Dried Ink

By: J.R. Harrington

1. Stark

The seasons change, and so too do the occupants of this town. As it cools you see much less of the little round balls of fluff that the world seems to cradle, and more slick corvidae. Bluejays, crows, and squirrels searching frantically for food before they settle in for winter.

You are most akin to the non-migratory residents—the crows that stay in their territory all year long, stark outlines against the snow, sharp squawking in the hazy silence. Born stained, hidden steel nibs beneath your wings. You sink before the words fly, each crash prompting the creation of something new.

The iridescent sheen of ballpoint-ink adorns everything you touch. Sticky, trailing fine strands like wet silk as you pull away; leave it behind. It’s wormed its way beneath your skin, the whorls of your fingertips forming tiny letters when you press against paper.

Darkness comes earlier each night, but the glow of electricity and sound of distant words keeps you awake. Coming back to consciousness in the afternoon sun, irritated but with nothing to be done. The frost makes more than just your joints hurt. There is pain now, in every motion and lack of motion.

You try to make the most of it, focus on what little you can while your mind feels so slowed. Act like there’s nothing wrong, and maybe you can make it so. Before this, you were comfortable. Before this, you found miracles in every moment. Like water, ever-shifting—the cold has frozen you, but soon you’ll be soft again. Eventually you will be light as air, making puffy patterns in the sky.

You change with the seasons, and so does everyone around you. It’s so hard to keep track of them all, drastic change as warm leaves fall. You wonder how your mother looks, now. If she still believes you’re so much smarter than her. Intelligence was all she ever cared about, though she tried to hide it.

It was there in her asking you questions in front of her friends, letting you play poker with them when your brother was upstairs. It was there in her smile when you could intuit the meaning of the word “sheeple,” or when you learned to say “Δεν μιλάω ελληνικά,” from her best friend. The wink she flicked when you were reading on the couch, or the crinkle by her eyes when you won the second game of chess—she always won the first.

You wonder if she thinks you’re an idiot, choosing your writing over anything else, and if she’ll ever read one of your publications. You wonder if you can bear to send her one—to bare your soul to someone with such inexplicably high hopes for you. Could she bear to be saddened by you again?

Sometimes you wonder if you’re actually intelligent at all, or just a burnout with high hopes. Often you reread what you’ve just written and hate it more than improperly punctuated dialogue. Talking about your craft makes you feel pretentious, and not doing so eventually makes you morose. But everytime you come back to a piece after avoiding it a few days, it suddenly appears that you’re brilliant—or some better writer snuck in to edit while you moped.

It’s hard to feel like you’ll make it, with failures piling up. All these days spent unproductively. Every single day you haven’t posted a poem, every single day you’ve put off querying for minimum wage jobs. Like you’re stuck in a corn silo, and each motion brings you further down when you’re trying to spread your weight out. You forget, with the first frost, that you can fly.

2. Silo

Mother said to never climb the rickety ladder snaking up the side of the silo, on the farm you lived on when you were very little. And so that was your first ever dream, one you had every night for a month. You aren’t sure if you ever really climbed it, or if the dream was just so real that it feels like a memory.

Maybe you tried, and fell—you’ve never broken a bone, but you do have a pathological fear of climbing ladders. You think something like that happening would make everything else about you make more sense, though maybe later pains make up for a lack of early ones.

Now you feel like you’ve done something she disapproves of, and it’s biting you in the ass. She didn’t think you should move back home, you didn’t think she should have taken a socially inept ten year old across the country. But your room doesn’t have heat, unlike the rest of the house. The walls, ceiling, and floor are rough and unfinished. Your mattress is ten years old and profoundly uncomfortable.

You often hear insults through the ceiling, and aren't sure if you’re insane or if your sister and dad really are making fun of you. You hate that you’re mostly caught up on the word “moron”. It may be the first time in your life you’ve been called unintelligent by anyone who mattered to you.

