Kalina > Recent Status Updates

She tries to walk not too fast and not too slow. She doesn’t want to attract any attention. She pretends she doesn’t hear the whistles and catcalls and lewd comments. Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank top because it’s a warm day and she wants to feel warm air on her bare skin. Before long, she remembers.

She runs because she likes it. She runs because she loves her body, the power of it, how it has always saved her when she most needed saving. She loves to wear form-fitting clothing that shows off her musculature—the leanness of her legs, the gentle curves of her calves, the flat of her stomach. When she feels people watching her, she remembers the freedom of running and knows that one day, she will just keep going.

My sister was the only place that made any sense.

Alone, I watch the water move now like a clock someone is winding with a knife. I am starved for that easy taxonomy of Things Before. For the
years not likely to be cut open with scissors only to find proof of disease. Black hair spooling from the lungs of each month since. You’re gone & I collect fox fur by myself in every direction. You’re gone & I misname the trees.

Stone after stone, I’m defacing the river of being in love with you.
True, I don’t care how that sounds. I have a list
of cocoons to transform my body: Uncontrollable
Shaking. Sleep Paralysis. Dread of Eating. I’m guilty
of pretending the roads to your house are no longer roads
but deerpaths angled crooked through the marsh.

In my history, I was bones eating paper
or I was paper eating bones. Semantics.

I lived in a narrow house;
I lived with a man who said

You fucked up your own life, who said
I could never love someone so heavy.

The place was brick on brick
with iron grates covering the windows—

rowhouse cage, South Philly. I was learning
how some of us are made to be carrion birds

& some of us are made to be circled.

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?

-Anne Carson

'I have done it,' she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the
tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. ACHILLES, it reads. And
beside it, PATROCLUS. 'Go,' she says. 'He waits for you.'

IN THE DARKNESS, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.

THE GREEKS SAIL, and take my hope with them. I cannot follow. I am tied to this earth where my ashes lie. I curl myself around the stone obelisk of his tomb. Perhaps it is cool to the touch; perhaps warm. I cannot tell. A C H I L L E S, it says, and nothing more. He has gone to the underworld, and I am here.

My mind is filled with cataclysm and apocalypse: I wish for earthquakes, eruptions, flood. Only that seems large enough to hold all of my rage and grief. I want the world overturned like a bowl of eggs, smashed at my feet.

It was spring, and we were surrounded by the profusion of Anatolian fertility. For three weeks the earth would paint herself in every color, burst every bud, unfurl each rioting petal. Then, the wild flush of her excitement spent, she would settle down to the steady work of summer. It was my favorite time of year.

In the end:

I really do hope you find what you’re looking for, and I hope you find
something new to look for after that, and I hope some part of you is
always looking and that you discover that searching is something
beautiful we all do.


I hope you never stop looking for you.

We’re all pretending to be something that we secretly don’t want to
be. We all think we know what we want sometimes and we think
we’re dedicated and strong enough to get it, until we’re distracted.
We all stay up late at night writing sentences in lists that start with
the words 'we all' in the hope that whatever we feel, we don’t feel it
alone. Don’t we?

And we’re all looking for the one strange trick that’ll make us happy.
We’re all hoping it’s something we can buy or something that will
change us just by thinking about it, like being in the now, or letting go
or enjoying what you have
or setting a goal
or taking up a hobby.
We all miss something or someone we’re not supposed to miss.

They should’ve said:

'You should know: I kept every ticket.

Because I want to remember
every good place we went.

Even if the movie was horrible.

Even if the concert started late and it rained.

Even if the train took us
somewhere we were never meant to go.

I want to remember.'

There is someone trying
one more time,
and then giving up,
not knowing that they still had to
try one more time after that.

There is someone in all of us.

Show me how you tell someone that the thought of them spreads
like a warm river through your soul, until it leaves through the eyes.

How do you tell someone that you would do everything
for them.

How do you explain that there is no greater force in the universe
than the love you have in your heart for them.

Not everyone wins the lottery,
but everyone who does
bought a ticket.

To live the life you want,
you have to be brave
and buy the ticket every single day.

Kindness is not a currency, and if you treat it like one, then that is
not kindness.

'I know who I am. I am the one that looks for me. And every single
day, I find me again. I find myself in the things I do and the things I
notice. I find myself in crowds and in solitude. I find myself in quiet
moments and at the top of tall mountains. I find myself in the tips of
waves, in forests, and in the books I read.

I find myself in leaves and rain and old photos.

Every single day, I find me again.'

Take a moment, now, to be conscious of
what you’re doing with your time.

If you intend to waste it, that’s fine,
just be aware that you’re wasting it.

Do not confuse being in the same room,
with spending good time with another
human being.

Do not confuse the distractions of the world,
with the world itself.

They’ll say,

'We can make miles if we hold our breaths and dive beneath the
sheets together, we can make it all the way there and back if you
trust me.

We can make it somewhere good.

Trust me when I say I love you like the light in
autumn loves the leaves, like a wave loves the sand, like good loves
bad, like everything we can still be
to each other.'

Somewhere, you can stretch every moment into a
kind of forever.

Here is something that makes me happy:

I believe that there is a restaurant somewhere in
the universe that serves nothing but first meals
and last meals.

The first time you ate with the person you loved.

The first time you discovered you enjoyed something, you always
thought you’d hated, and the last time you ate with someone,
without knowing it was the last time.

There is a straight line that stretches back through every parent
sitting in a chair looking at their child playing, knowing that their
own parents must have looked at them the same way, and that one
day the child you are looking at, will look at their own children like
that, and you will be gone in all but the
realization that you are joined by this
imaginary line that stretches
through generations.

Now listen:

You are made of good things.

You are capable of incredible things.

You are a song the universe sings itself,
in every color it can imagine.
Some parts are sad.

Some parts are happy.

Every part of the song, is a part of you.

Listen.

We forget that this is true of every person we meet.

We only hear the loudest voices when really, we should be listening
to the quietest.

*We forget that how a person acts in each moment is not who they
are, that each person is a series of moments and we cannot judge
any moment in isolation, and use that moment to define them. It is
not up to others, it is up to us, which moments we want to hang on
to, for good or for bad. We forget our successes and enshrine our
failures. We forget there is still a child in all of us, begging for love.

You cannot say it is the absence of them, and the presence of them,
and the difference between those two things, that hurts the most.

The wind does not stop being the wind
when it stops blowing.

A wave does not stop being a wave when it

crashes

against the shore.

A story does not stop being a story when you turn the page.