have shamansuit, will travel

Please?

Unfortunately, for you, anon, this is a request that has only ever worked once.

Probably, it will never work again.

You have to understand, words are not so easy to come by in the colorful chaos of my brainspace; they are many, but they don’t play well with others. Words are slippery creatures, they blend into the shadows cast by memories & doubt, & they burrow deep into bone. Even when I can catch them, they tend to turn to dust when they touch the air.

I’m sorry, anon, even with something to work with right now, even if we had silvered our skin with the dew the moon leaves for the morning, if we had tried to turn our bodies into one pale light in the grass, I’m not sure if even then I would be able to write you anything.

I think I might have forgotten how.

N

My dearest anon, I am terribly sorry that it has taken me so long to respond to this. I was away in the great beyond, & the cell service only worked over water or asphalt, & the shale chewed the life out of my battery quicklyquickly.

I am sorry that your week has been rough. & I’m not sure that there is much I can do or say to make it better, but I will try as best I can manage knowing nothing. Maybe by the point you see this though you’ll already be better. I hope so.

Think how small a week is though. I’ve already had over a thousand weeks, a bunch over that (but I don’t compute particularly well in my writerly brain) but what I’m getting at is that a good amount of those were pretty rough weeks, and an even greater majority of those were the sort of weeks that slip by and suddenly you’re three months in the future, & I don’t recall what made them rough or why they disappeared. I don’t remember the ache in my bones or the cracks in my hearts as anything more than the words to describe feelings that my body has forgotten.

Your skin will forget the hurt too. Your muscles will shake it lose. Your bones will crush it beneath them. Even though it feels like it a lot of the time, we are not creatures of pain, & when we least expect it, the pain vanishes.

If the hurt persists and it feels like there’s no help to be had, look for little things. Go digging through your own belongings first; find words a friend gave you, find your favorite toy, or your first flower you keep tucked between the pages of a book you pretend you have forgotten. Then find new things, pick up stones that are shaped like compass points and bear claws, that are the colors of moonlight and dirt, & then run your fingers through the sand around them to feel the wealth a planet accumulates.

Find water, find a calm trickle pearling in oakshadow, & listen until your heart is like a white sphere, smoothed solid by wet wealth. Grind your rough week against it, break it into white.

You are stronger than your bad days, anon, remember that.

N