An Institute of Higher Yearning

I just want to go home. Step inside the door and feel the weight of world made bearable by a backpack just fall off my shoulders. I want to sit down on an unfamiliar couch that feels invitingly informal. My shoulders would drop a few inches more and I'd exhale everything I've wanted to bare. The wanting would be done and maybe we would have a conversation or two while watching this glowing-awkward box as the focal point of our words. We could speak whole sentences with no destination but a closer proximity. We could float them up to that place that tangles prayers like a dream catcher. I could whisper to you the stillness I feel in this place and you could nod with your eyes instead of your head. We could both think this novel and choose to read between the lines. We could pretend to go at full speed when everything happened in slow motion. We could live a memory life, slowed by age. We could break our ribs and let our hearts grow in the same syncopation. Inhale until we teemed like blow fish and exhale to take flight like falling. You could throw stones at these glass exteriors. You could give them veins and bring them to life in the breakdown. We could hold hands for the first time knowing. You could prove that walls can't stand between us. We could sit while the past dismantled to the floor and choose to fix the pieces in better places. Or maybe we could just comb through the shards for a scrapbook sharper than the rest. I'd leave my fingerprints all over the pages just to say I'd been there but had never lingered. I'll happen there again, to show you my hands, when the dust settles. You can take me to print and validate every time we've ever fallen.

Where the Earth Cradles the Sky

There's a place I discovered in the alley heading from Court St. to Kantner Hall that I want to share with the world. I was contemplating Midnight in Paris, the bricked rues to which the cities lay claims, the commencement of my 4th year in Athens, and the importance of footsteps to Cagean symphonies. I happened on a stretch of brick to my left that met the vertical bricks of the building that lined it. Here there was an ordinary drain pipe that I'm sure has outlived any student I have known to walk these same bricks as I. A small, yet lively, puddle had formed under the pipe where years of rain nestled so closely and oft that the brick had reformed around the years of puddles.

 So here I was, an alley at dusk after a great film, and I just stop and watch this small body of water dance. An old muse, to which I've dedicated such time to through my life that I now consider it more of a friend, captured me once more.


This groove in a small heavily traversed alley is representative of decades--even a century of rain fall. It's a cradle for the sky. A nest of all eternity. Soul mates, fitting puzzle pieces of the city together since the advent of the town. A place where a gaze can be flattened into the environment it usually streamlines through. Well, I'm not sure of this at all but there is pleasantry to it.

Though that's not even as I prefer to think of it. I much rather prefer to think of myself as a body of water, which is all too 90-some-odd% true. I like to think I know the stability of earth wrapping around me. The comfort of running into an old friend so many times that we both just melt into one giant puzzle piece. The lines are blurred, the brick is seen only through the puddle. Nestled as they are they continue because of one another, whether in spite, spirit, or sublimation. They could not exist any other way.

Why would they want to?

Late Night Write

It was stupid, even childish. One little thing went wrong, I felt flaky, and I felt failed. The mask was slipping away and the camouflaged flaws flashed neon lights. I felt undependable and incapable of self control. I wanted to be held not buoyed. Furthermore, I wanted this to not be shrugged off. My standards may seem high but they’re what I have. Cheapening the strong emotional response to failure, however minute the failure may have seemed to you, was only making it worse.

 Now I was failing everywhere. I couldn’t communicate the situation or the effect to the degree I felt necessary. Maybe I was detailed enough, perhaps I just would never be able to make you understand. I know that if I had allowed the attention to be spared just a few more moments upon myself a great conjunction of catharsis could have resulted. This novelty felt selfish with you. It was a kid complaining about apple pie without ice cream to the kid who hasn’t had a meal all day.

Instead, I decided it would be much more proactive to switch roles. I did for you as I wanted done for myself. I comforted you and assured that everything would be okay. I catered to your needs no matter how minor they may have been. I felt that I was taking control of my own emotion by taking control of your comfort. That was until there was nothing left for me to do. We sat a moment in silence.

