feels like you made a mistake--you made somebody's heart break

I am surviving. Surviving with blistered skin and broken bones and nerve endings licked by fire...but alive. Survival is knowing the last breath seared the lungs, knowing the next one will, and breathing anyway. Survival is ash in the air and cinders underfoot and thirst never-ending.

Survival, sometimes, is being too stubborn to give up. To give in. To fall down and wait for the searing breaths to stop. If I am nothing else, I am at least that.



I have taken a wrong turn
when will I learn? When will I learn?
should I show them all my scars?
cherry-red, bleeding burn--

So many scars at this point, so much damage underneath them. Old burns, old breaks, old fractures...it's a miracle anyone doesn't walk across the landscape and not end up with shrapnel embedded in tender flesh, me included. Who knows what's lurking in the land, these days?



What any rational person would do...I am not doing. But I never said I was rational.

On the other side of the coin, this is not a rational place, even by my definitions. Things could go so very wrong...and we are not starting off balanced and level. There are pitfalls and tripwires and spike traps. I have carefully walked across the blackened earth to the cliff's edge, and it is crumbling.



Feels like you're making a mess
You're hell on wheels in a black dress
You drove me to the fire and left me there to burn
Every little thing you do is tragic
All my life before was magic
Beautiful girl
I can't breathe...

First it was certain topics under discussion, at certain times. Then it was certain feelings, pared out, planed smooth, examined under safe conditions.

Now it's down to breathing. Remembering to keep breathing. Keep breathing in spite of everything. I have no assurances and no control over anything else. Burnt air enters, toxic air leaves...okay. It will suffice for now.



I know that is in me to fail. Fail at small things, at large things, fail brilliantly, fail monumentally. Occasionally I fail in new and unexpected ways. It is in me to make mistakes and learn from them, and it is in me to make mistakes and make the same mistakes later, never having learned.

I want to learn from these mistakes. I want not to make them again.



We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

I am dwelling largely on the story of the little mermaid these days. Not the Disneyfied version, lovely though the songs are--but the original Danish fable, with the woman who yearned so deeply to travel beyond her sphere that she was willing to mute her songs and render every step on dry land an agonizing pain...just for the chance to take those steps.

Everyone concentrates on the sacrifice of the sea, but me, I'm wondering what would draw a woman to change her entire circumstance, just for a chance at something different. What was her life under the waves like?



for betty was born
to never say nay
but lucy could learn
and lily could pray
and fewer were shyer
than doll. doll

Consent and contradiction and glowing shards of what was, what might be...and what's the half-life of heartbreak? And why am I here again, and taking each moment day by day, anyway? It feels like playing chess in Chernyobl.



And what is the cost of all the fire, the end result of all the burning? If I must burn and burn again, let it matter. Let it crisp and sear and tear away what is unworthy. Let me harden to adamant and be strong enough not to burn again. If this is what it takes.

Hard surface, all the emotion of a star, reflecting all hope, deflecting all attempts...if this is what it takes, then let me be that. Gather my chains and remake my barricades, and be a closed capsule again, a walled city, overlooking the valley where the rivers dried to dust.

Let me be that. Not this.



love love love is everywhere
but not a drop for me to drink
tie me up and bind my feet
drop me in, and watch me sink

One step. And one step. If I have to break it down to centimeter progress, I will. I'll know what happens next when I get there.

I hope.



Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Because staying here? Is not an option.



This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I refuse. I will not be pushed. I will stand my ground until I am out of ground to stand on. Stubborn, so stubborn, but this has kept me alive more than once. And it may yet again.



In the meantime, I just have to keep things moving. Anything else hits the ground...there won't be ground left.

Home isn't home if I feel I can't go there. Safe places aren't safe if I don't feel safe in them. So I need to decide where my safe places are, and secure them. I need to decide where home is, and make it a home again.

And I will do this, through fire and flood, hail, devastation, and the vast and trackless wasteland of my heart, as many times as I have to do so.

Home is, after all, where the heart is.

Even if it's nailed to the wall.

(Lines quoted are taken from Locked Up by Ingrid Michaelson, Disease by Matchbox 20, T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, ee cummings' a pretty a day, Ingrid Michaelson again, Alfred, Lord Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, and T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men.

(Locations ranged from Fallen God's Dark Circus booth at Fantasy Faire 2010, the Chernyobl exhibition, the Junkyard, Tonktastic, the Stringer Mausoleum, the House of Munster and the Wastelands sim.)