She articulates her emotions better with writing.

When it comes to conversation, she has trouble saying a complete sentence that would make any sense to be heard..

Shes not running away from it, or diverting to a new subject. She’s ready to be seen…

Except, the fear of being seen is far more greater than the want of being heard.

Something is not connecting… she feels more disconnected to receiving the love that is given.

Even going on random dates, she finds herself empty

She misses the intimacy and tired of the one night stands.

It’s easier for her to be detached

She is a simple person who longs for deep conversations and hates small talk...

If she can quiet her insecurities and the lies whispering the negative thoughts that stop her to speak…

That stop her to feel less than what she believes she is..

She would no longer feel disconnected from human connection

Sunday morn, skies that mourned,

wrinkled blankets, undone laundry,

notes that piled, lectures paused,

plates and bowls, last night meals.

Seasons changes, fall and rains,

falling apart, piece by piece.

Save me, please, screamed to the skies,

begged and hurt, lone in a crowd.

Deep inside, something changed,

life felt different, so did I.

What once was, what now is,

what would be, all blurred in one.

Barely human, days all same,

can't be machine, feelings clawed.

Bewitched in a maze, no way out,

dark that stayed, lights that frayed.

Would I leave, this game of hurt,

or would I stay, forever and frail?

Shall I try, when all things fail,

or just let go, as fate may plead?

But I will wake, to another day,

for dawn may break, and the sun may rise,

birds may sing, and the rains may pour,

nights may fall, and the cold may creep.

I will wake to another day.

All the words

Congeal

As saline pools

In the corners

Of my eyes

I hold

The floodgates

With willpower

But my thoughts

Outweigh

My will

The weight

Is caused

By my deep

And everlasting

Love

For you

My eleven year old

Little man

Since you began

As an idea

I had to wrap

My head around

I found every moment

Sweeter

Than the last

And the love flows

So beautifully

In both directions

You are the ground

I require

Beneath my feet

The breath

That draws the fear

From my heart

The laughter

That releases my pain

The smile

That clears away rain

Happy Birthday

Can I use this and this and this

To create something magical, memorable?

If I wrote a song, would you sing along

Or shut me down 'cause it's too honest?

I guess I'm just guessing

When I decide how you'd react

But if I wrote an honest song

Would you like it and sing along?

If I wrote an honest poem

Would you set me free

To follow my own road?

And if I wrote my own song

Would you let me go where I belong?

I could write about the food. I could write a great deal about the food. But the food is not what’s important.

I’ve had some amazing meals, don’t get me wrong. And cooking is art, there’s no doubt about that. It’s an act of caring and grace to coax raw ingredients into majesty, and when it’s done well, it borders on magic. But it’s not what’s important.

I would know, I’ve had it both ways. I once ate a 90 day aged Chateaubriand in an estate at one point owned by the King of Morocco. It was seared with a crust of peppercorns and walnuts and kissed with a brandy-based pan sauce, accompanied by a beet and goat cheese salad with slices of white truffle. After, we sipped fine port from crystal snifters and ate delicate chocolate desserts with aerated pistachio creme. A paragon of a meal, indeed. But then we went home. “Mommy and daddy had a great time,” we tell the kids. What do you say to a 3 year old? The meal was majestic, but I was not transformed.

My wife and I once dined on fresh langoustines and salmon sashimi in a 16th century building in old Torshavn after a long day hiking up the gorge of Saksun. The fish and lobsters were pulled from the water in the old docks not 100 yards from where we sat. It was spectacular, and I was happy. But I was happy before, in a happy place, with happy company. The food didn’t need to do that much heavy lifting.