It was a silly little moment where I could feel the weight tottering above me. The claustrophobia had returned and the need to flee was a new necessity I was all too obliged to fulfill.

 Failure, an actual entity. I felt like I was swimming in an oversized coat. It was as if I had shrunk, but my clothes had not come with me. I couldn’t breathe and my vision started whirling.

Anxiety attack. I reach for my door and pull myself inside. The handle clicks shut and all I can see are a deprecation of thoughts. I shrink against the door. The weight has become unbearable. I’m shaking through it with shallow breath. Gravity calls me down to the ground as the door behind me guides my back. Insults and insinuations are hurling back and forth within the static room. Flashes of memory and potential narrative flash between black space and my, now, sepia toned vision. Nothing feels real but all feels dire.

I failed this task.

Well, it’s a stupid student run organization. You’re just having trouble adjusting back to school. Probably jolted by the many changes that had occurred basically at the same time.  School start, re-acquainting with roommates, reacclimating to a live-in boyfriend, leaving home after starting to feel comfortable, the shit Christmas that was. I don’t deal well with change.

I failed to communicate

I didn’t want to be selfish. You just have to be strong. This will pass. In comparison to what could be happening in your life, you should feel lucky to have this be your down-trodden state of madness. Really if you break for this there isn’t much hope for the future—figure it out.

I couldn’t control the situation

A physical response isn’t always something that you can mentally control. It could be any number of outlying factors. The important thing is just to breathe. This will actually be funny at some point in time. The melodramatics of a 20-something with nothing-problems rooted in her perfectionistic, overachieving, never feels good enough psyche.  Why isn’t my life a sitcom?

I failed at eating

Put the card back in the deck. Half the time I don’t believe myself that you had any disorder. I’m more than tempted to declare that card a comfort to your current self so your current skewed eating looks better than a lack of self-control.

I failed at an eating disorder

13 year olds with crushes on movie stars are somehow able starve themselves yet you couldn’t continue it. What does that say about your resolve?--- it’s a good thing you eat now. Though sometimes I believe you’ve just exchanged one disorder for another.

My expectations of any relationship are too high. Fail

If they don’t meet your expectations you don’t want to lower them. In addition, you’re dwelling on this. Just focus on the breathing, try not to think, and calm down. You’re fueling your own fire.

All the while these audible noises are coming from the living room and I begin to feel paranoid that I’ve drawn attention to myself. This paranoia is both upsetting and intriguing. On the one hand I desperately want not only to be heard but to be saved by myself and on the other I’m ashamed of this reasonless tantrum that has so physically manifested. This puts the tears, the heaving surface breaths, and blackness on hold. The pins I feel heating my skin cool until I’m frozen.

I look around and all is still. The same as it always is, tantrum or not. The climax feels cheapened. Nothing has changed, this has all happened in my head, and the only souvenir that remains is this shakiness. I’m not even sure if it’s a shakiness that is visible. The buzzing silence of an unchanged world by my dramatic moment courses underneath my muscles. I’m sore and exhausted. I imagine what I look like.

A crumpled ball on the floor, leaning against a door below a Katy Perry poster, nauseated by lack of oxygen, and demonstrating the calm reddened eyes that explain an inability to care anymore. This vision of myself, out of myself, is quite a funny one. I start to worry that someone might actually have heard me and come to “check up”. I reach up to lock the door, only to find that it’s already been locked (either as a result of muscle memory or a black out occurrence). How funny, blackout anxiety. How terrifying.

I shake either as a result of muscle fatigue or temperature and truly dissolve into a text book case of madness. I’m laughing but only insofar as I’m crying. I’m judging and counseling and crumpled helplessly all at the same time.

I realize how sad a notion it is that I can’t even allow myself the luxury of a natural breakdown. One unprecedented by motivation. A happening that refuses to be kept in the closet and instead topples out on its targeted victim.

