WRITING – The Unapologetic INKDOG

thirty-four

I wrote this thing, and it is not very good.

I am thirty-four

and the years have muted my seaglass shine
but I have not been polished smooth —
I am roughhewn, stormworn,
firescarred and scorched,
all jagged margins and serrated edges

and I cannot shed the weight of these years
because this baggage doesn’t slough
(I cannot grind or burn or cut it away;
I cannot wear it like armor;
it does not insulate or fortify)

and I’m heavy —
heavy-hearted, heavy-handed
lead foot on the pedal

(slick pavement

no traction

wheels spinning)

and I think maybe my body is erupting
a mine-riddled warzone for Nature and Nurture
and I can’t breathe here
can’t stand, can’t move, can’t live here

and your questing fingertips
serpenttongue and eyeteeth
cannot crack my gnarled defenses
you can’t lick these wounds
you can’t ford this wreckage

and these scars are just scars to you
because you haven’t learned what I already know:

every life is a galaxy —
there are alphabets in these imperfections
you can read them like Braille
construct countless constellations
rove raised-relief replicas and find your place

I am thirty-four

(and I did not plan to stay this long)

I told myself
I was going to leave early
sneak out unnoticed

no

trigger warning: rape, abuse

She whispers it
and the tail end of that long, long vowel sound
wavers and moans like a worn floorboard.

You sidestep around it,
feeling your way along,
and when it comes again —

— you stifle it with your teeth,
sheathed beneath the suffocating press of your lips.

She is a child,
collects stuffed animals
is captured by your charm
and cowed by your condescension —

but she’s got calluses on her hands
scars on her shoulders

her legs are not shapely but sturdy,
with scarred knees and soles.

Soft and small,
she bares her teeth at you
but her tongue sticks on the consonant,
and before she can form the word

stop

you’re prying her open,
and she’s a tightly closed fist,
the jaw of an animal,
easy enough to break

kedim xx: lotte

Yesterday I doodled and uploaded a new ASMR video.

I still have two ten minute coffee can poems I need to write, but today I had something of a breakthrough that I would rather talk about instead.

I mentioned WOLF and Undersea and Coelacanth, but I also have three other characters that I adopted from other players: Cypress Frostfur, Szymon Cairn, and Lotte Ansbjørn. I know. Wolves with last names. It’s a thing. Don’t worry about it. Szymon is retired now, which means I pulled him from the game and don’t write for him anymore, but it was ridiculously easy for me to sink into his character. Cypress is the same way. I identify with a lot of their personal struggles and our neuroses tend to match up. The boys don’t react the way I might to certain stimuli, but still — writing for them has generally been easy, inspiring, exciting and fun. I struggled more with Cypress because I have played him since he was born on June 27^th, 2016. It’s really boring to play a newborn wolf puppy because…they don’t really do anything. They can’t even urinate or defecate without assistance. You’re just like, “CYPRESS WORMED AROUND, NURSED, AND FELL ASLEEP.”

For weeks.

Anyway, I don’t really feel like going into detail about Cypress and Szymon [affectionately nicknamed “Sizzle”] because that would take me ages and I have things I need to do. What I wanted to talk about was Lotte, my problem child.

Lotte wins the award for the character I struggle with the most, and it’s not for lack of trying. I’ve played her since Cypress was born and it’s never gotten any easier. She does things that make me cringe — she’s brash, outspoken, and dominant and I’m timorous, introverted, and submissive — and the vast difference in our personalities is probably a significant part of the rift I feel with her, but that’s not the only thing. It takes me days sometimes to get into the mindset of writing for her, but once I do I think her posts come out okay. It’s just…getting there is brutal. Not a day has gone by where I haven’t thought, “Man. It would be so nice if I could just drop Lotte and keep on with Coelacanth, Cypress, and Eirlys.”

Oh, yeah. I also play Eirlys, Lotte’s daughter. She was born April 1^st, 2017.

Everybody struggles for inspiration at some point in their lives, I think, so I don’t really dwell on the constant agony that is trying to get into Lotte’s mindset. Some people listen to music and other people read works of fiction or watch shows that inspire them, but that doesn’t always work for me. Originally I thought it’d be cute if Eirlys took after Moana a little bit, but that plan has been scrapped because although the pack she was born into was originally a seaside pack, they’ve since relocated. Now they live in a little strath in the southern hinterlands weeks away from the ocean. It’s…kind of a bummer, honestly, but that’s my personal affinity for the ocean speaking. Lotte hates sand. She’s from the northern tundra.

