Maybe if I dress as the girl I’ve never been then I’ll never have to feel this pain again because these bittersweet songs have me missing it all and I’m not one for regrets but I regret that I left so I’ll just slip on these fishnets and continue to pretend I never took anything for granted.
I don’t want to be known for my pain, I want to make the most of my pain, and if that entails emotions to prevail in a story that parallels my particular mental hell and I can make you understand a specific circumstance then all will be fine ’cause baby, I’m one of a kind.
I wrote this poem, “Like Fine China“, without fully understanding what my subconscious was trying to tell me. After reading it a couple of times I realized the meaning behind the words. Fine China is the symbol for making art (something beautiful) out of sadness. The sadness is a constant cycle that manifests itself like patterns on fine China, royal “blue” (sad) details that I’ve etched upon the surface (my writing). When I have days that I break down, the porcelain breaks down, and I could use the jagged pieces of sadness to hurt myself but instead I choose to use them to build a display out of the broken pieces in the form of a porcelain vase (art from my mental breakdown) and there I show off pretty flowers (rhymes through poetry). The problem that arises from creating art out of sadness, sometimes sadness that a 3rd party might see as “old news”, is that these emotions I’ve recited are as good as dead to the world, hence why the flowers in the fine China vase I’ve built are decaying. The wonder in this, though, is that those decaying flowers offer me, the writer, solace. The cycle of sadness and creativity continues as the decaying flowers become a beautiful floral tea that I turn to for comfort as a grieve the ongoing pain I’m still in. Other people don’t see the benefit of the flowers (writing about perpetual pain), but I do. The entire process from fine china to a floral tea is cathartic, as is the artistic process, and in the end I feel okay and like I can survive my own mental state. Alas, a new day comes, the sadness inevitably returns as I am overwhelmed with reminders from the real world, and the pretty pain goes back to being “too pretty to comprehend” (commentary on not fully understanding what I was writing in the poem itself “Like Fine China”). Thus the entire breaking down of fine china (delving into an artistic outlet) occurs again.
Isn’t it incredible how art can be completely mindless but reveal something so profound in the mind it spawns from?
To have hope is to be vulnerable and open to disappointment. When you are hopeless nothing can hurt you, you’ve given up and everything is pointless. It is better to be hopeful despite the pain that will transpire because God chose us for the human experience and that is this life’s greatest honor.
I’m really not trying to live in the past tense but why after all the ways you made my mind bend do I still want to protect you from the consequence of how you destroyed me with your actions?
I’m really not trying to cause any hurt you might even ask “why would she print these words?” and it’s because I’ll never be able to move forward until I put these feelings on the record.
“Destroyed from the Inside Out” by Valerie Parente