The laughing turns solely to crying. I delve even further into emotional extremity. Heaving sobs at a frequency where I try to move my body to secure a muffling pillow. I’m a sack of bricks. A sad sack of Stephanie and there is no way my body is moving. I have no choice but to conclude and become over it.

Man was that weird. I have to find tissues, I have to get the tissues to me. Finally raising to my feet, a surreal experience indeed, I witness the aftermath within my body. My skin is offset in color, a palid dewiness with goose bumps and palsy wrists. Tears have been unkind to my eyes and the redness extends out from my veins onto the surrounding area. Lashes are clumped by dew and paired with swollen frames. I fan myself hoping to drive the redness away. It remains, however, stubborn as it is—I swear it even darkens.

I leave my room with an immense feeling of fear and stagnancy. Nothing has happened in the living room while a hurricane devastated a wall away. The sepia tones had diminished and left only traces on the walls, the floors, and the furniture. I beg in my mind for them not to look at me. One look and the trump will be played. I’ll have no choice but to show my hand and take responsibility for my gamble.

Are you okay?

Shit. I muster up the weakest of all smiles as if to call more attention to my predicament.

                Yeah, I’m fine.

I can’t even get through the sentence without sniffling.

Rooted in Multiplicty

"...my work is most successful when I'm falling apart a little bit in front of you..."--- Julie Tolentino.

This is the phrase I've been looking for within my own muses. I'm attempting to unravel myself in front of you in order to show you how to unravel your self. I become your object for self discovery. The vulnerability I'm catering to, displaying more than hearts on sleeves or candid cliches, is a developmental tactic. Fighting off my own barriers has been liberating, though a seeming producer of anxiety attacks and hurtful epiphanies of displaced moments in time.

I've long thought that the give/take of interactions warranted an equilibrium. Physicality shows that in speaking/listening we mediate our language through our body: hand gestures, breathing patterns, heart rates, and facial expressions. Conversation, the dialectic exchange/receive procedure personified, is naturally something of a give and take, push and pull entity. As person a enters person b's space, person b natural moves back a bit (though how much is dependent on the individual's space bubble/comfort with confrontation).

This banter has always provided thought provoking insights into the human condition. The fragility even the strongest of persona's possess within defense mechanisms and other insecurities are amplified and often projected.

Undercutting projections is what I am attempting to do, through somewhat of a middleman scenario, within my work. Two theories meshed together in potentiality.

One: to critique an existing situation reaffirm its existence. What does this mean? Over exaggerate and expand upon what's obviously at work. Re-itteration in re-presentation [re-representation].

I've often brainstormed that I should mix a little Lewis Carroll into my work. Communicative exchange to have a use rate--- perhaps tie a little tag to my neck that says "Use Me" or "Share Me" or "Neglect Me" or "Watch Me" just as the liquid in Alice in Wonderland says "Drink Me" and the biscuits say "Eat Me". Each produces an action that in turn produces a chain of reactions. This is very much how I interpret conversation, at both its most basic and complex levels. By drawing more attention to the purpose of the exchange we begin to critique the event: macro and micro, motif and motivation.

Two: to critique an existing situation represent in opposition. A more normative response to understanding or critique. The offer of something different to either make a point concrete or crumbling is a frequented method of debate. 

This is me when I openly succumb to vulnerability in front of an audience, open myself to objectification (sometimes passively demanding it), in order to provide a better understanding of vulnerability as a universal trait. I become of screen for projection, unidentifiable as an individual until after the performance, stripped and white washed until the only thing left to see is a reflection of the viewer. Opposing any identity, forces the projection, and then (especially in intimate pieces) becomes a critique of the individual itself. Simultaneously, vulnerability is the loudest of what is being viewed. This opposition to that stasis of what we interpret the 'self' to be (reference phrases and connotations of strong sense of self or concrete beliefs or rooted opinions) in turn critiques from an all over approach.