WE HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON.

I thought.

Maybe up until approximately an hour ago, I still felt that way.

Now, though, Sara Bareilles has done some kind of crazy magic voodoo and given me a flicker of hope for Lotte’s future. Her fantastic song from Waitress, “She Used to Be Mine,” has been on repeat for the past week or so. I never once linked it to Lotte. When I write with music, I usually pick a song or an ASMR video that I like, stick it into ListenOnRepeat, and let it play in the background. What I’m listening to doesn’t have any bearing on what I’m writing — I just need background noise. Otherwise, I get distracted by every little thing that happens in my house.

It used to be the cool, fancy thing to garnish our posts with song lyrics or lines of poetry that encapsulated the situation or the character. Some people still do it. I still do it, if I’m particularly moved. Cypress is heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and most of the titles of his threads come from “Dream-Land”. Similarly, I draw from a wide range of sources to immerse myself in the right feel and aesthetic for Coelacanth’s posts and for Undersea. Lotte, though? There hasn’t been anything I’ve listened to or watched that has “spoken” to me from her point of view.

Until now.

Because Sara Bareilles broke my brain.

Today I wrote a Lotte post that I was unusually happy with, and it felt like I’d broken through. I’d won, somehow. I still don’t know if I’ll be able to keep her long-term because it’s just…really, really hard to write for her, but today is a good day.

it’s not simple to say
that most days i don’t recognize me
that these shoes and this apron
that place and its patrons
have taken more than i gave them
it’s not easy to know
i’m not anything like i used be, although it’s true
i was never attention’s sweet center
i still remember that girl

As he often does, Arturo gives Lotte a gift she doesn’t realize she needs. He has married a soldier, not a princess, and it is all too easy for the young queen to lose herself in duty and responsibility. These things fuel and drive her, but she is helpless in the face of their demands. Without someone to forcibly take the bit from her mouth, she is too easily consumed by them. The dawn of the year has brought event after heavy-hitting event — the Donnelaith fire, her move to Teaghlaigh, and her marriage to Arturo; her ascension to leadership, her first heat cycle, and her ensuing pregnancy; the threat of Blackfeather Woods, the exodus to the hinterlands, and the exile of Olive and Dakarai. Add to these things the departure of her kaksonen, the birth of her children, and the constant struggle to keep them happy and healthy despite their dicey arrival, and what you have is a stretched-thin girl with a hard-lined mouth and cool silver eyes.

Some days it feels like Lotte Ansbjørn died in that fire. Some days it feels like she left with Dagfinn. Some days Banríon looks at her reflection in the water and searches for that girl, that reckless, hoydenish girl who wooed and won a gangster in gentleman’s clothing, and doesn’t recognize the harsher set to her black-masked features. There’s a stranger in her body, and only her eyes know that what she’s seeing isn’t what’s inside — but not with any concrete certainty. Where is the laughter? Where is the spice, the sass, the spirit?

Where is Lotte?

At present the soot-stockinged songbird is seated riverside, and when her mate’s call rises above the trees her charcoal-colored ears flick and swivel to catch it. Her children are already under Hemlock’s capable care, but there is still a moment of sluggish hesitation that delays her. Every day that Dagfinn’s gone, it gets harder to answer to the sound of her own name, not out of spite or despondency, but because without him to ground her it’s all too easy to forget who she is. This time, she is not Kaniini, Kitku, or Solene.

She is a stranger even to herself.

After a beat, she rouses herself to respond to that call. She doesn’t know how much time has passed, if any. She doesn’t clock the hours the way she used to. Her surefooted paws draw her away from the river and out of the strath, into the sweep of fragrant cedar where a forest clearing and a good, solid man who loves her waits. There is no ecstatic flutter of her heart as she stands, breathing deeply, looking at him; but there is a feeling of weightlessness that melts the ice in her argent eyes degree by slow degree. She warms to him, softening, a smile curling the sharp corners of her lips and making something sweet of them. “Turo,” the nightingale sighs, instinctually defining herself by her place at his side. It’s easy to cross the distance. Easy to snake her body hard against his in the old, familiar way, and walk a circle around him before pressing her lips to his cheek, his mouth, the base of his ear. It doesn’t fix the problem, but she doesn’t see that. Doesn’t care.

