Saturday, November 26, 2011



If my words were big enough for the things I'm trying to say they would be settled in the sand at the bottom of the ocean and stretch to scrape the big blue sky. Hell, they'd be tall enough to reach the moon. They'd fill this place like they've filled up my body, because I'm so full.


And I've considered a million ways to say this, but I just really do love my friends. I love them for reasons that would blacken all the white space within my reach upon writing them. I love them because I'm so incredibly lucky to have them. I love them for giving me bits of them and taking bits of me. I love them because they're people that I love. And amongst all of this, that's what important. I love them because we're friends, you know?


And I'm sorry that's the best I can do, but it's sincere. I wish I had more to give back. I wish I could take this feeling and box it up and wrap it with a ribbon and a bow to place on all of your doorsteps, so you could understand what you've really done for me.


And yes, I'm talking to YOU.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Days 4-7

The chills run down my spine
with steps so careful and unassuming, fleeing
the dome of my tired body
and tight-rope walking the strain in my chest,
clambering up my aching windpipe and
leaping and twirling out as breath
which says "I'm back, I'm back" and
with clumsy eagerness trips and sails
across the kitchen floor like little ships
and lands
at your awkward mess of bones,
your fragile frame of home in
which my bed lays, messed and empty
because you
are the patterns of my sleep.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Days 2 and 3









I don't know which is worse: having nothing to say or having something to say but lacking the way to say it. Often times we can find more in what isn't said. It's like working with negative space in art. You have to look around and between all the words and see what the silence is saying. See what shapes the silence makes. Find it's tone and stretch and color. Sometimes I enjoy silence in it's softness and ambiguity. But silence can weigh as heavy as word.



I'm reading a book about the invention of wireless communication. It's fascinating to think that when you're talking to someone on the phone it's all a matter of sound waves being converted into electric waves that are being transmitted at the speed of light over distances and then being pieced together and de-jumbled and turned back into sound waves and that's how you hear someone's voice at the other end of the line. Even when someone is speaking right in front of you, it's a complicated matter of sound vibrations reaching your ears.


Silence is much simpler. Silence is the lack of all scientific this and that. It is simply nothing. But, as we all come to know, nothing is always something.


Can you figure out what I haven't said?


Ok, Freddy Jones, SHUT UP.

Day 1 (respectively)

I'm afraid I finally caught a cold. My immune system couldn't handle the exposure.



Brace for impact.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Dear Anonymous,

I'm writing to you not for lack of anyone else to write to, but rather for lack of words to write to anyone else. You're Anonymous with a capital "A", and you've a name if nothing else. Anonymous, I've been thinking a lot lately. Isn't thinking strange? Thinking is just talking to yourself, really. Your brain talking to whatever else you are. It's the voice you can never be rid of. The more you try, the more you think and the louder the voice becomes. Our heads are filled with incessant chatter. I've been thinking about thinking. I've tried to talk about thinking but human voices only seem to further complicate the matter.

I believe there's a power in thought for thought's sake. Put one unknowing person at the head of a room and then fill the room with people all thinking the same number as hard and as clear as they can; will the one person start thinking the number too? I think so, I really do. Is that crazy? Anonymous, do you think I'm crazy?

"What're you thinking?" He asks me that a lot. I ask him, too. Reread the question, "what're you thinking?" Can you remember what you were thinking before you read that? I can't. Rather I think what I should be thinking or what I'm now thinking, which is just about thinking. Sometimes it'll be quiet and then he'll ask, "what're you thinking?" and I'll remember what I was thinking but I won't say it out loud. Is that wrong? Anonymous, does that make me a liar? A liar and a thinker and writer of anonymous letters?

The process of thoughts to words is perplexing, much is lost in translation. I've re-thought the opening sentence of this letter. I'm writing to you not for lack of anyone else to write to, but rather lack of ability to write for myself. Does that make sense, Anonymous? Anonymous, will you tell me what you're thinking?

Sincerely,
Hayley Elise

P.S. "A man's at odds to know his mind for his mind is ought he has to know it with." -Cormac McCarthy

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

I'm punch-drunk and exhausted, delirious and happy.

One day I shall write a whole series of volumes on the Science of Conflicting Emotions. As you can see from this post here and the one below, I'm quite the expert.

I'd rather be a contradiction than a question mark.

That will perhaps be the first line of vol. 1 chapter 1., followed by a whole lot of blank, white pages. Ah, but gray pages would be more fitting. When I have a theme, I roll with it.

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall.












I've been awfully weepy lately. I've been soft and teary-eyed and sentimental.



I teared up when I saw a dad sitting on a bench at the mall holding his little baby so soft and sweet. I cried in bed with my little brother when he couldn't sleep. I cried because I had to go to work and I cried some, too, when I got home. I cried because I couldn't stop crying. I cried over my poetry book and I cried when I lost it. I cried watching home videos. I cried because I felt plain. I've cried a million times watching the trailer of Like Crazy. I cried because I'm not going to Brown. I cried on Veteran's Day. I cried because nothing special happened at 11:11 on 11.11.11. I cried because people really are trying.


I'm happy most the time, but if I'm not I'm crying. Maybe this is just the tears talking. Maybe I'll grow out of my tears the way I grew into them.


(I apologize for the melodrama, truly.)


It's four in the afternoon and I've got nothing to show for it.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Lines for Winter
by Mark Strand

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

On the Art of Entertaining Yourself in the Back Row of Math Class:(a how-to guide)

1. Write little letters in your spiral bound notebook entitled "Math Notes" to random people you're never actually going to deliver the letters too.
2. Make a fortune teller out of paper and predict your own future.
3. Spark spontaneous conversation with your subconscious.
4. Spark spontaneous conversation with the German foreign exchange student a couple seats away (or any similarly interesting person).
5. Meditate.
6. Take a nap on your English novel and try and absorb the words through osmosis.
7. Assign each person in your entire math class with their animal look-alike.
8. Pretend to be a major punk/bad ass and act accordingly.
9. Pick out the interesting math subjects such as imaginary numbers and infinity and ponder them on a non-math level.
10. Imagine gifts you would give to each of your best friends if you had all the money in the world in which to purchase them.
11. Examine the outdoors through the window that looks onto the atrium.
12. Contemplate freedom from the public education system.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011





I may be experiencing a mild case of dissociative identity disorder. Sometimes I'm a romantic and sometimes I'm a realist. I'm a split personality. I get confused with which half is which. I see the world in such contradictory ways. Sometimes I'm Jekyll and sometimes I'm Hyde.

I can't decide which side is preferable. Perhaps it better to face the facts, to deal with things purely as they are. Life is life and it all follows cleanly into logic. But that is just my realist talking. Maybe the point of life is to transcend the everyday through imagination and higher thought. The mediocrity can only be beaten by personal coloration. And there goes my romantic, rambling again.

Maybe it's alright to be two people at once. There's my black and my white and in the middle is me. Gray has been my favorite color lately.

The first rule of Project Mayhem is you don't talk about Project Mayhem.