I Didn't Spellcheck

Am I going to be the kind of barely-in-her-twenties, vegetarian, girl who binge eats three chicken tenders straight out of the oven because her sister called her self centered?

I am completely uninspired by the idea of being inspired. I find myself blaming the stigma attached to not knowing what you want or who you are more and more each day. It's completely stifling to feel like your mistakes are being tallied up like pounds on a scale, and reducing you in the eyes of others. I want to be able to trip and fall and have that be perfectly ok. Because that's normal! It's normal to be 19 years old and switching majors more often than you switch out disposable razors. I don't watch shows like Nikita or Covert Affairs to feel better about myself. I know that it's awesome to see women portrayed as strong individuals, but to me that's not real. I can't find myself, or any other woman I know, within those characters. We are imperfect, we are soft, mushy, and emotional. We are strong, but not because we can wear a jumpsuit, or find 20 different defensive uses for a kitchen knife. I want to see people fuck up, embarrass themselves, change their minds, and still keep moving forward. That's what's inspiring to me, those are the woman who convince me to get up every morning and just do me, whatever the consequences might be.

Badass is feeling. Badass is being able to face up to how much of a failure you currently are, and yet not let it hinder you from believing with all your heart that someday that will all change.

So hurray to the Lena Dunhams of the world. Thank you for making me feel less alone in my clumsy entrance into womanhood. Yeah maybe I will be 24 and still only paying for half of my iphone bill because I'm working as an unpaid intern at some publishing firm while I "write my first essay collection". Maybe even the Coffee Bean won't call me back in for an interview. Maybe I will continue to love all the wrong people in all the wrong ways. But it won't always be so.

It won't.

xoxo Yaz

You Take What You Can Get And You Die With It

Something really amazing happened to you. Something you never dreamed ever would be in your hands, red hot and burning through the palms of your hands. What do you do? You want it SO BADLY, you can feel the desire melting down your spine. But you can't have it. Or maybe you could, but you certainly shouldn't. So you make a list of choices, how to deal with the situation. You could: 1) Sabotage the whole thing. Be a madwoman/madman. Convince yourself you don't deserve it, until it starts to believe you. Follow every self-destructive nerve ending until you are alone once again, laying in a pile of ash. 2) Be patient. Simple, hard, long. Be virtuous, and faithful, and optimistic. Believe that if you turn a blind eye and continue to drive along the answer will eventually appear in front of you. 3. Pack up all your things. Leave. Leave it all behind. There is no control. We have no control. All we can do is try to understand that life is sort of a joke anyway, a sad and wonderful and short joke. Breathe, go through the motions, be mad in your head or all the other aspects of your life except the one that consumes you most. Be dignified. Take all the sharp turns and left hooks you can because bruises give you depth. Make yourself over over and over again, until looking in the mirror and not recognizing yourself is routine. All you've got right now is you. Maybe sometime soon, or sometime far, you will have him. But for now it can never be. The Atlantic Ocean robbed you of a second chance to taste those lips. Twist it into inspiration. Write, write, write. Light yourself up like a spark and marvel at your shine. Consider growing accustomed to a different taste. But then again, maybe no. I didn't say give up did I? Don't give up. You know you love the impossible. You know you are a challenge who loves challenges. You are chasing a dream. What could be more worth a few burns than that?

I Know All The Rules

When I take a picture of myself I stare out it for hours, on and off, trying to imagine what other people would or wouldn't see in it. In me. Narcissism or the looking glass self?

Could You Make Me a Cup of Tea

So it happened. You heard a song, and it took you twenty paces back. Maybe it's not the right time to swallow down memories and feelings and faces. To imagine that your pillow still smells like him, to pull out those creased notes from the bottom of the sock drawer and read it out loud to yourself. It's a good feeling though, to know that enough time has passed that you can afford to look back for a little while. It's only a moment of realizing that you will be ok, that you're almost ok, and you can afford to crack down the middle for just a microscopic moment. Melancholy. All beautiful things in life are melancholy.

