I Don't Even Like Jelly

Distance manages to do for me
things no one else could.
It pulled me to pieces and left me
on the floor—kind of like you did,
although it wasn’t as gentle, and yet
it stung less. And it took it’s time,
but eventually, it put my pieces all back
together, one-by-one, glue and staples
and sutures and the blood I lost
when I thought my life was over,
traveling the distance, leaving behind
what I thought was a life.
Nothing I have done
could be considered living,
I’ve been walking this distance numb
and a ghost—not a spirit or demon,
a person
without a purpose but to mess myself up.
These sorts of things
are called self-destructive behaviors,
and I am the self-destructive bear,
swimming out though there is no ice,
searching for shelter though there is no room.
I helped the distance, and I helped you,
to break my arm behind my back and snap
my heart right in two.
And I helped the distance
put me back together, ready
and waiting to shatter again.
It isn’t that I enjoy misery,
but I am starting to think I enjoy
tearing myself to the point of no return.
Settling for something
so mundane
never was this violent.
Maybe it’s the settling,
not the distance, that did this.

I can’t be sure, but the distance isn’t so great
when I think about what it will take
to realize I can’t settle for anything less
than finding you again.
The distance is less, because this settlement is more,
and overcoming myself is twice the challenge
of overcoming the distance.


March 4, 2008
Author's Note: basically just a lot of rambling...an ode to self-destructive behavior. Everybody loves Scrubs and Pandy the Self-Destructive Teddy Bear. Basically, that's all this ever was. Really nothing. :) I write a lot about distance...you would think it was the biggest barrier I have to overcome in order to make my way back home. You would be wrong, unfortunately. Home is, apparently, more than seven-hundred miles away. It's more of a state-of-mind...a seven-hundred-mile-away state-of-mind.
I Don't Even Care

You're Looking Like You're Looking For Something

My Things on a Pedestal

I wonder if I hold on to the things that remind me of home. The purse and bags I carry, the sweaters I wear, the places I visit when I need a break from reality. All of these things are the same, whether I am here or there. Today I wore the sweater, carried my laptop in the bag, and ordered the same meal I ordered more than a year before. And I carry with me everywhere what I bought in June nearly two years ago, the purse I have yet to replace, that has traveled with me back and forth and been my companion. Is it simply that I want to be reminded of home, of a place where I feel happier, softer, sweeter? Or is it my longing for the place that I hold on, is it the idea that by given them up, replacing them with other, newer things, I will have lost something dear while it is so far away. As if I cannot allow myself the luxury of a new purse simply because I am not yet home. Simply because, to replace it would mean that here is where it dies. Here is where it stays, replaced, and without use for it, I somehow stay here. If I move on by moving up to a new bag or sweater, I am comfortable, and somehow promising I will never return to the place I was best. It’s as if, somehow, these things are destined to be mine until I can return home and replace them proper. Or maybe I just like the way it feels.
I still love this sweater, and the bag that I’ve fixed up so it won’t break. And the purse—even though sometimes I hate it more than life—I can just never find a suitable replacement. These are my things. My true things. Which I will not let go without knowing I can.
Maybe, when I return, someone will convince me I’ve had them all too long, and we’ll go shopping for more.

January 25, 2008
If Only You Could Hear Me Out

She Said "You're a Masochist"

Roll Up Your Sleeves

Why do I get this feeling
that life is harder without you
so close and so easily obtainable—
so easily found on street corners
were buildings are tall enough to swallow
our small hearts?

If there weren’t an ocean of grass and land
maybe life would be less heavy,
maybe I would feel less hard—
stone walls and glass barriers and
borders I put up—seemingly impenetrable.

If trees as fierce as skylines, cold
and metal and cruel,
didn’t appear in the distance;
if they were as beautiful as
small pines in the past, left behind with
all the things deemed so difficult
maybe I would be kind.
Maybe I would be gentle.

I get this feeling the world would
be softer if you weren’t
a distant thing, long sought after.
And I ask it, all around me, the cars
and concrete and cold steel,
I ask the world: “when will I be soft?”

When will I begin again, closer
to you, swallowed and whole
in the belly of the world
so distant I can’t but feel
the world would be easier
if it were close.