You fail to scrounge up the motivation to make anything. You fail to understand what others want from you, who you’re supposed to be. Every move feels wrong, like a game you’re bound to lose. You’ve started to miss being truly alone, though you know it’d kill you to go through that isolation again.

You still feel trapped. Can an animal ever really escape its cage? Are you caging yourself, now, with all your fears? You’re so afraid to fail that you can’t even try. It just seems like everytime you move you sink deeper. Even certainty is uncertain. Are you being watched? Are you being treated like a game?

Two years ago, another October, you started having dreams of your mother killing you. A month later, in November, you sat outside in the cold for hours because you thought she had filled the house with gas, and was telling you the smell was just burnt food so you’d stay inside and die (it was just burnt-on food, because she went inside and watched TV when she got home.) A month after that, you thought she was going to hit you when you told her you thought you should be hospitalized.

It’s terrifying to think that’s your fate no matter who you live with. It’s even more terrifying to think that what you’re trying hard not to believe could be the reality of it. Three years ago, you started having lucid nightmares, and started seeking proof of your reality. With your propensity for hallucination, that was a wise choice.

Last month, your partner told you that you’re not insane if you recognize your symptoms. “It gets really bad when you start believing them,” he said. You wonder if he thinks you’ve gotten to that point, when you tell him about what you hear through the ceiling. You wonder if you have. You believe, but don’t act on it. That way, if it isn’t real, nothing bad happens. And if it is real, it

doesn’t offer an excuse to take it further.

If your family wants to drive you crazy, they’re too late.

3. Solace

Summer is the best season, to a rickety bird like you. It relaxes you, the warmth. You especially like to feel the breeze, watching the leaves wave hello. That it takes longer to get dark, because when it’s dark you have your head on a swivel.

Autumn isn’t the worst. There’s still solace to be found; in the color of the leaves, the way they fall and drift about to crunch beneath your feet. But you’re less apt to go outside, with the newfound chill. Everytime a friend invites you out is a blessing, you struggle to find reasons to leave the house that don’t make you nervous.

You like your room, when the house is quiet with only you present. You started surrounding yourself with art six years ago, after the blank white walls of your bedroom started to feel like a prison cell. Your bedroom was recently described as “stimulating” by guests. That’s it’s goal, essentially.

Bright colors are everywhere, from the cheap rug you bought to the hand-me-down tapestries on the wall. Each area feels like its own collage, everything fitting together—the pinboard, full of art, the front of the desk with photographs reminding you what to miss, the pressed flowers hanging on a small strip of wall.

You like to take a magnifying glass to everything in your room, when you wake up feeling down. There are little details you’d hardly notice, making everything just a little bit more real. You like chipped and broken things, your bluebird and cellist figurines from great-grandma’s house, your thrift-store circus music boxes with missing pieces.

The room is a bit of a mess, but it feels grand with a few friends inside; you let them pick a CD to play from your collection, in the fancy radio your grandma bought as a graduation present. Someone comments on the drawings on your bookend-statue, like little tattoos.

In your room you can do practically anything. With a pocket-knife you cut into a box to start building a miniature library, though you leave it dilapidated while you wallow in stress. With paint you adhere paper to a canvas, trying to reuse it. You plan things out, but leave it sitting while you stew.

Each afternoon once you pull yourself from bed you stand in front of the window and gently feel the leaves of your basil plant to gauge if it needs to be watered. Sometimes you have to pluck leaves to make room for more to grow. It always makes you nervous. This plant is your greatest triumph, these days—having driven with it across the states, having rescued it when it broke in half, you can’t bear the thought of it’s death.

The mother plant to this once became infested with aphids. You kept it for two years, but somehow those bugs found it and it was only a matter of time before it died. You called it Sunny. Unable to let it shrivel, you found the healthiest stem—obvious through the lack of bugs—and cut it off to carry with you.

You cried when that propagate broke in half, and smiled proudly when it survived. You build your own joy from the ground up, and seeing it reminds you that you can do it, again and again.