struck matches
entries from journals, the notes app, etc. from november 17th to november 21st.
Entry titled “Rose Garden”, 11/17/2025, 2:19 a.m. In a journal.
Nightgown and knee socks. Feeling soft and strange like I’ve undergone ecdysis and am now just the pale milky meat of an inside. Must have scrubbed an entire layer of skin off in the shower earlier. Few hour nap as a concession to exhaustion. Of course it’s raining. No Irma this time. Think I’m happy my mother is gone but mostly I’m frustrated that the bars of the cage are still present. Rattling them for what. Trying to pick the lock for what. I haven’t done anything that I truly need to do because something has frightened me into paralysis.
Listing poems because I have nothing else to do. Maybe I’ll show the list to someone one day. Young and confused; never with myself, though. Tried to sort the poems into PAST— things I felt as a child, think that resonate in a low place in me— and FUTURE— dreams I want to move towards— but I couldn’t really do it. Can’t conceptualize time moving like that. Isn’t now the future? And isn’t the future unreachable and untouchable? Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future… if all time is eternally present, all time is irredeemable. Still echoes down the line— a million girls walking around the same room as it shifts around them. Ghosts. Ran-through snapshots. Summer is contained in a tape I haven’t listened to since August and and now I’m setting it free, although I bet it’ll always sound like sagebrush and dry grass and hot ponderosa pine needles. Songs I’ve been listening to for ages like messages trapped in bottles.
Ghosts again. Sometimes I miss you so much I want to vomit. My heart all eaten by stomach acid and bile. You’re in poems. It’s never linear; it eats itself. Everything does. Rain’s coming harder. Oh I can’t stand it.
Untitled two-minute-long voice memo, 11/18/2025, 8:42 a.m.
Okay, so in my dream, I was sitting in this house— this one room house, like a little hut or a cottage. Really more of a shack. I was sitting there and, uh, my heart breaks open like a— like a rock and I— I cry and I cry and I cry and there’s so much more sadness than I thought, right? And tears are falling and it’s like a million little diamonds and it’s all around me and I’m, you know, Alice in Wonderland-ing myself into this pool. [Pause]. The water comes around my ankles… and then it’s up to my knees... and it slowly engulfs the chair that I’m sitting in, and then the table that I’m sitting at, and then I’m borne aloft on this river of tears. The door is open and it all goes down the street and I’m— and there’s the river and the river is the road. And I float down the road on this river of my own tears.
Then I fall down a storm drain and I break my legs. [Pause]. It hurts, it really hurts. I fall down the storm drain. I break my legs. The water comes and it crushes me. I don’t drown— the force of the water coming through this storm drain, which I’m sitting at the bottom of, snaps my neck. [Pause; sound of an exhale, then a breath in]. So I die, but then I’m awake again and I’m in the house. And it’s a never-ending house, and it’s dark, a black house, a blue house, a house like a bruise. I wander through the house, up and down stairs, through hallways. I’ve been in this house before. This is— [pause] I always see this house in my dreams. Whenever I die, I see this house. I think my brain’s idea of an afterlife is this house. It’s really just an endless hallway. It’s not even really a house. But yeah, I just wander through this house endlessly. Legs are still broken, neck is still broken. All my things are at the wrong angles. I’m all crooked and bleeding but there’s no pain. I’m just wandering— crawling, really— through it until I open the wrong door, and then I wake up. [Pause]. And then I’m here and it’s morning. And now it’s now. Alive.
Probably. [Laughter]. Jury’s out.
Entry titled “Hands”, 11/18/2025, 9:33 p.m. In a journal.
Watching my father’s hands. His back. The way he shifts his weight. He tells me how to make beef stew the right way, because I burnt it last time, and I know with dead certainty that I’ll have forgotten most of the instruction by the end of the night. Knowledge bestowed upon me in dreams. The opening of the sky. The temperature is beginning to really drop; we’ve gone from brisk to brittle in a day.
His skin. His stubble. The back of his neck. I’m thinking of freeze-outs even in the heat of the kitchen. He complains about women and my mother and the world as a whole. I know I can only get away with checking him because he sees me as his daughter, not female. I am not the enemy. I’m him. I am made in his image. It’s funny because the older I get, the more I identify with my mother and our shared personality— the I-do-what-I-want, the fuck off attitude. I know I get away with a lot by being a subset of him, though. I think of that picture of him as a child, bouncing on a trampoline amidst the clapboard desolation of the reservation. His tiny joy jumping alone. The wrecks of rust around him. The endless empty prairie. The cheap little trampoline. I wonder who took the photo and I know I’ll never ask. It’s too intimate to remember a specific photo, for some reason, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t an evocative image.
More doctors tomorrow. Another appointment with the psychic. I don’t know why I seek out violence so often. His arms, his graying hair, his posture, his clothes hanging off him. Steam lines the windows. It’s dry enough to make the skin tighten (overwashed-feeling; a milder sort of autism) outside, but not in here. Yellow light pouring over him like a crown of his misery. Ugh my head. Ugh my dreams. I go to sleep and see vampires and shipwrecks. I wake up or I don’t. Come out knowing things I shouldn’t. Ugh my eyes hurt. Soon this will be over. Soon the cotton across the bones will roll away. Ugh my heart. Ugh my soul.