January 25, 2008
So Roll Up Your Sleeves

Full of Things Even I Don't Understand

In the Sun


I made a decision today—the kind that plague my life, full of worry and the possibility of regret—and worse, the chance I’ve ruined my opportunity. But, unlike so many others, all those decisions I’ve made that have racked my body with grief and fear, this one I hardly questioned. This one I didn’t fear. This one, I stepped out and rook a risk, believing whole heartedly that taking a risk truly will do us all some good. I was never before one to risk. It was unnecessary, earlier in my life, to risk what I had—which was absolutely nothing, although I wasn’t aware. I did it, though, eventually, without regret, with everything I knew on the line. I experienced phenomenal fear, but I stepped right out and chose it. Once I had, the door was opened. Something, in that first risk, was available to ruin, and I allowed that chance. I survived, taking another risk soon after, exceptionally pleased each time with the outcome. But then, I stopped; I moved back to Oklahoma; I returned to play-it-safe—for safe is the only word I can think to describe it. In fact, it wasn’t safe, I wasn’t safe. Not from myself. I endangered my future. I, on some unknown, childish, God-fearing level, refused to resign to safety. I lived, and in many ways, I failed as often as I succeeded. I risked everything—the life I wanted, and the person I was. I put her on the line. I lost her. She went, gone to a sea of problems, fears, regrets, and the inability to learn. I lost her, risking what I had left to replace who I was. I found along the way that a move to safety hadn’t been a risk I was willing to take. Thus, I changed part of who I was; a new person possibly emerged. Until this day, I thought one had. Now I know I had only changed enough to satisfy my needs, not enough to satisfy my wants. I feel, today, however, that the risk is ripe for the time, and the place; and the girl destined to survive will be the one I must eventually be. Not to mention, it will end with a city and a hope that’s new but familiar, and worth all the risk.
I dropped out of school today. Returned my books and left the campus a weight lifted. As if something had truly changed. All I can do is understand my deepest desire, and from there find my own way toward it. It is a risk, but more for the sale of salvation and security, and hope. It’s a risk of character, I suppose, one I have never been truly willing to make, despite my many lines about personal change. I’ve been satisfied by the little changes I’d made in order to survive. However, without further change, I might as well have never made them at all. Even today I wonder about my true willingness—how I advocate personal change on a daily bases, spending many an hour writing these odes to new beginnings. I wonder if I will do it and I know myself enough to worry. But, I am not allowing myself a declaration of dedication. I will not right another note of personal motivation—and redundancy. I haven’t taken the risk to change who I am, so I have placed school on the backburner to find who I am. And to find my way home. I want to go home. I no longer want to be satisfied with what little change I have made, as difficult as it was. I want to, finally take a risk worth taking, once against, and not emerge on an act of luck but with an ability to survive.
I made this decision with as much rationality as I could allow, and then I did it, with one swift motion. From here I know where I will go. I know what I should do. I know how to finally deliver myself home. It isn’t going to hurt, this risk, not in the long run, not the way I’ve been hurt before. It’s simply time to go home. It’s time to put myself out in the sun, as I have pledged many times before. It’s time to make everything that’s been put wrong right once again—even if I’ll only see it turn again. It won’t be without worth, whatever I do.
I once wrote that my heart was shattered, but when I put the pieces back I was able to sew in the holes that previously perforated the surface. I hadn’t finished the sutures, and they ripped again, pulling the muscle apart. Those holes can’t be shut if the pieces can’t heal and scars can’t form. I wasn’t ready, to perform open heart surgery, to crack my ribs and cut right through the mess. It’s time to mend the poor thing, allow the scars to heal. And they will form, a sacrifice I cannot ignore. The holes will disappear, behind scars and sutures, maybe even patched with new pieces. The holes will fill and the stitches mend the muscle. It will still be fragile, someday break, as hearts tend to. That is no reason to leave it in pieces, that it could never break for it is already broken. I’m willing to risk the mend, even just to let it break again. Make it right, even just to watch it go wrong. How can it, after all, beat if it remains in so many pieces?
I’m not worried, not about this. This is something I just can’t avoid. Taking this risk will do us all some good, including those who refuse to allow me this one quick jump, right off the cliff. The sea is below, red with blood and green with envy. And I will jump, arms flailing, throat screaming, legs preparing to swim.