One day in 2009 I sat alone in section 212 of the Friendly Confines. One of those midwest storms had rolled through, fierce and transient. The air glistened with moisture and a fog lay heavy over the lake while rays of sunshine dappled the park. The seats were dry, covered from above, but the air was humid, and damp. No one could tell if I cried, and no one cared. I drank a $9 old style and poked at a $8 Chicago style dog. White onion, neon green relish, celery salt, mustard (ketchup is heresy). The Cubs won in extra innings.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

I flew into Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International airport in the late afternoon. The flight was delayed and I’d been drinking since morning in expensive airport restaurants, because I wanted to, and airports are the place to do that kind of thing. Time doesn’t matter there, and no one cares. When I got my bags, the sun was already setting behind the Sloss furnace. My mom picked me up. She muttered pleasantries about the weather on the car ride back to my parents’ house. I said nothing, and watched the darkness fall on the magnolia trees and hills of kudzu, heart and head bowed beneath a heavy weight.

I slept long into the morning in the basement bedroom. No one came for me. I heard the doorway to the basement open multiple times, hesitant creaks on the stairs, then the sound of the door closing. “Leave him be, he needs to sleep,” I imagine them saying. Fine by me. It was dark and quiet down there, better for no one to see what had become of me. I had nothing to tell them anyway.

Eventually I came upstairs. The kitchen smelled of pecans and the morning’s bacon grease. Fiestaware littered the sink in bold reds, yellows, and teals. The smell made me realize how hungry I was.

“Lunch?” my dad was grabbing his coat from the hook in the hall. “I’m buying.” I nod, grateful. I wouldn’t have asked.

There’s a restaurant near 5 Points South where the ribs cook long and low over wood pellets and you can sit outside under a tent on splotchy grass amidst the blooming rhododendrons.

It stormed in the morning. The chairs are damp and the air is humid. The sky is a pale gray above the aging oaks and the fountain. I pick at splinters in the wooden table and no one speaks. I don’t have anything I want to say to anybody, and no one thinks it’s right to ask because, “cowboys don’t talk about their problems.”

We’re not cowboys. We lived out west, sure. We’ve ridden horses. But that doesn’t make us cowboys. But the myth persists.

Luckily, we don’t need to talk. While we wait for our ribs, there’s bread and barbecue sauce. The bread is Wonder Bread, white and chemical. It’s soft for dipping. Our fingers mold it like clay. There are bowls of barbecue sauce and paper plates. A deep south version of chips and salsa. We sop up the sauce, savoring the sweet bite of vinegar and Worcestershire. I take another. Sauce dribbles down my chin. I watch my dad eat white bread and stare at birds in the sky as the cloud cover breaks.

Suddenly the world is alive, hot and glowing. The sauce is sweet and the air vibrates with the hum of happy voices and birdsong. My dad smiles at me out of the corner of his eye and lifts his Wonder Bread in a mock toast. Still heavy in the head and heart, I’m burdened by pains I don’t want to talk about. He has his own, I’m sure. He doesn’t try to solve my problems. He doesn’t even ask. I volunteer nothing. The food is not transformative, it’s barely a meal at all. Just bread and sauce, but we’re together. And for the first time in ages, that’s enough. It may be the most important meal I’ve ever had.

The food is not what’s important.

The world was once transformed over bread and wine, after all. Why can’t barbecue sauce do the same?

There’s magic in the moment, in being present with those who ask nothing and love you as you are, even when you don’t deserve it. Then it doesn’t matter what you’re eating, it just matters to be sharing a meal. Because that’s when the grace peeks through. It’s not the aged Chateaubriand that redeems, it’s the communion.

We played cards that night, the three of us, and laughed at jokes, and told some old stories. Maybe I had changed, or the world had changed around me. It’s often hard to pin down the moments when wounds start to heal. But there is love and grace in a shared meal, if you’re open to it. You just need to know where to look.

Time makes losers of us all

for it always carries death

on its heavy, shrouded shoulders

and life becomes a series of deaths

each of which corrodes us just a bit

and though there are rebirths;

the buds and blossoms of spring,

the multitudes of colors,

the variety beneath daylight’s shelter,

the waiting arms of death are always there

somewhere in the shady distance,

hidden in the shadows

where mysterious objects block the light,

waiting to bring the finality

that erases all of our springs.