Noticing the Little Things

Today Something Happened

I'm writing my first novel. It's really happening. I'm really doing it. Maybe, if I can conjure up the willpower, I will post the goings-on of my process....BUT what I'm really hoping will happen, is that I will disappear and write something truly wonderful and magical. So for now, goodbye. Talk to you soon. - Yaz

Don't Ask Me To Rise

I can't put into words what I'm feeling. It's like every thing hurts. My eyes feel like lead weights but they won't stay shut. I don't know what you're trying to do to me. Why is it okay for you to walk in and out of peoples' lives when you know damn well how much you rearrange a persons anatomy the minute you look them in the eye. I finished putting myself back together after leaning on you for so long and now it just feels like my veins and nerves are splitting and reattaching themselves. Why is it so easy for me to forget the horrible, cruel way you treated me? I just want to talk to you. I just want to talk to you. I want to lay in bed with you, like we used to, and feel, for a moment, that I am safe and understood. I just want to sleep you away. I just want this ambivalence to end. I got what I wished for every day for four months, and now I have no idea what to do. I don't know what to do with you. I just want to sleep. But I know I'll just dream about being OK. I'll dream that you and I are OK. I'll dream so hard that I'll wake up thinking I'm whole. I can't be whole, you won't give back the parts of me I gave you. To fill in the holes, the gaps, the spaces that were left empty.

I just want to sleep.

I think I know

I am the reason. I'm the reason you felt the need to bring what you feel on the inside, to the outside. I claim to be holding every one together, but in truth I'm just a single, rusty staple. I can only go so far before time sweeps over me like high tide. Just like that salty expanse of tears, I'm a victim of the capricious moon's ambivalence to highs and lows. I love you though. So I will attempt to be better. I think I could be better, better for you. Just give me some time to wash my skin of it's sallow color. Just give me a little time to compromise with my bones so they don't try so hard to make themselves known under my armor, which is diminishing day after day. I think I know what you want, and I think if I fight hard enough against myself I could give it to you. I just need a little time. I just need a little time.

Her Name Was Naomi

I want space. I want blackness, darkness, quiet, a vacuum. To be suspended, not even in air but in nothingness. To remember to breathe in deep enough that you can see your lungs rise. You can find auspicious dreams in mundane things; collections of bottle caps, toy sailboats, books weathered by time. I just don't understand what it is that I am supposed to be waiting for, or hoping for. I don't even desire to think about anything but the future anymore, and a destiny of living a life defined by unknowns is a sad one. And words don't even make sense. You just write them, speak them, sing them, and trip over them. But who are you getting through to? It just feels like you could scream and throw your fists to the wall and you'd just wake up tied to your bed, sweating: it's all just a dream. You're living a thousand lives at once, you're throwing your limbs into pools of dark water and you don't even care if they get swallowed up. What is it to be so jaded that you don't even think, every moment is connected by impulses. And impulse by impulse you get farther away from your point of origin. what is it to be infinite? to have no clear beginning or end? Is it better to have faith or hope? Faith is defined by a thankfulness for every day you that shows you mercy, while hope is a state of blind expectation. What is it that makes more sense?

The night is the only time I dare think of your face, because you and I can only exist in a dimension separated by every thing else we are. I can't feel you when I'm facing reality head on, because you are not reality. I can't feel you when I'm awake, because I can tell the difference between the haze of constant dreams and the line that crosses into actuality. I feel you when I see the moon, and hear quiet breathing in the night, and am delirious enough to touch my cheeks and feel the wetness you left there. It might not be real at all, but that's okay. In the night it is okay to feel imaginary things. It's okay to breathe in the intoxication of after-hours visions. You aren't hurting anyone, you're not even hurting yourself, because when you wake up in the morning you can't remember. You can't remember sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, hugging your knees, and letting everything that you push away in the daylight to come at you full force. Just feel it, take it in, feel it touch your skin, and know that you are alive. You are alive for a reason, because someone needed you. You are alive with every breath you take, and all the discourse you choke down with tasteless water.

You sit on the granite counter top, it's cold and it feels right. You slide to press your face against an untouched square of stone, colder still, and let your fingers tap ghostly melodies near your ears. You breathe because you are alone, no one is watching, and it's okay to fall apart in the twilight hour. No one has to know the secrets you share with yourself. When the Sun comes up, you smile while your back is turned to the rest, and remember those silent moments. Moments where you felt your heart beat, and you felt your soul speak, and you know. You know

But I Miss Your Face Like Hell

I've never had anything real before you. And despite my own willingness to write off what we had, I know it was as real as real gets. But there are things you can do someone you love that they can never forget. You can break something beautiful beyond repair. And God knows why we do these things to each other, but I guess that's how we keep motion in our lives. I don't know why you let me go the way you did, and you've made it clear I never will. But the thing is, I loved you, I really loved you, and you only loved me when you needed me. So tonight, I'm going to actually do what I've been saying I would for months and let you go. Thank you for teaching me, dealing with me, giving me so many moments that I only remember with joy and appreciation. I hope you find what you were looking for, I hope you find your will to live again, and I hope you find someone to breathe life into your every day. I won't call or write, and I won't ever say your name again. This is over, and I accept you as a vague and wonderful memory. Good luck. Love, me.