January 8, 2008
But I'll Try--Oh How I'll Try

So Don't Cry

All My Loving, I'll Send to You

I officially love you. This isn’t a new discovery, or anything to marvel over really. It’s just a fact that is—something simple, something easy, something honest. We all know how much I love honesty. I can’t deny it. The truth is apparently my best friend, sitting comfortably on my lips. I won’t lie if you ask me this question, I won’t tell you something to make it better, or disguise how I’m feeling right now. I wear my secrets sewn snugly into my sleeve, resting atop my wrist, waiting for you to see them.
So I love you, for everything I’ve seen and everything I know. And it’s been hard to keep it quiet with my honest mouth on fire. I’ve called and written and sent you all the notes I can write with trembling fingers. When you don’t respond, I’ll try again, too afraid to give up.
I love you; it’s easy, now that I know how perfect it is to do so. I love you, from the moment I let myself, in that instant sort of love you kind of way. Your charms are enough to pull me in, and I’m pulled. And even when we move through phases of insecurities and moments of uncertainties, I won’t stop—I can’t stop, you’ve tangled me around your finger, and I can’t let go. I love you, despite it, this unfailing, foolish love. Unwavering, and sometimes unwanted. No matter what you do, however you act, I will love you still. I will fight for your happiness, I will fight for our love, but I will not fight you.
Love like this has left me before, broken and silenced by those who refuse to accept it. But nevertheless I love. What has happened to me that I can find it, unwavering inside of a heart so broken the bloods spilled on the floor, what has caused me to see the best in the people who tend to hurt me the most? What has allowed me to allow myself the pain, to let go of the fear, and love despite the sadness I’ll eventually endure? I know on some level you don’t love me, not the way that I do. I need you more than you will ever need someone’s love like mine. I know someday you will leave me, hanging on words I pray you don’t mean, but maybe you always will. I know this and yet, despite my mind’s warning, I put my heart on my sleeve, next to my secrets, waiting for you to see it. Waiting for you to take it. Waiting for you to break it. Hand it back with all the pieces, please, and leave me the needle and thread.
I love you, in these moments still, when I know someday I’ll miss your loving the way I’ll miss my ability to.

December 9, 2007
Author's Note: for everyone I love this unconditional, foolish, uncontrollable love--my friends and more.;)

You'll Be the Only One to Make Them Go Away

I Want to Change the World

"It was just a man with something to prove--"

My favorite mug is the red one.
My favorite shirt the long-sleeved one.
My favorite person is an idea,
a theory, an interpretation.
Everybody is waiting for a cure
for something nobody really has yet.
Everybody is working toward the moment
when they can make themselves proud.
What is it we’re looking for if we’re looking f
or something? What is it we’re hoping for,
since we’re all hoping for something?

I’m dying to make something of these moments,
wrapped in blankets and ideas,
sipping cold coffee
too anxious to do something
about the taste.
New ideas don’t form in my head,
they’re all repetitions of the ones I’ve had.
Being unsuccessful in my plans to merge them,
being for the benefit of keeping myself alive,
keeping my mind in tune to what is happening
in my world—the places I wander when I’m out
of my mind—being for the sake of saving
my ambitions, I repeat the plans I’ve made,
over again, until they are concrete in theory
and abundant in imagination.
The coffee just gets colder,
the blanket just warmer,
the dogs still bark and planes fly over.
I’ve still made nothing of this moment.

My favorite animal: a turtle.
My favorite dream: a city.
My favorite idea: a person.
Still just a person.

"--slightly bored and severely confused."

Instead I Sleep

Be Gentle with Me

"I fought the war, I fought the war, I fought the war but the war won."

Everything has become political, everything a battle of wits and attrition—whose theory, whose idea, whose belief can out last the others. Who can win the war? The idea is either to be universal or conflicting. I am unsure which. Both have been used, both are excuses, one for the other. Either way, don’t all ideas strive to be utopian in product? All I can see are angry people, angry and striving for peace. Except that human nature is to be at odds. From experience, anger doesn’t generate pleasant utopian societies. Anger produces anger, fire fueling fire. And they say to fight the fires of opposition with yet more fire. But fire doesn’t defeat fire, two of the same does not water make. Fire fighting fire yields all the more fire. In that regard, fire is the all-consumer, its main consumption thought. How can this yield peace? Humans must just be creatures of self-destruction. Pyromaniacs—all of us. Doesn’t anyone believe in water? Isn’t anyone tired of the heat? Hasn’t anyone been burnt? Maybe we can’t notice the pain, too distracted with the display of flames. Not necessarily beautiful, but captivating nonetheless. We always did enjoy watching our fellow man fall. Or, burn, I suppose, as the case may be.

“Stop for the love of God.”
December 4, 2007
'Cause My Heart Gets Broken So Easily.

We Push and Pull

Rachel is Enough Already. It's Boring.

I spend my life writing odes to new beginnings. Handing out glory and sense of self and gratification. Everything is a pledge, everything is a devotional, everything for the purpose of self proposition. I’m tired of planning, I’m tired of pledging, I’m tired of advice and inspiration, I’m tired of attempting to force motivation through words. I’m tired of listening to myself speak, pushing myself forward; repairing what damage has been done. And why does it all have to be so cliché?
Am I self-destructive or stitching up old wounds? Or am I simply neither. Somewhere in between. Cutting open the sutures and pulling the flesh back together with strings coated in motivational, inspirational, self-propelling words.
Have I stitched the holes closed, or have I left them in my heart; am I still bleeding?
When something rips, it leaves a hole. But when it falls apart all together, you can somehow rework it, put it back together, so that no holes show through. It’s still broken, still tattered, still technically in pieces. But the holes are missing, filled in, shut by two busted portions stitched together again.
If I’m taking the time to write out all the things I say in my head, all the ways I’ll fix my heart, all the ways I pull my life back together—if I’m bothering to repeat myself on a daily basis, am I really suturing the wounds, or am I holding the bloody pieces, searching for my string? Or am I simply reversing all the work I’ve done, cutting and stitching, slicing and sewing. Each line over, each stitch altered, each suture becoming straighter and smaller with each pass of the needle. Each scar bleeding, healing, scaring again.

