March 2023 – Listen Here

I’m wound unbearably tight. A harp string one errant pluck away from snapping. A pocket watch overwound, my hidden springs straining, a treacherous tock, tock, tock that betrays itself through the nervous tick of my hands. 

I’m drowning in the waters of responsibility, the relentless tide of expectation. The appointments, the late-night rehearsals, and a concern I never asked for presses at the edges of my mind, gnawing and unwelcome. Like waves, obligation implacably laps at my nostrils, threatening to drag me beneath, to swallow me whole and pull me into abyssal depths where rest becomes a distant, ink-dark myth.

I burn with a need so fervent even the moon seems to regard me with distant disgust. A hunger… unholy, unmet. A hellfire that sweeps through my core, and every futile attempt at relief from my faithful toy only sharpens the black hollow it leaves behind.

I am both the woman sinking and the pyre upon which she immolates. 

An element unto herself, my Inner Goddess thrashes against the confines of mortal limitation. She rends and rakes at the bars of my flesh-bound cage, her vast wings beating against bone, her enormity suffocated within a vessel far too slight to contain her. She was not wrought for this… she was fashioned for the firmament, for winds that sing through every plume, for heavens without horizon, for ecstasy so vast it shatters us into stardust and hymn.

And yet… she is caged.

And I… her keeper, her gaoler, her betrayer… can do nothing but press pale hands to my ears, as though I might silence the feral shriek of her fury.

But there is more.

Beneath the water, the wildfire, and the keening cry of a caged goddess… there is the earth of my being. Ancient. Unyielding. It remembers.

Oh, how it remembers.

Not as a passing thought, but as sediment, as strata. Every wound driven deep, compacted under years of silence until it became bedrock. Every slight buried, yes… but not forgiven. Preserved. Kept. Left to darken. To harden. To grow teeth.

The world beyond me demands…again, and again, and again…that I bloom. That I soften. That I drape myself in the illusion of spring as though winter never stripped me bare.

But the earth of my soul does not forget what was done to it. The earth does not soften for those who trespass upon it. It does not weep, nor cower in meek servitude. Not anymore.

The earth defends.

Pressure upon pressure.
Memory upon memory.
Heat building where no one can see.

In my understone, something terrible shifts. Mountains rise from it, jagged with memory, sharpened by restraint. Every injustice given weight. Every silence fed to the calor below.

The ground trembles. A fault line splits through me. And it erupts.

Violent… molten fury forcing its way upward, devouring the confines that held it, spilling over every boundary I carved to keep it hidden.

It burns.
It consumes.

It no longer simmers in buried rivers of fire… it tears through me, an adamantine upheaval of righteous indignation.

And I… 

I see red.

“Noooo,” wails some fragile glimmer of my soul. 

I hold.

Gods… how I hold it.

With the brute ferocity of womanhood called upon to rise up, yet again, with hands fisted in iron resolve and teeth clenched against the scream that lacerates its way upward.

I bind the water.
I smother the flame.
I fold the wings.
I bury the earth.

And over it all… over the ruin, the accumulation, the strain… beats a maternal heart of devotion, steady and relentless, concealing what threatens to split me open.

I become the vessel.

The composed one.
The mother.
The grace.

The quiet embodiment of poise that others may lean upon without ever sensing the titubation within.

But the fractures persist.

They spread… filigreed and fine as spider silk… across my heart. My thoughts begin to spiral, tightening inward.

I carry the mantle, but I fool no one. I wish I were forged of sterner substance. My right eye betrays me… a restless twitch under mounting pressure. My answers come too quickly, their edges honed too sharp. And in their echo, I hear it… her. That familiar, venom-laced cadence.

My mother’s voice leeches from me.

And I feel another fissure splinter across my heart.

The monster I consigned to the deepest hollow of myself, starved of breath and recognition, has awakened in the tremor of my weakness. And now… it peers outward.

Through my eyes.

I sit alone within the confines of my car, tears raining unchecked down my face as the world rushes past in indifferent motion. My chest cracks with a grief too vast, rage too unspeakable to be given form. 

And so I scream,
and scream,
and scream,

My voice growing hoarse and ragged, breaking against the silence.

I sit within my metal cage so that no soul may hear the mortal woman splintering under the weight of the world.

There is, at last, the briefest reprieve… an ember of release for the fire that devours my Inner Goddess.

