just alyssa

Fall in love and you’ll write a poem, 3 love letters, and a love song. Get your heart broken and you get an Adele album and years of slam poetry… Do you know what it sounds like? When a heart cracks?  Nothing. It sounds like nothing. Your phone doesn't chime with text messages, it doesn't ring with phone calls, you have no voicemails, no emails.   It sounds like nothing. And somehow the silence is murderous.   Deafening. And you feel it in your bones. Literally in your bones. You try so hard to go about your daily life, but even the simplest things are hard. You hate everything they touched. Even Oxygen. They invaded all the space you needed to breathe, and even now every breath still tastes like them. Tainted. Warped. Eventually lost laughs turn into memories you can’t even remember. What did it sound like when they said your name? Do you remember the way their voice held those syllables? The way their lips caressed sweet nothings? ...

Alyssa: You’re turning 25 now, in just a few weeks.  The world is different. Sometimes it’s colder, more isolated. Other days you’re overwhelmed with the amount of people who filter through your life. But don’t take any of these days for granted. Don’t waste your time worrying about the future or stressing over the things you hoped to accomplish by now. You’re here and even though “here” might not be where you’d hoped to be, it’s still a good place. There are going to be people who walk into your life and walk right back out, but don’t waste your life crying over the ones who didn’t make it to every chapter. Be thankful for the role they played in your story.  You’re learning to adapt to new situations and new types of pain. Unfortunately these are going to be things that you’ll continue to navigate throughout your life. No one is perfect. Least of all you. But don’t let these moments of truth ruin you. Learn from them. Grow. Let them change you. Do...

I am a nothing but a pile of quirks and inconsistencies. I am made up of awkward moments and even more awkward texts and I don’t know how on earth I became this way, but I am... I have a very serious foot paranoia, in that I won’t let people see my feet unless my toes are perfectly pedicured and I fear them not being smooth with perfect cut and painted toenails. As if someone’s true opinion of me is based solely on the perfectly quaffed maroon polish that squarely shapes each toenail. And I hate the taste of tomatoes, yet I insist on cooking with them and putting them in tacos to balance it out. And sometimes I listen to my own recorded poems because my love for slam poetry and the pull for inspiration somehow satisfies me and those poems make the rough days easier, even though I’m the one who wrote them. Finally, I hate silence. I hate it. It’s thickness. The mood it harbors. The way it makes the voices in my head scream. And yet, it’s the most necessary thing on this planet. And I ...

I have come to the realization that I just don’t give a $#!%…. I remember being 19 and looking at the world like it was my playground; as if I was going to run and be free and save everyone. I focused on this hard in college. My objective was to pursue a career in Psychology and in school I focused on children and minored in juvenile delinquency. Finally after years of working 3 jobs and struggling with my coursework, I graduated with my Bachelors in Psychology and a minor in Juvenile Delinquency. I was finally on a track to where I could begin saving the world. Except, I wasn’t actually on that track. Instead, I sat, depressed in my house for months. The family I had nannied for moved away, I could no longer work in the SIU Child Development Lab, as I was no longer a student, and the families I babysat for didn’t need me that semester. I was unemployed, bills were stacking up, and my future was crumbling. I went from working 3 jobs 7 days a week and taking 6 classes, to sitt...

I don’t know what it is about me [other than the fact that I have all the parts that make me female] that somehow says “You have permission to say whatever you want to me”. It’s like all women have this giant stamp on our foreheads saying “access granted”. As if being female gives men the right to say whatever they damn well please. Newsflash: IT DOESN’T. A couple weeks ago I stayed after class to talk to my professor and, thanks to the time change, it was quite dark by the time I finally started to walk across campus back to my car. It’s a decent enough walk as long as the weather is good and only takes about 15 minutes or so to get to my car. Because it was after 7, it was a pretty dark walk with only the dim lighting from lamps strategically placed across campus. During my walk I kept checking over my shoulder, careful not to cut corners or drift off too close to bushes or other parts of campus where a person could snatch me. Wait. Snatch me? Why was I even thinking about t...