A multiplicitous identity is hard to place, as multiplicitous often seems synonymous with instability. Plurality, however, is hardly without root or foundation. The whole may seem shaking when denounced to parts but with a multiplicitous media, mediation, and motivation the bonds prevail the whole to be consequential to its various parts. The dialogue begins in a presence through absence. We escapade through muted audio and shouting caps locked subtitles. We dig to the roots. We find the stability branching off in every direction under the ground.

Yours Not Have Myself

I've been winning a losing battle for some time now. Day-to-day I've been watching the numbers flip in an arbitrary fashion and this entire time I've convinced myself losing was winning and vice versa. The relativity I'm feeling extends down many an understanding: one of family, one of banal circumstance, and dare I say the relativity of physics.

I'm grounded in this gasoline haze, hoping the trees will sway into a cartoon form or the breeze will dissipate into writing. I'm loosing grips as far as I'm accessing new handles. I'm losing touch while gaining ground. I no longer can tell which way the signs are pointing and I'm just failing to contain my beliefs "that I'm fine, everything is okay....". I'm losing strength, gaining speed, and heading for a confrontation.

I feel. Even when there is void or absence a presence is created. A silence prompts so much giberish that talking is all the better. The bearing of weakness, quite transforming to a bare weakness, is neither making me stronger, more reflective, or more okay with the situations.

I'm well-adjusted. A keen social sense and placation to a P.C appropriation surfacing above the internal instability. I've stood here for so long quivering, I've been born and re-born a thousand times in the eyes that pass me, judgment, and ridicule. I let you see yourself and have often found that those who find distaste in a first impression often have swirled themselves twice over in admonishment.

I'm dealing. I want to scream and I've pruned in the rain as a result of my own demise. I've reduced to tears and have trembled under the weight of the footsteps that pass and subsequent curious eyes that are too busy to do anything but graze. I'm an obstacle, to them and myself. A burden that must be trespassed in order to go on through the day, through life.

I'm frustrated with my lack and furthermore yours. I feel like all I'm feeling are excuses that don't belong or aren't contextualized. When I ball up, it's an invitation. I like your problems more than my own, because it means that I'll have something else to roll around in my mouth when the silence seeps in.

I'm balancing, best as I can. Yet, I feel unable to comprehend anything but a distant regret or a lackadaisical attempt at disavowal. You don't want me here and frankly I want to leave. Just like I've wanted to scream or stand on a chair or project across the room how much it hurt to be tossed aside. I've wanted to apply a sense of confession to the feeling, or lack thereof, of self worth. I haven't spoken for myself because I haven't deserved it.

I have use value. What can I say? Reuse. Reduce. Recycle. Patterns are an easy routine.

When the words float so elegantly on my tongue, the traffic clears and the sounds I have either ignored or been ignorant to for so long come sprinting (as I'm sure they will) onto a nearby ear...then perhaps we will finally make sense of this wreck.

I've never been NOT okay...or maybe I've just been playing on double negatives. Maybe this is me, and maybe this is what I've been reassuring myself I will always have.