December 3, 2005
And I Fall Down Sometimes

All I Want is a Heart

New rooms—unfamiliar;
and faces to match people to.
New ideas that fill the dents
in the road like puddles to plow through.
All the old things are growing
dark, like memories, faded around the edges.
And all the new things are piling up
on top, on top, on top,
one above the other.
Houses aren’t homes and home
has no heart; and the cable’s going out—
flashing on, flashing off, void of snow
or white noise. Nothing feels like comfort,
nothing feels like safe,
everything is a mystery
like new shoes and a new city.
Like new friends, who hardly know
any history or plans.
Everything is familiar, but nothing
is the same; nothing is familiar, but everything
has changed.
And I am stuck inside myself
for the duration of the day.
I’m wandering the rooms I’ve left
unfamiliar in my head.
It’s time to open up their doors,
expand into them; move all my
baggage from the crowded spaces
I’ve used and even out my head.


“Come now,
come
and mourn me.
It’s so easy
now I’m gone.”

The rain has made the lawns like swaps
and has left my heart hoping for more.
Walking through the yard has become
like trudging through mud,
grass is ankle deep and growing
with the increase of precipitation.
The only things I want are
to feel more at home in this suburban wildernessand
to not have to shake mudded water from my feet.
I miss the smell of concrete and steam,
the sound of sirens past midnight,
the jolt of trains stopping and going,
moving across the tracks with rough sparks
and no hesitation.
I miss the people who made that city my home.
I miss their energy, their honesty,
the feeling that we were true friends—
despite all the [fake ones] we encountered.
And I miss being able to laugh without needing to,
without having to smile to keep my spirits lifted.
The coffee, the cold air, the coats, the strolls,
the train rides for no reason, the adventures
that were ours.
People think I am strong, because it’s raining
and I smile.
What they can’t see are my hollowed-out insides,
and that I am happy just to not be sad.


To Feel Something Beating Against My Chest

One Cell in the Sea

The Devil in the Bathroom

©Rachel C Johnson

My mother confronts her demons in the shower. Early in the morning she addresses her issues whilst washing her hair. She chose the shower, I presume, because she maybe thinks no one can hear her, but I can make out every resentful word on mornings I sleep in. I unwillingly play audience to her diatribes on these mornings I have nowhere to be, paying relentless attention, eyes fixed on the dark water tower just beyond the yard. She’s noisy in the mornings, slamming doors with righteousness. I’m not falling asleep again.
When I was young I had a fear, probably spurned from the tales of Bloody Mary, and I couldn’t face myself in the bathroom mirror if it were dark. Unable to look my shadowed self in the eye, I would turn away until I found the light, or not go in at all. The anxiety followed me to the bath, and later the shower, where I felt eyes peering from places I couldn’t see hidden by shower curtains or, simply my back, turned on them. I had demons—demons in the bathroom—watching me from every point.
Even now my hand finds the light before my eyes hit the mirror—my refusal to face the glass becoming my refusal to face my darkened self. What lies beyond that mirror in the dark? I would like to remain mature in my imagination, say nothing—dry wall and insulation—but my childish superstitions and penchant for fantasy leave me questioning my appearance in the dark. Dark mirrors bring out the demons just as enchanted mirrors the beauty, and I’ll keep my eyes out of mine in the absence of light.
When I moved it was into a dorm, and I never had to face my demons in that bathroom. The light was always buzzing and someone was always there to share the experience. I took to hurrying my routine in the bathroom if only to shorten the communal event. There were times, however, when I would use the bathroom as an escape plan, a way to find peace from my roommate, a way to be alone with my thoughts. Finding an empty bathroom was a blessing, offering up a chance to take a moment for myself. In those moments I may have avoided the mirror for the safety of the stall, freeing myself from the obligation to face my mirror image. But, even while avoiding that sight, seeking console there alone forced me to cope with said demons. And, in a way, hide behind them, from the stress my life was developing. I hate my demons, but when I look in a lit mirror I see myself as something beautiful, and maybe only to contrast what lies in the dark.
My mother, she faces her demons with a noisy battle in the bath. My battle is silent, trudging on through age, keeping me aware of the little demons that haunt me.

November 12, 2007