having trouble even remembering what normal feels like.

(It might be that I have gone too far into the land of the crazies.)

I can feel this uneasiness collecting like dust along my shoulder blades. I am uncomfortable in this skin, same as the last. I will shed and shed and grow and break and build once more, but will ever be a definite concept? A whole substance?

Yes, that is what my personality needs-substance. I need to stop shifting with the water and lean into the comfort of just alright for now. 

Three years from now, I see myself being irrational. Twenty years from now, I see nothing. I guess that means my prediction of “dead after 23” must be what my future is expecting to happen.

(I don’t know what I am trying to get at, and I think I changed what I wanted the point of this to be.)

Anyway, at this school, I have been deemed as less than. A weaker link. Submissive.

I want it to be said that if any of you actually believe this, you haven’t been paying attention. I am playing this game like this on purpose, I promise.

My whole “thing” is that if you let people believe you are less than them, they will give you more information than they would have at first. I sit, I watch, I wait. (And I react crazily to throw everyone off my trail.)

Here’s my big secret, guys. This is it. I act on impulse to watch the reactions of others. I have no limits in order to understand the condition of my surroundings better. I am too self aware to focus on myself when I do irrational things. Instead, I am only focused on the social situation. Also, I do think through everything I do, and how it affects others. It’s exactly why I feel the need to do it.

I have never really needed to explain what I am to anybody, but I am starting to realize how off people are when they think they understand me. I would love for people to believe I am not just insane, but intuitive.

And if you don’t believe any of this, congrats! You are entitled to your own opinion. My praxis is something hard to understand, I get that. Just please, know that I let myself get pushed around or into situations it’s because that’s the only way I know how to “control” the situation.

(I am not making sense, sorry, I’m trying.)

I am the owner of a predicament if I cause that predicament. I create, then destroy. I am the beginning and end to my own problems, the designer of my catastrophe.

No one needs to give me excuses.

I let myself look dull for the sake of time. I do not have the patience to please everyone, but I go out of my way to do that sometimes, so that I might learn more a bout their human nature, and my own.

I’m just trying to figure things guys, and I’m not weak or submissive.

I am only waiting.

It’s as simple as that. When you breathe, my skin crawls from my body in an attempt to drag down the street. I hear your screech of a voice, and my toenails curl upward. With every step you take, my eyelids burn. I am me, and you are me, and I hate you.

There are so many reasons to be grateful for the lives we all have. There are also so many beautiful things that happen when you embrace your mistakes, rather than run from them. Sadly, I tend to forget this. My pretentious-self somehow decided in the last few years of my life that snobbish, self-centered trash was bound to be my density. And thus, it was so ( and is so).

I would like to believe I am funny (though I know, I’m not). I would like to believe the seven double chins I have displaced below my neck are cute. I mean, squishy is adorable, right? ( Maybe on a Siamese or Rottweiler, but not on me, I promise).

Redeemable qualities? Miss me with that.

I have lied to my closest of friends so often that I normally can’t see the already thin line that I drew for my lies. I don’t know what’s real, and not in the cool psychological way. I just honestly cannot ever tell what’s going on.

Sometimes, the existential rage rooted in my bones is shown in forms of me being rude, or maybe not taking the time to actually be a  real human, with humanity, you know? It sucks, but it happens.

And all of this is why I just cannot wrap my head around the idea of ever hating anyone, besides myself. I just, I understand why people are bad sometimes. It is a thing  that I too get lost in, and I need to work on it.

Existing has become a real hassle, but hey, I’m still kicking, right?

Right?

God, I don’t want to exist sometimes.(Geez, what an edge lord, huh.)

I keep waiting for that day. The day my life changes. The day I wake up and breathe in atmosphere instead of overworked oxygen. The day my feet float instead of trample. I am waiting for my bad poetry to mean something, waiting for my eloquence to be elegant and humble. I am so ready for college, and not just because I want to grow up. I don’t, technically.

I just want movement, it’s the only thing that’s keeping me, for the most part, sane.