Entry titled “Toad”, 11/19/2025, 7:57 p.m. In a journal.
Psychic tells me I’ve got a visitor. A todd, she says. Pardon? A todd. Like a frog, but not. A toad? Yes, a toad. It’s an invitation to joy. The toad loves you because you love it. You like the ugly things, yes? I guess I do— beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite, and because God is infinite, all divinity must be ugly. Yes yes, she says. Thank you. The todd loves you so much.
Laid up in bed because I did three things today— psychic, doctor appointment, and the drugstore— and it was too much. Watched a woman shoplift half the makeup aisle and didn’t say a word. They were out of my favorite shade of lipstick. My father let me get a soda. Drank it in the car while he was in the hardware store and tried to fend off the approaching migraine. Failed. Failed miserably. Burned my eyes out on headlights and angels. That’s what I get for not bringing sunglasses, even though the sun had set long ago. Now I’m immobilized. God coming— being born— out of my skull. Softness of the inner eye can be fatal. Ferme les yeux. Les yeux sans yeux.
There are things I need to do and I don’t care. I’ll be alone tomorrow and I’ll be free to figure it out then. Need silence. Need less light. Need to keep writing because I’m bored out of my mind, my mind that is trying to leave my head, and I can’t sleep or watch television or read or anything so this is all I have right now. Damn it all. Passing cars illuminate bars of light on the ceiling. I keep skipping letters. Oh I can’t do this anymore. Too much glow. Love of the dark is visible on my heart; you can read it like a book. I don’t want to think about my alien abduction or Bluebeard or anything at all. Wish it was later. Wish this terrible monster had crawled its way out of my head already. I hope I die like a child.
Untitled entry, 11/19/2025, 10:46 p.m. In the notes app.
Your birthday was a bit ago. Reading advice columns on grief— live your life in honor of the dead, they would want you to be happy, they wouldn’t want you to stop living because of them. Etcetera. Don’t think that’s true. You once said you hoped I’d sleep on your grave but they burnt you. Not even a headstone. Not like I could get there if there was. Called you Bluebeard in a journal during a moment of spite and I’m sorry but I won’t take it back. Never touched me but if it happened the way we planned it, I have a feeling it wouldn’t have been long before I sat mute in the living room as you swung your dead in front of me. You used to be in my dreams— in my head— but I haven’t seen you in a while. Forgetting your face. Don’t have any pictures. Because what were we thinking? To get married like that? Sweeping me off my feet to Vegas after my eighteenth birthday so we could do what. So we could live like what. So what could happen. Think we just wanted to own each other. Well I know it but I’d like to think there was something outside of that.
I know I was fond of you. Liked to hold your face while I buzzed your hair short. Bad decisions stack like bills. We wouldn’t have ended well. You would’ve simmered in yourself and I would’ve vanished forever. Told someone after the crash that I believed in amor fati and maybe I was being honest. It certainly stopped us in our tracks didn’t it. I wanted you near me because you had a plan. Blood on the floor. Blood through the keyhole. Of course I’m not angry. Of course I forgive you. Said I was fond of you didn’t I. Strange to be mad at ash. If you want to come stay in my head I won’t mind. You’ll be trapped in my castle that way. You’ll be my body.
Entry titled “Matches”, 11/20/2025, 3:08 p.m. In a journal.
And I was alone and I have been alone and, come the morning, I will be alone again. I keep striking matches for the sake of phosphorus. My mother used to eat the tips of burnt matches when she was a child, apparently. I’m not there yet but I could be. Sweet wood and smoke. I would dress myself in it if I could.
Didn’t get dressed at all today, though, just sat around listening to Nancy & Lana. Shaved my legs in the bath because the week ahead is going to be a whirlwind of unsolicited opinions from middle-aged women. Not in the mood for harassment. I’d like to not have to defend myself. How terribly sad. Watched the last bits of down float towards the drain with a distant sort of regret. It’ll come back. Eternal return of even the smallest things. People will be coming home tomorrow. Can’t say I’m excited. Sunshine through leaded glass. All the world is an oil spill. I miss my old bedroom window but at least I’m warm. That might be why I kill every plant I get— my warmth for their lives. Is everything in pain like this?
Not in the mood for poetry, either. I am sleek and hungry. Imagine my back when I stretch, my spine moving, my purr. Probably going to end up braining myself on ice cream and ancient YouTube videos. Little patches of missing skin. An aching loudness. Voice-like drowning. I am turning my face away and going into nothing for the night. Burning my fingertips on black candles. No more overt illness; at least there’s that. The room is all tangled. In there is a waiting monster. Fishermen stealing furs. I should’ve heeded the warning. Wish I was safe from Heaven. Oh well. All singing must now be howling. Drink full and descend.
Untitled entry, 11/21/2025, 1:22 p.m. On a sticky note.
All the leaves have fallen off the tree outside my window. Starting 2 feel like winter. Paradox of directionality again— winter pushes me deeper & higher. I condense. Preserved in salt; I shld live in salt. I wear my furs inside. Hunched down & beautiful on a cold snap. Things r shifting. I will b brave. Shoved down a well— secrets written on stones— casting wishes away— been on the run from angels 4 ages— no more horror— still black woods in here— love love love is eternal isn’t it—