"Screamed Fuck You *** to the Night Sky as the Blood was Running"
- oliviashearer75
- Apr 17
- 7 min read
I need to write a lot tonight. I need to do a lot of different things actually. The list keeps growing longer it seems, even when I check one thing off it feels as if two more take its place. I am running with Saskia in the morning tomorrow at 8:30, but I have felt restless in my heart all day (separately, my body has felt sluggish I think because of a lack of sleep) and so I think I need to just get it all out. So, I went to the Wawa and got a Celsius (kiwi guava in case you were wondering) and I am going to get it all out and then I am going to do what needs to be done for school. It’s 11:44 so the night is still young and “it will get done,” as YK always says. I’m looking at this document where I’ve been writing all of my blog entries; it is 17 pages long single-spaced. In relation to my thesis that length will be barely even half of it. That adds on a weight to the thought of next year, but still, I am excited to write it. Just nervous.
When I was at Wawa, I saw one of my friends from basketball. He told me his thesis was technically due yesterday and he hadn’t finished it yet, so his plan was to go to Wawa and get snacks and go home and write the rest of it tonight. It made my heart happy because that’s what I was doing there, too. I am writing a paper, a discussion post, a syllabus, and a lesson plan, not a thesis, plus I was getting an energy drink and not snacks, but we are in the same boat, or if not the same boat, we’re docked in the same marina. It was a much better interaction that I had prepped myself for. I put on decent sweatpants and a sweatshirt over my tank top before I left just in case I were to run into anyone who I may know who may be at the Wawa who I certainly have not texted. More to come on him later. (He texted me as I was writing this.)
I listened to Taylor Swift on the drive. My title comes from “thanK you aIMee,” a song I listened to during the summer of 2023 (? I think) when I felt like I was bleeding out after being cheated on. Her line, “it was always the same searing pain,” resonated with me then and it resonates with me now. I knew then that the pain I felt after that event severed my life before from my life after. I love my life after; I love it more, in fact. However, I knew when I heard it then, “it was always the same searing pain,” that the “always” was very real and very heavy. She sings it that way too. She pauses between the “always… the same… searing… pain.” Some things like that you heal from, but they really never go away. 3 years later and not a day goes by where it doesn’t cross my mind at least once, and when I get very run down and stretched thin from stress the pain and the memories tend to surface more. This happened at the end of last semester too, when I was living in a self-fashioned hell-scape. I had dreams about it a lot, and they’re back this time too. I had a dream last night that came back to me this morning when I was looking at the rug in my bathroom. Not entirely sure what it was about the rug that made me remember, but the shame and the pain live somewhere inside of me, stirred up by distress and ready at any moment to light up when I feel an ounce of emotion. Shame is a fantastic motivator. That’s one thing I’ve learned about those feelings. When it comes to the level of scorn and shame that I felt, I feel as if it has made me more protective over myself out of a desire to never be flayed alive like that again. So naive, so estranged to the actual evil that lives in the world. I am not the exception, and that is not a lesson that I will have to learn twice.
The other night I was talking to a man, and I told him that Taylor Swift helped me get through that “really bad period” that I had previously (very sparingly) told him about. He looked at me like I was crazy. I was like, “No, listen. I would think about how if Taylor Swift went through this and survived then I can too.” And he responded with, “Taylor Swift is not God.” And yeah, I know Taylor Swift isn’t God. Thanks, man. At that point in my life, I didn’t even have a relationship with God. But that’s beside the point because even if I did, I don’t think that that immediately discredits what I said. Nothing discredits what I said, actually, because that is my lived experience. And he tried to backtrack. I told him that his response made me feel embarrassed and then he tried to come up with something as equally embarrassing to tell me. It was a kind gesture; it didn’t matter though, because none of the things he told me held as much weight as the thing I told him. He’s not a bad person for that. Honestly, he didn’t even really do anything wrong. I don’t feel embarrassed easily because I tend to just love what I love and mean what I mean, but I think that his reception of something that meant so much to me, something that got me through the worst time in my life, just hurt my feelings. I don’t think he realized how bad the “really bad period” was, like I said, I told him very sparingly… I’m talkin like I maybe talked about it for one minute flat. But it hurt my feelings nonetheless, and this wasn’t someone I was considering dating. In fact, this is someone that I am very loosely friends with. But he is a man and for the first time in a while I experienced having my feelings hurt by a man and I’m just sad about it!
That’s not really what my heart has been restless about today. It’s mostly been restless about the fact that it would be sweet to have a good someone in my life. A bon quelque’un or, to just cut with the ambiguity, a bon homme to laugh with and eat with, to talk to and hold hands. I am so thankful for these years alone. I have been able to fill my life up with so much love and joy on my own and I think that’s why it was so easy for me to say no to the aforementioned man when I realized what was being offered was less than what I wanted and deserved. Honestly, I don’t even have space in my life for what I want right now, and I think that’s okay, but it doesn’t make the want go away necessarily. I think of myself and how I feel when I get home at the end of the day or how every waking moment for the past 9 months has been spent thinking about the next task or the next deadline that is approaching or how I work genuinely every weekend and I know that the timing is not right right now for me to have what I want. And that is okay! I just feel sad about it sometimes because, in the midst of all of the love and the joy that I do have in my life right now, there is a little piece missing. Not a piece I need, just a piece that I want.
Remember a while ago how I said I was making a capital “W” Woman move. For the sake of anonymity (and a little bit of my pride) the details of that move will remain unsaid. However, I don’t know what I was wanting from that move. I made it, and it didn’t necessarily go poorly. I guess, considering the fact that there is really nothing to measure how it went by, it went alright! But a small part of me feels like it was a rejection. Partially because I think that I misread what exactly spurred me to make the capital “W” Woman move and also because I showed a little bit of my heart by 1) initiating a conversation and 2) talking about Ulysses and then I got left on read. Now! Not a problem! That aint no problem at all and there are absolutely no hard feelings about that! My ass went out of my way to initiate a conversation on Linked In so I literally cannot say shit about shit. But it’s like, where is it that I’m supposed to show little pieces of my heart like the Taylor Swift comment or the Ulysses tangent where it will be received by someone who understands how much of myself I am offering to them. I used to think, and sometimes still wonder, if maybe that’s just a me thing. Like if I place too much weight in things like that that aren’t directly statements about me but are statements about things that feel like an extension of me. Maybe I can’t expect people (men) to understand how that works for me. All of the things that I love have become me, and it’s not like I can expect them to love every single thing that I love. Except that maybe I can? Maybe I actually think I can because that’s what I want. And if not love, just a curiosity and respect because, to me, that’s what love is. And also, that’s something that I really like about myself, how over the years I feel as if I’ve inadvertently created these little horcruxes that parts of my heart stay alive in. With the two above, it’s not like they killed those horcruxes, it’s just like… maybe they had the basilisk fang out and were tapping a little too hard on the cover of the diary.
The mid-twenties are a little so lonely, and that is okay because I am surrounded by the love of my friends and my family. I also keep finding new horcruxes every day at school and in my reading. It will all workout, it just takes a lot of patience, I guess. I love you all and I love you Taylor Swift.
xx
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