Sincerely October

Garden variety

A collection of poems written in appreciation of my ordinary life.

Daisies
I look down at my shoes, the mat in front of the door is welcoming me to my ordinary life.
I step into the house and admire the joy of normalcy.
The immersive joys of having a life that is oh so typical.
A life of thrift shops, painting on your t-shirts, studying in the morning and laughing when the day is over.
My life has been anything but typical, but things never stay the same, and luckily I got the chance to pick up the pieces and mosaic myself a life worth sticking around for.
I used to be followed by a storm cloud, I used to look for happiness in all the wrong places, I accepted the likelihood of being an early grave, but it doesn't have to be like that.
I don't have to write in the rain with the knowledge that I wouldn't be anything more than an overdose in the end, the sun has helped my daisies grow into my ordinary life.

Picking up the pieces
You are not running out of time, you stand at the crossroads and if you take the path pwith the flowers this is just the beginning.
You made it through the part in which you clench your teeth until it's over. You made it through hell. Don't go back.
The drugs will always be there, but you know better, you know who you want to be, you know better than to throw it all away.
Hold my hand, we can walk together, for us it is just beginning.
We step through a patch of flowers, what a collection of lovely moments life has to offer.
You don't have to be scared anymore, those days are over, the sun will keep you warm, the marigolds will keep you company.
You thought you'd always be desperately unhappy, how does it feel knowing that the truth is otherwise? How does it feel to pick up the pieces? How does it feel to know you have a beautiful life ahead of you?
You can create a mosaic, you have a life of beautiful gardens ahead of you.

May to April
I know you're scared, I know you feel like you are endlessly lost, but believe me you won't always be wondering.
When you had to bite your hand to live through it, those emotions never went away, you shoved them into the corner of your attic, and you cannot live with what you will not acknowledge.
Be proud of yourself for opening the box. Be proud of yourself for surviving. Be proud of yourself for crying and shaking. Be proud of yourself for telling your story.
I promise it doesn't always hurt like it did in May and September.
April has many beautiful moments waiting for you.

Reflections on my little dark age
You watched the clock tick, you watched the minute hand and when you were particularly impatient you watched the seconds pass.
All you wanted was to get high, you didn't care if it killed you, maybe you wanted it to kill you, because you couldn't seem to do anything in life but watch the sand slip through your fingers.
Your friends don't like you like you used to. She doesn't talk to you anymore and you know it's for the best. Your family doesn't trust you and you don't blame them.
You sacrificed your honesty for the chase. You didn't care what you had to say to them to shut them up.
In the beginning the chase for the perfect high is like a breath of air after what felt like drowning. The relief was utterly indescribable, it was like nothing you had ever known.
November turns into May, May turns into September, September turns into February.
You were a tree in a drought. You told yourself this could be fixed, that you could get high enough, but you swam too far from shore, there is no high enough, not anymore.
You hated it. You hated it because you knew you were depriving yourself of any natural pleasure, the sun doesn't shine like it used to, you haven't drawn in months and you know why. That doesn't change you, does it?
As much as you understand that this is bruising you, as much as you know this will put you six feet under the dirt before you can even recognize you're choking on your own vomit, you can't pull yourself together.
You want to pull yourself together. You will always be an addict but you tell yourself the story of the high functioning addict with the hope that you will learn to handle yourself.
Yet you can't control yourself when the drugs are around. This was supposed to last you a week but it's gone by morning. You weren't supposed to take it on Christmas Eve but you did. You weren't supposed to let this bleed into every beautiful thing in your life but you did. You weren't supposed to cut those ribbons holding you together but you so cleverly did.
See what I must admit is that when the drugs are an option lines get blurred and I don't feel like myself anymore.
When the drugs sit in my backpack there's no telling where the dams will hallow in but they will.

A photograph of a poem
The relief I feel is utterly indescribable.
I thought I would always be sick. I thought I would always be bruised. I thought I would die early and die aching.
I didn't want to live the way I was living but a new way of being seemed out of reach.
I couldn't stop writing about it. I wrote all about my little dark age. I wrote constantly because I needed to capture how ugly my paintings had become.
I couldn't pull a yellow poem out of me because the sun didn't shine through the trees.
Life has changed in a way that is so beautiful I write with the same passion trying to find the words to describe how it is.
I used to spend hours trying to draw over my bruises, and with a happy heart I now spend my nights trying to capture the sunrise.