The tent fabric flaps in the faintest whisper of wind, scarcely enough to ease the oppressive heat of the March afternoon. My voluminous moss-green skirts lie bunched in disarray at my waist, and my hands are not gentle, no longer restrained, grasp for Jack with a desperate insistence that borders on violence. I pull him to me, into me, as though I might quiet the storm by force alone.

There is nothing graceful in it. Nothing tender as I wrap my legs around him.

He meets my sharp urgency, plunging to the hilt, answering it without hesitation, matching the intensity with a force that floods me with sensation. I taste copper at the back of my throat as I bite back a scream, my body arching like a live current, pain and fullness braided into one. Unwanted tears rise, stinging at the corners of my eyes. 

I need this. 

Gods, I need this… and I loathe it.

I loathe the hunger. The weakness of it. The way it strips me bare and leaves me ashamed… ashamed of the longing, ashamed of the momentary escape from the weight I am meant to carry. Shame coils tight with anger, hot and suffocating, turning inward even as I move with something unbridled and wild.

Then, suddenly, I rise, pushing him from me.

My Inner Goddess unfurling in something manic and feral, something almost monstrous in its intensity. I press him back, claiming space, claiming motion, straddling him before he is quite seated on the edge of the inflatable mattress. I am blind with necessity. My vision blurs… I scarcely see him.

He could have been anyone.

And I hate myself for that thought… for the baseness of it, for the way my body betrays the sanctity my heart still clings to.

And he… blessedly, silently… allows me the illusion of control.

I rise and fall, but there is no beauty in it. No rhythm to admire. Only a frantic, unraveling cadence, as though I might outrun something clawing at my throat.

And then… just as abruptly as it began… 

I cannot rise again.

It is as though the fire has consumed its final breath of air. I collapsed inward, emptied in an instant, my body spent, my spirit hollowed. The heat within the tent presses close, suffocating; the presence of others just beyond that thin veil of fabric suddenly unbearable.

I have nothing left to give.

Not even voice.

The sobs that seize my chest are silent, violent things, tearing through me without sound, without misericord. I do not even know if I found release with Jack… or if I simply burned white-hot, like magnesium, and was gone just as quickly.

I withdraw, slowly, gathering myself in fragments, my body folding in on its own ruin.

“Water,” I offer. A weak excuse… the word thin and insufficient.

Because there is nothing else to say.

And I hate myself for it as I rearrange my skirts.

Days pass, though I scarcely feel their procession, and I struggle simply to keep my head above the ceaseless swell… the waves batting at my lashes, salt and sting blurring the boundary between breath and drowning. I cast aside the books that would fan the embers into an inferno, refuse the call of pages that might awaken what I cannot afford to feel. I turn from the wings that ache for the firmament, denying them their sky.

And still, I draw breath… even through the subterranean rage, the anger that moves within me like tectonic unrest, straining upward, magma simmering on the brink of eruption.

I move through the world as a wraith of myself… half-formed, half-felt. My smile is a carefully lacquered veneer, and my whimsical, twirling dresses serve as a charming deception… a masquerade draped over something far less palatable.

I maintain the illusion.

I always do.

And yet… I am so very tired.

I miss myself with a longing that borders on grief, even as I reinforce the enchanted bars of my own confinement… doubling them, strengthening them, ensuring that nothing escapes which might unravel the fragile order I have constructed. I do what must be done. I become who must be embodied.

I am calm.

I am maternal devotion.

I am grace.

I am honor.

And still… I recoil from the artifice of it.

There is a falseness that clings to me like damp earth, rank, suffocating. I do not wish to smile. I do not wish to soften. There is no sweetness in me now that feels honest.

Because underneath it… below the practiced composure… there is the earth.

And it is angry.

My rage demands a voice. It roars for justice, for retribution against wounds it deems unforgivable, against wrongs that fester without redress. It is not quiet, not noble… it is vast and consuming and unsparing, driven by horrors of the past.

There are moments… dark, fleeting, and terrible… where I want the world itself to bleed.

Not from cruelty, but so that something, anything, might mirror the violence I carry within.

To sit, for once, in the terrible symmetry of it.
To witness the scales tilt.

I don’t.
I do.

And still… I am so very tired.

Tired of holding.
Tired of containing.
Tired of standing as the seawall against which the whole of the world hurls itself… wave after relentless wave… because it knows, with absolute certainty, that I will always be there for them.

And yet… I am so very tired.

There is an evening with Jack. This time, there is the cool hush of air-conditioned stillness, the wide, indulgent expanse of his bed… a softness meant to invite surrender. But I cannot give myself to it. I have done too well… crafted my defenses with such precision… that in preserving myself, I have misplaced something essential.