The Whole Hole Returns Wholeheartedly

My thoughts are racing, almost yelling at me to do something. Just something that will make these circles actualized in a presence of social worth. Retreating, I'm finding it difficult to hold on. Suddenly, I'm slipping back into the hole, the bad habits, the thoughtless thoughts and in differential distance. I'm becoming the distance and walls have been re-erected so fast that I'm caught in the middle of the blockades. Half-in, Half-out...incessantly falling from the sky and crashing with the tides. I'm crying and stopping and blocking and wrecking and writing and wishing all the same. So well hidden, so well controlled, so long hiding, and so adjusted to adjusting. Breaks. Break Away. Breathe.
The words and confessions so far into my throat that the oxygen has stopped mid-escape. Between the bars, my catharsis is silenced and sneaking. The hairs on my neck stand as it breathes for me and becomes me. I feel the retreat and I feel the silence. Studying. I'm starting to study again, that vow of silence sleeping upon my lips in hopes of a discovery; the same of which strategic conformity alongside deception steered so long ago.
No one spoke, just as I did not speak. We acted. We acted like everything was fine. We projected that binding as far as the glue did hold whole. We projected the whole when the pieces fell and we were left what we perceived was the whole but was only projection.
We slid. Slide 1 *click* 2 *click* 3 *click* 4... the pieces scattered on the floor with all to see and none to hold for they were no longer pieces---as pieces can be only that which construct a whole and that same whole was what stared us down from that elusive wall, was it not? We stared back blankly at that whole hanging down the wall. We stared quite through the hole purposively.

We pinned down that wall with that whole; squared to the corners of the wall and frame, squared to the binding background, squared to the corners of our eyes and the telos of our soul. Yet, still not quite right in it's squareness it remained, with the remains forgotten beneath it. And this is how it ended? Purposively. Without resolve and without fight....but with the frightening epiphanic moment that the whole was not right, no matter how squared or opaque or pinning it was to that wall. The whole was just a hole, that didn't hold at all.

And now...now I begin to fall. The whole and hole so blurred that seeing is no longer believing but feeling--that pit that drops inside of you when everything begins to break, when the cracks tear further along the surface, and the calm settles over the nerves. That feeling of non-existance or more so wrong existence; where you remember stable ground but as far as you can tell you've been falling forever--that feeling. That one where your pulse begins to slow, your breathing shallows, and every muscle in your body begins to relax, just as you realize you might need to brace upon that fast approaching impact? As you fall quicker and quicker and harder and faster, it's that feeling of a sickly sweet smile and the muscles that hold it up on a falling face. The feeling of never returning again. The feeling of complacency. The feeling of hiding your hands, never to touch or be touched again, never to taste nor smell, never to fly but only to fall.

This is the feeling of a whole hole returning, wholeheartedly.

Embrace in Raining Retrograde

Streets. They careen against the falling sun and straighten out with the rise. A connection. A place we go to find ourselves, to find someone we knew long ago, or to assert who we are; who we think and want to be all at once.

A passage. Time is past. It dies and all we can be is driving. All we can be is driven. All we can be is that state of controlled lost. We listen to our self or we block it out by blaring someone else's words to which some part of us is attached; singing along we make them our own. Grasping to understand, even when we are running. Forward and side to side, but mostly backward. How many times are you returning behind the steering wheel. Creatures of habbit; we work in a retrograded state of return. Turn left at the next light, unless it red then continue straight-- we'll get there some day.

In the passenger seat, I'm a melted shotgun twisting to become the car. Let my eyes be the side window. Let me feel the wind billowing off the lakes. Let it sting and make the tears burn from my eyes as I drive back. 0 to 60 in 20 seconds: I've learned how to operate, how to adapt, how to become the car. Melted and twisted silver frozen behind a seatbelt.

I'm full of blanks; small spark followed in smoke. I redefine constantly and find myself traversing more boarders and using more lines. On the edge, just waiting for a push of encouragement, I've envisioned it. I swear I can hold the feeling without ever experiencing it before; my throat in my stomach, the rush of air, and the deep embrace of dark. It feels squishy and surrounding this forgetfulness, this forgiveness. Squishy and surrounding, but what to do with it?

 This is not the time. There is no burning passion, just stinging eyes and I can't seem to see anymore through all the haze. The cold front is coming in and the pressure in my head is building. It's all building toward something I can not see, even with my brights it is hidden for me...from me.

Slips. Slippery slips back in your retrograded return. Who are you now?

Hold me in the asphalt, surround me---- I want to curve with the road for once. Envelope me...




Watch it. Watch the heavy rain dance on-- careen with me, curve with me...

Embrace