i want my journal to look like the pretty ones i see on Pinterest

Written by Meg RuoccoPhotography by Calder Sell Abstract: “At night I try to curl my lips into a haunting.”  i want my journal to look like the pretty ones i see on pinterest { What are diaries forif not for writing down every inane whiny hormone-fueled thought I have at that moment? If not for stamping my words to paperimpress thought to paperabout every repetitive mantra of  “I miss him” and“Does he miss me” and “Why do I miss him” and “Why do I still want him to miss me?” }  I hold my penwith the rigidity of someone who is afraid to be themselves even when they are alone. Pinky dragging along thick pages of a diary, I protest things I was conditioned to be while silently wondering in pages if they’re true, the cloth birds on my blue bedside lampshade to bear only witness.  My mouth is a ghost made from vapors of what I hope to say one day, overrun by the bigger (more masculine) words that rest on my teeth in beer stained recliners. No one told me I have an evicted tongue.  At night I try to curl my lips into a haunting. My mind darkens behind red velvet curtains[DO NOT CLOSE. FOR DECORATION ONLY.]and some dusty old woman with a wrinkly neck wheels in a projector on a cart clicks the power button and blinds the blacks of my eyelids with light and the room is blue and my thoughts are blue.  I say I don’t want to see this or I moved past this last week me and my therapist decided, but the old woman just gestures to the light like It would be best, don’t you think, if we took a look at this one more time? for some reason the this is almost always a hymn him.  whoever the him is at that time and I watch my internalized misogyny coil in on itself.watchmy patriarchal-bullshit-o-meter and my “women power” t-shirts and my feminist ideals get choked out by the hands I miss so much. gasp for breathas the words I mistook for loving suck the oxygen out of the room one “well, actually” at a time. and I pull bloodied ribbons of hope and wanting and fear and shame out of my body like a shitty handkerchief magic trickfingers curled around again and again I miss you.  Do you miss me? What are diaries for if not for thisone womanperformance?  This silent protestation of myself.