The feminine.
The magic.
The ethereal, luminous goddess that once moved so freely within me.

She is gone from my reach.

In her place, there is shadow… dense and impenetrable. Coiled fury. I flinch from touch, from closeness, from the very communion I once craved. My soul feels hollowed of light, filled instead with a darkness the world will never witness, never comprehend.

I straddle him and guide him to my core, but even as I settle over him, forming around him, I cannot feel him. Nothing answers.

My thighs piston, body mechanical, and I clench my eyes searching for sensation, for spark, for even the faintest flicker of that once-radiant fire… but I find only absence.

I have done too good a job.

My Inner Goddess has withdrawn… curled tightly into herself like a wounded creature, wary and silent, no longer trusting the hand that once unlatched her cage and bade her claim the heavens.

And I ache for her.

There was a balmy afternoon upon Olympus, the air thick with warmth and languid laughter, and I stood among those dearest to me. I should have felt it… that sacred companionship, that easy, golden sense of belonging in cherished company. And yet, I did not. I felt too sharp, too finely drawn, my words a whip poised to strike, my mood brittle, my senses stretched thin.

Even as two Olympian gods reclined upon the great pallet… indolent and divine, surrounded and adored by goddesses worshiping their adamantine cocks – I found myself reaching inward, searching for my Inner Goddess, for desire… for even lust… to bloom unrestrained. But there was nothing there to greet me. Only a distant chill, a quiet frost where warmth should have taken root, as though the earth within me had gone fallow.

I moved as though in ritual rather than desire, carried along by the rhythm of it all… a symphony of breath and skin I should have delighted in… yet I could not find myself within it. I went through the motions where I should have been rapturous. Instead, I drifted, unmoored, unable to rise on wings that would not answer me.

Frustration redoubled, a molten thing denied eruption, while above it all my wings lay stilled, bound in their folding, refusing even the memory of sky.

I do not want to be this…this sharpened, haggish version of myself. I understand, in some distant, rational way, that this is instinct. That my fire is fed by new vows, by promises etched into bone:

never again to be diminished,
never again to be used,
never again to surrender myself to a life that cost me too dearly.

The earth remembers.

So I fight.

I fight with tooth and talons against the ghost of what once was, against the pull of something that feels perilously familiar. I refuse to return. I refuse to be remade into something smaller, quieter, more easily held.

But in my defiance… I have swung too far.

From soft femininity into tempered steel.
From capable flexibility into something volatile, quick to ignite.
From grace into a serrated protectiveness that cuts even as it shields.

And I know… somewhere within these calcified layers of vigilance… that I do not require such densely wrought, consecrated fury to remain safe. I do not need to set the world ablaze simply to preserve myself.

There are curveballs life will cast without warning, expectations that will shift under my feet, apologies that will never be spoken, and behaviors that will never change… truths that must be endured, not conquered.

In the haze of emotions too vast, my rational mind yearns for another kind of protective strength. The quiet dominion of composure that does not snap under pressure. The gravity of a presence that need not roar to be felt. The woman who, even as shadows coil and rise about her, remains sovereign, untouched, as though the world itself hesitates to mar her.

I crave that.

The regal stillness.
The cultivated poise.
The untouchable elegance of a woman who walks through tempests and remains gentle and thoughtful, her heart unfurling ever wider in love.

And yet… I do not know how to become her. 

What I wear is but a semblance… a careful construction wrought from years of survival. My expressions, a studied illusion. My face, a porcelain falsehood that conceals the fractured spirit. It is not her grace I carry, but an imitation of it… something rehearsed, something assembled, held together by sheer and stubborn will.

How does one rise above it all… not by suppression, not by force… but with that gentle, knowing smile?

How does she stand within the weight of the world and remain untouched?

Because I am drowning in overwhelm… my wings bound, burning with a wrath that seethes, drawing me ever downward into the soil in slow, merciless increments.

I am so very, very tired.

Tired in a way that sleep does not soothe.
Tired in a way that seeps into marrow, into spirit, into those unseen chambers where longing once resided like a quiet, steady flame.

And now… 

I can no longer hear it.

The sound of my own longing has grown faint, indistinct… as though the air itself has abandoned it… drowned in the tide, buried deep in the sediment of my own exhaustion, its final embers dimming to ash while I struggle to remain afloat when I was never taught how to sail above the storm.

Until next time, XO. Elsie