What I still find difficult is that we started out well as friends but after some time passed, the real you in you I didn't know about came out of nowhere as far as I'm concerned.

Arrogant, rude, selfish, inconsiderate, cheater and thief and honestly, you became a horse's ass practically overnight. I never had a clue until then you were a Jekyll-Hyde person.

Your snide remarks to me, to my friends shows that you have no concern for other people's happiness. What the hell is wrong with you? Did you think I would just pass this off in you having a difficult day? I might have, but that day turned into two, three and then four days.

I can't take your conniving, deceiving ways any longer. I don't know how many bridges you have burnt down in the past but that stops with me.

As far as I'm concerned you can take your trashy insults with you along with a suitcase with what stuff you have and get the hell out of my apartment and out of my life. I just don't care any longer if you were to die getting hit by a truck.

Get out of my space, out of my life and pull this shit on someone else. I would say I would wish you well wherever you go but I can't.

You are dead in my eyes.

Oh... Gods. Another date. Another man. Another nightmare.

And this one's asking me to talk about my writing.

What a way to make it worse.

"Oh... Mostly commissions," I say, smiling sheepishly and averting my gaze. As long as he stays content with that answer, all will be well.

But of course, he wasn't, because who is? Curiosity is a fearsome warrior.

"What kind of commissions?" He asks, leaning forward to show his enthrallment with my sub-par writing hobby.

"Mostly romance, really; that's quite popular nowadays," I grin, hoping to throw him off my back, to no avail. His eyes gleam with excitement, so I offer him a bit more to chew on. "I work on my novel occasionally, but it's truly not much,"

"I'm a romance reader myself," he leaned back, cutting my words off and crossing his arms, as if content with his actions.

"Is that so?" I question, clearing my throat and brushing my hair out of my face. "Who's your favorite? I know it can be hard to choose--"

"Colleen Hoover, as of now," he tilted his head with a smug smile that read 'I researched this just for you, and now I finally have my moment to use it.'

"Ah," I nodded. "Excuse me a moment."

With that, I stood, gathered my things, tucked my wallet under my arm, and left right in his view.

Blood on my hands,

rivulets of red stain my soul.

Found and bound

to the nowhere prison.

Pinned to my bed,

barely breathing,

almost dead,

in the nowhere prison.

Blood on my hands,

rivulets of blood stain my soul.

Found and buried

in the nowhere prison.

Invisible. Invisibility had pestered Constance since she took her first steps. They weren’t the first within her house– They were, in fact, the fifth.

Though, it wasn’t just her first steps that felt entirely cheap. It was her first A+, her first award, and her first nomination for class president– These perfections that she strived for were all not firsts but fifths.

Constance’s family was nothing but perfection. Not meeting, but exceeding expectations. So, when feeling invisible morphed into turning invisible, she took it and ran. She finally had a first. Unless her siblings had something peculiar about them that they didn’t tell her.

Still, invisibility wasn’t anywhere close to where it stopped.

On her fourteenth birthday, she bought herself a cake; White frosting with swirling black letters atop it, saying ‘Happy Birthday Constance!’ The baker, Mr. Zepheros, she knew very well, as she had visited him since her tenth, always requesting the same thing—a cake with simple letters and raspberry filling between the vanilla slices. The raspberry filling made it worth the money she earned from selling papers and small crafts.

But there was something different about this birthday, something incredibly neglectful. On most birthdays, Constance’d get a small side-hug from her mother and a few ‘Happy Birthdays’ from her older siblings if they were feeling generous– Mostly from Vincent, her older brother, whom she believed deeply pitied her. Her fourteenth birthday, unluckily, just happened to fall on the day of one of Vincent’s violin recitals.