“I have missed you,” she murmurs, and these words are true.

she’s imperfect, but she tries
she is good, but she lies
she is hard on herself
she is broken and won’t ask for help
she is messy, but she’s kind
she is lonely most of the time
she is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie
she is gone, but she used to be mine

kedim x: feral

for sid, who deserves way more than a ten minute coffee can poem

I was soft when we met:
tame as your sweetest house cat
with approximately half of the street smarts.

There are dogs who will tolerate anything:
tail pulling
ear pinching
being sat on and bowled over —

soft dogs
tame dogs
sweet dogs —

when we met,
there was no bitch in me

no curl of lip
no glint of alabaster

I knew meek and I knew mild
I knew to sit and to lie
to speak when spoken to
to beg and to go down on command
I knew that no means NO

(except when I say it)

I knew masters and leashes
fences and walls

and when I finally got away
I didn’t know how to be free

I didn’t know that
bitches eat first

sit when they want
lie when they want
beg when they want
speak when they want
go down when they want

say no and mean NO
cut their teeth on bone

I didn’t know that
until you taught me

you taught me to run wild
sit when I want
lie when I want
beg when I want
speak when I want
go down when I want
say no and mean NO
cut my teeth on bone

you taught me how to be free

kedim ix: skulduggery

an acrostic poem about losing

She cracked the safe. They told you it couldn’t be done,
knocking into each other, shoulder to shoulder.
“Unless you got some magic we can’t see,” they said,
laughing all the while, “that safe, she’s holding fast.”

Don’t count on it, is what you thought but didn’t say,
unconvinced but courteous as was your wont. You
got it home, got it set, set your mouth in a hard
grim line, and waited for the inevitable.

Early morning. Broad daylight. She wasn’t like the
rest. She never needed shadows or subterfuge.
You never needed to cut your losses.

‘Till now.

kedim viii: coelacanth

BAA humbug, am I right? Accountability is hard.

I have been writing more often than I let on but a lot of the writing I do is for a game called WOLF. I actually received Member of the Month for May.

Since I already have several uploads and posts to catch up on, I decided to post some snippets of things I have written for my main character so that I can look back on this one day, cringe at my flowery verbosity, and laugh. It bears mentioning that Coelacanth is the inspiration for the artwork that I use for INKDOG.

Seelie is my life’s mascot, and maybe my totem. ♥

In the WOLF universe, Coelacanth is a wolfdog who looks impossibly like her purebred Belgian Groenendael ancestors but for the narrower keel of her hips and chest, her bright cerulean eyes, and her tufted ears. The wolf blood is mainly because without her being 50% wolf, I couldn’t join a pack with her.

takes place after weeks of solitary confinement

Coelacanth was a wisp of shadow among other shadows, and not even the violent trembling that intermittently wracked her vividly gamine frame gave away her position. It was only when she opened her eyes, startled into doing so by the different sort of silence Atshen’s heavy-boned presence wrought, that she could readily be seen. Perhaps she startled him in that moment, bright Neptune globes winking suddenly through the dark, but if she did, she couldn’t tell. She hadn’t really been sleeping — the line between the nightmares both sleeping and waking was so finely drawn they were practically one and the same — but it was easier to keep her eyes closed. She felt invisible then. It was simple coincidence that she very nearly was.

Suspicion had her whipping around, a skittish, spindle-legged blur of ink. He was here — the orange-eyed, pale-bellied behemoth — and she feared that the gray phantom, too, might be regurgitated from the bowels of the Wolfskull as he had been once before. Her slimly tapered muzzle swung toward the impenetrable dark as she skittered backwards, pressing against the wall, the belly of the Wolfskull to her left and the maw to her right. Her lips drew taut but did not quiver or curl — she had learned via the fangs of other tormentors that such behavior was not to be tolerated. Tufted ears flattened against the gentle curve of her skull as she made herself infinitesimal, tucking her small body as tightly as she could, the tip of her tail a frenetic flutter as her spine arched impossibly to fold in on itself. Why had he come?

