written in october 2017
photo by stephanie antunes bettencourt (2017)
yes. I feel deeply. and sometimes I feel nothing at all. I can choose to show certain layers, or I just do it without thinking. human beings are composed of multiple selves and show some or many. I am me in person, and I am also me on paper, except those two surroundings consist of completely different qualities and ways of thinking though they can be very much so intertwined. I am drawn to rawness, to what we reveal the least, to people’s very core. I must arrive at my own and dig through layers to discover more about the whirlwind and the universes that come and go in my abstract self. what defines who we are is splattered across an array of things. I am a writer of somethings and everythings, nothing in particular, only scrawled efforts of those things I feel, of what I open myself up to. none of you really know me, and that is okay, for none of us will really know you too. even those we hold dear the most do not see us for all we are in every way we are. we move between lines in the sphere of our very essence, of a constant drawl of spectrums and time that we cannot fully fathom. I open myself up to what emerges within my writing, within my poetry, rooted in what I feel and still do not understand, for it seduces something in me. and it pulls out art that I scribble and spill and thus creates something beautiful–not the words, but the efforts to interpret my mind’s wanderings. everything else disappears, and the poet emerges. the hopeless romantic, the bearer of every emotion I am capable of having, except when I crack open the door to wordsandwonderlands I have also opened my pandora box. the deeper the tunnel I dig into my core the deeper I feel, the deeper I hurt, and the deeper I rejoice. I am taking notes of my journey, using photography to bring vision into emotion, and I voice my stories aloud. I don’t care whether they are heard or not. I just want my voice somewhere in the wind, some indication of something different than what I usually see–the physical layer of life. I want to submerge myself into another essential layer of life, of ramblings and captures, of heartbreak and hope. sometimes I don’t like it, and want to leave that layer. I’m learning to master layers–my own and the world’s.