It was his big day (as it had been many times before.) A day that would bring the family much fame and fortune and bring Vincent every drop of attention the family had to offer– So much so they paid little attention to getting him a cake. She stepped silently through the front door and attempted to sneak past them with a bag draped over her arm but quickly stopped.

“What do you have there?” Her mother chimed, prying the bag off her arm and peering inside. She had a smile– A genuine one that Constance rarely saw. She supposed that one of her seven children had finally achieved something worthy of it. The smile brightened further as she spotted the cake resting in the bottom of the bag. “Oh, how thoughtful, Connie!” She returned to the kitchen and rushed inside without glancing at her daughter. “Vincent! We have just what we need to celebrate!”

Constance watched from afar as she popped off the plastic cover, opened a kitchen drawer, and removed a fork, which she used to scrape the letters off the top of the cake skillfully.

She wouldn’t have minded if she had just asked, as she was always for a celebration– But the way her mother didn’t hesitate to do such a thing and didn’t bother to read the letters decorating her special-made cake was what truly got under her skin.

She cleared her throat and turned away from the celebration, carefully steadying her steps as she made her way to the stairs. She’d allow them to eat her cake if they did it without her in the room– She didn’t wish to watch as each child was served before her until there was nothing left but the crumbs decorating the cardboard bottom of the cake’s container.

She quietly shunned herself for the burning sensation raiding my eyes and throat as she reached the top of the stairs. “We do not cry over something as petty as this.”

She walked to the far end of the upstairs hallway, floors creaking in pity with each step. Her stomach began to twist with anger. The feeling devoured her like a flame, rocketing through her stomach and reaching her chest, sending her to her knees before she could grasp the door.

“I’m so proud of you!” Her mother wailed dramatically downstairs.

Her head was on fire, and her skin was slick with sweat. She was in the limbo of rage and disgust– Her feelings were mixing into a disgusting concoction that she could barely name, and her body reacted with each twist. Each new additive started another symptom, and before she knew it, my hand collided with the doorknob– And the doorknob was no more, engulfed by soft orange flames that licked the faux gold aggressively. Flames that didn’t taint the metal bulb.

A flurry of orange and yellow was attached to her skin, licking up her arm and leading to her chest, which they rapidly overtook. She was burning up, yet her skin remained intact– She felt no pain, only fury– Red-hot rage that danced over her torso and down her legs, engulfing her body in flames.

“Constance?”

Vincent stood at the edge of the stairs, hazel eyes widened. She turned to face her brother, albeit slowed. Until now, she had yet to see Vincent portray any emotion, except for when he played violin with his god-given skill. Still, even when he played, she had never seen such fear. His face had paled further than its usual sun-deprived white, and his hand was twitching, hesitant to reach out for her.

She fled. It was all she could do. She could face her brother in her dazed state, or flee, leaving singed carpet behind her. The flames retracted into themselves, clinging to her body like the rage that ultimately began to subside, fading into embarrassment.

As she ran down the stairs, the flames dissolved. She pressed her back against a wall far from the kitchen and gathered herself, taking a deep breath. She had yet to contain her outbursts of invisibility, but she wished so greatly to be invisible at that moment that the Gods granted her wish. Just as the flames had spread, the invisibility did so, too, creeping up her body and washing over her.

She sidestepped and entered the hallway, watching from a few feet away as the family slowly began to realize Vincent’s disappearance.

Thud.

“Vincent?” Her mother called, brushing past the rest of her children to rush to the stairs, followed closely by the others.

It’d be a lie to tell herself that this was the first time something odd had happened to her. She wanted to be in shock at the experience, but all she could muster was a growl of her stomach as she eyed a spare piece of cake on the kitchen counter.

She snuck into the kitchen, pulled a corner of the cake off with her pointer, middle, and thumb, and stuffed it into her mouth as she scanned the house one final time.

It was unfortunate that it had to end that way, with her exiting the house, cake coating her fingertips as she gulped down a minor portion of her favorite flavor– But it was how it had to be for Fowther to find her stray soul.