What have I done?

takes place when she first gets kidnapped

Betrayal of this magnitude was a new and harrowing experience for Coelacanth, but the hurt it engendered echoed a long healed hurt from the tiny Groenendael’s earliest memories: the first betrayal. For just as Lotte had nipped at Seelie’s feathered heels to drive her toward her captors, so too had Selkie nipped at the heels of her infant children to drive them away from Nanaimo. Oh, she hurt! For the first time in hours — days, maybe; she didn’t know how much time had passed — Seelie stirred, a thready whimper trembling upon her lips. Her gamine frame was littered with bruises and punctures, but as far as she could tell, she was generally sound. Dainty paws shifted as she gingerly took stock of her injuries, unfolding the tight bud of her fear-knotted musculature to explore her dimly lit surroundings on tenterhooks.

She appeared to be in a cave that smelled of old blood and the fetid stink of terror, its ceiling and floor infested with ugly, serrated fangs. Yellowed with age and spattered with rust-colored stains whose origins she had no care to discover, they seemed almost sentient in the tenebrae — and she flinched involuntarily at the sight of them, tufted ears flattening and Neptune eyes squinting as she sharply recoiled. The empath felt quite plainly the panic and pain of the Wolfskull’s previous victims, and the grim miasma was intensified by the fact that she was literally backed into a corner. As a rule, Coelacanth was decidedly unfond of cages, caves, and corners — and she did her best to flee, nimble paws darting fleetly between the macabre weave poles like a little black pinball. She moved with instinctual swiftness, reaching the Wolfskull’s maw in record time.

Open air filled her lungs, billowing out the fragile swell of her breast, the parameters of which were clearly delineated by the scalloped gradient of her rib cage — but with only a single pawstep lying between Coelacanth and freedom, she froze. Tufted ears piped alarum as she looked intently down at her catlike paws, tipping her delicate head first to one side, then the other. They stood in sharp contrast to the sallow floor of her prison — and they served as a chilling reminder of everything that had led up to this very moment. She had no reason to expect rescue or respite — she could do nothing but endure. In a spectacular display of learned helplessness, she drew her rose blush tongue anxiously across her lips and issued a shaking whisper-whine of indecision, her ears crumpling like black silk and her carriage folding in on itself as she backed away from the promise of freedom and moved deeper into the cave of nightmares.

There, Seelie curled herself into a little dog doughnut and settled down, waiting for the pain.

It was not long in coming.

If anybody out there enjoys games like WOLF and would like to join, I do have a character up for adoption as well. Part of what I worked on for WOLF involved drawing up a background and profile for that character, whose name is Ixchel.

kedim vi and vii: lovemaking and iron man

I have been running fevers all week and I slept most of yesterday.

I still feel awful today.

Here are two unrelated ten minute poems to cover yesterday and today. ♥

NOTE: I know very, very little about Iron Man. Feel free to correct my terminology!

in this patchwork-patterned sea of blankets
sleeps an island chain
of mossy, glossy, curled-up cats:

tabby-tinctured
pastel-pied
stone and froth
sand and shale

you are the storm
and I can feel your whispers in my bones
eons before you ever reach the sound

you part the waters
send islands scattering
engulf them in pleochroic waves of velvet

and I am Atlantis
aphotic, atramentous
enchanted sleep
cloud of ink
coral-encrusted

you stir the surface
insistent fingers through seaweed locks
teeth of lightning
windward licking
growl of thunder
incorporeal throat

you plunge within
past the lurking reef
past the ruined ships
past the impenetrable dark
past the sleeping monsters
and find what was long lost

I am a spined thing,
brittle and bullet-riddled,
a settlement submerged

but there is magic in your invasion

the spires of my fortress
crenelated and crumbling
quiver

beneath the weight of your whisper
every gate unlocks
every chain breaks

and I am transformed
silver-spun and scintillating
wave-wracked and wanton
arch of back
flex of fists
eyes sharp-arched
and lips nipped taut

the cry of my clarion lost to the sea
muffled in blankets

to outrun the demons
you built yourself faster —
harnessed velocity
bent tachyons to your will

and maybe you knew all along

the heart is a flawed prototype
vulnerable and willful
racing and skipping
leaping into your throat
dropping to the soles of your feet

so you fixed that, too

see, you’re a genius
and your specialty is armor

armor and weaponry —
they’re one and the same

hurt you? no.

