Hello internet friends, it’s me, Madeline.
I feel pretty confident that I can generally speak for all of us when I say…vibes have been….off. Heavy. Impending doom every time you flutter open your eyelids.
One of the existential spirals I went down recently (emphasis on *one of*) included feeling so helpless and less than with the amount of times I am absolutely shattered by things outside of myself. Not just the state of the world, although that grips at my heart daily, but also the way my neighbor smiles when I compliment her garden, the man who collects plastic bottles from the garbage cans in my neighborhood on collection day, a child’s board game left crumpled and withered by sunlight on the side of the road. Sometimes, existence just seems to really hit me.
I don’t really have the energy to examine why, or if there is a why, or if its a good or bad thing or both, or what this is teaching me about being a person. I just feel like…primal screaming it out into the void and shaking everyone off of their iPhones and asking, “Anyone else?!”
So, here’s some words that spilled out of me after a particularly lengthy spell of feeling crushed by the weight of noticing.
I have to let the world destroy me. Have big dreams. Have them crushed. Build them back up again. Wail at the injustice Despair at the hopelessness of it all Wonder what's the point then catch a ray of light hitting the sidewalk just so and begin again. I have to because that's who I am and aren't I always saying that if we could just live in a world where everyone sets themselves free off leash turned their skins inside out maybe we'd be better off so I have to let the world destroy me one crushing blow at a time. I look at my elderly neighbor dressed in a T-shirt and pink cowboy hat fighting sleep as he peers over the front porch railing and my heart dissolves into a million tiny pieces and those pieces scatter all across Los Angeles older cousins to the ones in New York and London and Philadelphia and Seneca, South Carolina and I wonder if all those fragments of my heart that I can't contain within me that explode compulsively without warning have a life beyond me now maybe they aren't fractured remnants but more like dividing cells the new tail of a lizard a budding leaf in the middle of winter when you were sure the tree was dead. I like to think about those heart fragments and what they are doing now and sometimes I call them back to me and we chat and we have tea but they never stay I am not their home anymore they belong to the world dimensions where I no longer exist but what even is 'I' but a series of things that have happened and the way they made me feel so I'll let the world destroy me and I'll wake up to a new dawn one more layer added to 'I' and a million heart blossoms scattered to the sky.
Sending you all some heart fragments and dreams of a crisp September,
xx mm
I woke up this morning and one of those heart fragments landed on me like a ray of light peeking through the blinds after a very long, near-sleepless night. Thank you for sending this out and adding one more layer to the part of me that’s human and alive. Your words are warmth and good company in the desolation of a numbing, confused world. I saw each frame in your mind, steeped in pain and hope, ready to drip into the ink of a graphic novel that one day burns its images into grains of film — a story of loss and redemption