P Pan

I've said it before, but I am ill equipped when it comes to goodbyes. But this is especially pertinent when the goodbye itself is not paired with a reason. No jagged set of final words, no raised voices, or the somber pressure of the last hug. And It eats me alive when I have no grounds for letting go. Absence can be defended in the mind. You can invent stories; tell yourself they got in a threshing car accident, unable to contact you or voice their need for you to the bedside attendant. You can convince yourself that their reasons ultimately benefit you, that their selfishness is just a clever disguise for a selfless sacrifice. When you can't look them in the eye and pan for guilt or anger, it becomes a fitting reaction to defend them with a handful of beautiful memories and blind faith. So what do you do? You keep a vigilant look out for that blue, two door, Honda Civic parked on the curb. Does that make you a failure to yourself and the people who believe you to be a strong and independent individual?

You are like smoke to me. You signal heat, and energy. Where you rise, incredible things have happened. Things have burned, things have lived so violently that they thrust you out of their pores. You are ominous and significant as a symbol of birth and death. But by the time you are taken note of, you begin to flicker and fade. You dissipate into the surrounding air of innocuous normality. I reach out to grab you, to hold onto your drama, but all I get is a second-long sting and ash-blackened palms. I want you back, I want you back smoke. Because without you these blue skies will drive me straight into the ground. And I promised you we'd do that together, you push the dirt in handfuls over my eyes and I'll pack it tight around your chest until the breathing stops. Fading is slow and beautiful when you do it side by side with your best friend.

Modern Girl

I'm nocturnal.
I hate that I have to be quiet at night when I wish I could be bouncing around to Sleater-Kinney & writing music.
I'm coming to the realization that all I was missing in my life was laughter. I had literally forgotten how to laugh. No matter how funny I thought something was, my laughs would be forced. An awkward and contrived replication of instinct. Portlandia fixed my problem. Now I laugh a lot.

I am the product of my own imagination. If I want to be happy all I have to do is close my eyes and imagine sunny days and Fred Armisen. I can keep Tegan and Sara on repeat for hours on end and remember waiting in line for 10 hours to see a screening of their new DVD Get Along. Sara Quin and her beautiful smile ten feet away from me.

I know better than anyone that life is just a collection, a flimsy string, of memories. Who you are is subjective upon which of those memories you choose to bring to the surface.

There is nothing I can't do. I'm writing music that is blowing me away. I'm preparing for a life on stage, a life of story telling. There is nothing that can get me down now that I feel this high.

No one can let you down until you give them the power to do so. And if someone turns out to be the big bad wolf, why give them that much credit? Enough credit to get you down.

May you have an infinite amount of tomorrows. May the beautiful ones give you stomach aches from laughing too much. May the dark ones lead you to create beauty out of the awfulness of it all.

I wish nothing but internal sunshine for every one.

The sun will be up soon, thats my cue to nod off into a Donnie Darko dreamland.

See you tomorrow with the moon.

Yaz

Turpentine

I chose to wait. I decided that waiting for the ultimate final destination was better than moving on to mediocrity. So when I see that they're lives are moving on without me, why do I feel saddened? I don't regret my decision 95% of the time, but the other 5% are just an agonizing and circuitous slideshow of all the reasons I have to melt my sword down and start hammering it into a better shape. I am walking ambivalence, and the people I love pay the price more than I do sometimes. It's so selfish to want anything in a world that makes it impossible to achieve a single goal without feeling the flesh of an innocent person's face against the sole of your boot. It isn't fair that instead of using this fervent realization of my mistakes to fix the things I broke, I just sleep on the couch and stare at the ceiling, praying for rain to wash it all away (or at least give me a miserable enough head cold to wipe the slate clean). I don't want to be Meredith Grey, I really wish I wasn't Meredith Grey. Excuses pave the way through my maze of hallucinatory, straight-faced humor. It's this twisted gut reaction to lean towards the "i'm fine" approach that keeps me believing in crossed fingers and lucky pennies. There is nothing worse than straddling the line between harboring a delusional, innocent hope alongside an insatiable hunger for the ability to hope. There is nothing worse than trying to be yourself and getting tangled in your personalities. There is nothing worse than knowing that you're on display for an empty gallery. My chest is open, exposing my beating heart, and even the crickets are too busy to chirp away tonight. At least for tonight, it's quiet.

copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011

Thanksgiving In Retrospect

I’m thankful for this tunnel of light I just pulled up in front of. Amidst this horrible, threshing feeling in my heart, I found that I’m not broken. I still have hope. I still have a necklace of optimism laced around my neck. For the first time in my life, I can feel that my growing up is more than ostensible. I realized that this thing, this experience that I thought would break me once and for all, hasn’t made me bitter. Not only am I alive and breathing, but I have no doubt in my mind that I will get up and walk away from this fire unscathed. For the first time, I’ve realized that nothing can take you down but you. I might be lost, I might be forever caught up in my delusions, but I’m not broken. The next time you touch me, I will be heavier, fuller, and lighter all at the same time. It’s a tragic and beautiful thing to realize how much power you really have. So today, that’s what I’m thinking about. I’m thankful for every single thing I have, and every single thing I don’t, because I am me, and I am not broken.

Copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011

The Moon On My Ceiling

I was reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, and I came across a quote that quite literally knocked the wind out of me. Kundera goes on to explain how in all Latin-derived languages, the word compassion is built from a prefix-suffix combination that means, “from suffering”. This makes the whole business of being compassionate seem condescending, like you are lowering yourself to the level of someone less fortunate. It’s a word that has nothing to do with love or empathy. But in all other languages, German for example, the word compassion is created by a prefix-suffix combination that means “from feeling”. It’s the ultimate emotion because it means you are feeling exactly what the other is feeling. You are tapping into their unique frequency as if their nerves were attached directly to you. It’s an honorable and perhaps the most powerful sentiment in the human emotional spectrum. I don’t want to be the former. What use is it to be understood if you’re just a project? If you don’t want to understand me because you love me or feel connected to me in a profound way, then what’s the point? Compassion shouldn’t be a talent; it shouldn’t be an ability that you spread around the world as if you’re doing a good deed. It should be a natural instinct, when in the presence of someone who has grown into your heart like a rooted tree, to feel exactly what they feel. You can be as complicated as you want, but that shouldn’t be a test of clairvoyance for someone who comes along. If they should see right through you like an x-ray machine, it doesn’t mean they have achieved some honorable level of greatness. It can only be rendered significant if they can feel their heel throb when you step on a tack, or taste salt on their cheeks when you cry because you couldn’t make your rent payment again. I don’t care about being understood, it’s irrelevant in most cases. I just want an invisible piece of string to connect my heart to yours. But asking that is equivalent to me asking you to shrink the moon and place it on my ceiling so I can fall asleep fearlessly at night. I believe in magic, but I think you can only create it for yourself. The rest of the world will have to find their own way to get to where they’re going.

Copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I hate that feeling where everything you are begins to slip through your fingers like sand. You build yourself up, not realizing that the foundation is shaky, and at the slightest touch the whole thing crumbles. A single breath from the lips of change and you wake up one morning having shed your skin in the night. How nice would it be to be able to trust yourself? to trust in your instincts and convictions as if they were permanent? But there's always something that we want that our present selves can't reach out and grab, so as our desires change so do we. But what are we supposed to lean on then? If you think about it, the only constant thing is the past, but if you lean on the past then your not living at all. We're left hopping from one space to the next as they shift and shake and throw us tumbling off the edge only to land, not so gracefully, into the arms of the next person who claims to "understand". Then they catch onto you and wheel around your head until your too dizzy to notice them slipping out the door with a suitcase full of your ideas and plans.

I'm just wondering why. Why am I willing to participate in the game even though I clearly understand there's no way to win? And why am I willing to lose everything for someone who is as permanent as dirt on a car windshield. One revelatory rain storm and they're gone.

I'm just wondering why. Why am I so in love with idea that I'm not one thing, but everything and everything I want to be? Or maybe everything you wish I was.

I'm just wondering why being sad can be so wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMG6W-kPk6g
Drop-Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
Sylvia Plath

"People Are Strange That's Why We're Strangers"

I have mentally regressed in age. I don't know what happened. Have I always been this sentimental? Where's my brick wall, I don't want to be made of glass. I don't want to be made of glass. It's funny what happens to a person once they've completely assimilated themselves into loneliness. It becomes more than a lifestyle, or a state of mind, or an emotion. I don't know how I let it get this far. I know how you see me. I know you think you know things about me that I don't know about myself, that you have x-ray vision. I hope to God you do. Because that's the only hope I have of getting out of this mess I've made.

It's kind of funny...but I get lonely too sometimes.

To Remember

I predicted that they would be able to read in between the lines, that I had enabled them somehow to do so. That's what I selfishly expected of them. Yet, in the meantime, I had been living with the people I created. Ostensibly I waited impatiently in solitude, yet I was leaning on the shoulders of my imaginary spectrum of personalities. I will admit I have built so many walls over the past few years, but if one were to look closely enough they would see that the walls themselves were made of transparent and malleable material, like plastic. Taking into account the actions of those around me, whom I do not believe have blind eyes, I must conclude that this facade has become a perverse reality. Against my better judgement, I feed and nourish this malicious demon and its basket of fallacies. I stand back and taste salt on my cheeks as I watch it grow and envelope each facet of my being with its shadow. How can I stand in full view of this horror? I call myself a martyr, yet cannot identify the cause to which I have bound myself to. It is well known that loneliness will drive any man or woman mad, but it seems so candid. It seems too conscious of a decent to make the trek without an anesthetic. I am wrought with a dissociative sadness that inundates itself into to every new cell that groans it's way into my pores. I drive long distances and think this through, philosophical skepticism paired with ordinary skepticism ,and no conclusion is derived. I park in the garage, get out of the car, and think "fuck, I'm alone".

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.
Carson McCullers

copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011

Glow In The Dark Stars

Ostensibly, I get along better than most. I have my own world, and I fill it to the brim with the things I love. I wake up in the morning and know exactly what I want (a cup of coffee), and I go about my day with open arms. But the reality I see through my eyes feels extremely different. Hollow, empty, full, voluminous....It isn't fair to want so many contradictory things. There's nothing worse than loving to be out of control. Holding up your biggest and most dangerous flaws above the crowd, for show, leave the telling to the metaphors you hand out like paper money. You call yourself a poet because you believe in things while no one believes in you. You call yourself a poet because you write from your own perspective. You call yourself a poet because you make believe you suffer. You call yourself a poet because you play tricks on your own two eyes, and pretend that optical illusions are just a result of blind faith. You call yourself a poet because you can listen to the same song twenty times in a row and still feel tears welling up in your throat. But you're just a scared little girl who was born with an old heart. You're lost, and you love it, but you still continue to shoot up flares into the night sky just to see what will happen. You believe everything happens for a reason, and that everyone is put into your life to play the part of teacher, student, or both. The fear lives on, and the fear lives inside of everything you do. In order to understand the fear, you must become the fear. You must inundate every aspect of who you are and who you want to be with this shadow, and then maybe the light will come. And if the light should come, you ought not tie it on a string around your neck like a key, but shake hands, say hello, and watch it walk away with a straight back and unshaken disposition. A friendly encounter, a fleeting encounter, and a wound to prove it's worth.

Quixotic : foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals; especially : marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action


copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011

"One Put It On A Pedestal And Left It There"

Personally, I don't think I'm cynical. I think in order to be cynical one has to be logical as well, and I am the polar opposite of logical. I think my "cynisism" (I'm going to omit the quotations throughout the rest of my prose, but I'm sure you've picked up my drift by now) comes from thinking too much from my own eyes. My cynisism comes from too many hours spent contemplating the pros and cons of being myself. My cynisism comes from awful retail jobs and the mechanical routine of numbers, numbers, numbers. My cynisism comes from one too many late night PB & J's, in the hollow light of a lonely kitchen, against a backdrop of ominous and beautiful movie soundtracks. My cynisim comes from my mother, who cursed me with a pair of permanent and threatening rose colored glasses. A genetic mutation that romantisizes even the smallest instances. My cynisism comes from the self loathing that bites and scratches its way under my skin no matter how hard I kick, and no matter how many pieces of metal I pierce into my body. My cynisism comes from loving, too fully, the things that cannot love me back. My cynisim comes from obsession, an obsession with big and small. My cynisism comes on strongest after I've read The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by Shel Silverstein and feel that nothing in the world could be as impactful as those simple and stark illustrations. "One put it on a pedestal and left it there".


My cynism doesn't translate. It can't be talked out. It can't be cured, because on most days I hold it close to my chest. It's endearing being the opposite of endearing.

It's 3 a.m. and I am wishing I could have just one breakfast with Sara Quin. It's 3 a.m. and I am smitten with Ewan Mcgregor, and wishing I could tell him how much the film Beginners changed my perspective on just about everything. It's 3 a.m. and I'm scolding myself for loving people who might as well belong to my imagination.

It's 3 a.m. and I am feeling particularly cynical.

Goodnight.

Goodmorning?

Time doesn't exist, take it up with Herman Hesse.

copyright Yasamin Aftahi 2011