you’ll hurt them faster, harder
before the threat has time to fly

so you built yourself stronger
you gave yourself flight
you’re smarter than Icarus

(feathers and wax? please.)

and at the end of the day
after you take it all off —
all that gleaming crimson and gold
all that armor
all that weaponry —

you don the mask you built to replace it
impervious, vibranium
cast in a roguishly handsome
I-don’t-give-a-shit smirk

you hold your tongue like a throwing knife
and you press fingers to glass
as you look alone across your city

kedim v: stray

you

girl

I see you,
shadow-skulking
when you’re scared of the dark

spine shrapnel-studded
bent and double bent

I see you,
head down, eyes up
oblique-glinting gaze
above tight-locked lips

hunch-shouldered
heavy-hearted
stone-still but feather-light

tiptoeing
on tenterhooks

I see you,
razor wire fingers
sharp-shackling your wrists
knuckles worry-white

where is your flock, sheepdog?
where is your pack, she-wolf?

kedim iv: airplane day

Today is Airplane Day.

Thirty-two years ago I was put on a plane bound for John F. Kennedy International Airport with nine other Korean children. Eight of us were born in 1984, from October to December. One girl was born in October 1972. Our flight’s 막내 [“maknae” — the youngest person in a group] was born in January 1985, which means that she would have been considered a Rat like the rest of us — and I really do mean the rest of us. Coincidentally, all ten of us were born in the Year of the Rat. 1972 is a Water Rat year and 1984 is a Wood Rat year. Had we grown up in the culture we were born into, we nine could’ve called each other 친구 [“chingu” — same age friends] and we might’ve called Miss 1972 언니 [“eonni” — a term that means “older sister” and is used by younger females to address an older female they are close with; also romanized as “unnie”] or 누나 [“nuna” — a term that means “older sister” and is used by younger males to address an older female they are close with; also romanized as “noona”]. I’m going to put a list of the names of my fellow passengers here on the off chance some of them are out there in the void:

Choi Myung Wha
Kim Jeong Soon
Lee Ja Won
Kim Yoo Mee
Yoon Mee Sook
Choi Seong Jin
Kim Min Seong
Lee Seong Joon
Kim Yeong Ae

I came with an instruction manual like every other imported good.

I also came with a letter stating:

Re: (84C-3093) SHIN, KONG JOO —ALBORA—

The above mentioned case is the birth mother was unavailable at the time of intake. We received this child from the Head of Clinic after the natural mother disappeared from her recovery room. Therefore, no one has any information about the birth mother and we have no possible way to locate the mother. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Choi
Chief
Information Department

This is the first Airplane Day I’ve experienced since the rift between me and my parents became utterly insurmountable. This time last year I was still soldiering through, still trying to go along to get along, still choking on retorts whenever various events from my past were inevitably brought up in “casual conversation” — events that painted me as the villain to my own tragedies. There’s probably some truth to that, but there’re at least three lies for every truth when my parents tell a story. Maybe it’s cowardice on my part that lets me write publicly about them when I have not spoken with them since I sent them a text message on July 31^st, 2016 asking them to leave when they arrived uninvited at my door at 10:15 p.m.

Here is an excerpt from something I wrote that day:

I have not been answering my parents’ phone calls or text messages recently as a matter of self preservation, so tonight they showed up at our apartment uninvited and spent the past fifteen to twenty minutes banging on my front door [which was not locked; thankfully they did not try to open it out of curiosity; I am still not sure what I would have done in that case, but things probably would have become physically violent] and yelling and calling out to me. At some point my mother began theatrically weeping and wailing. “Don’t you feel like what you’re doing is evil?” they asked. “Don’t you feel that turning against your parents is evil? You can’t possibly feel good about yourself after what you’re doing. You can’t possibly feel good at all. You can’t possibly feel good as a daughter or a person.” My door is not soundproof; it was easy to hear them talking to each other and to my dog — “go get Mommy, Kennedy; go get Mommy and tell her to open the door; Kennedy, where’s Mommy?” — and I am going to refrain from posting the things I heard because I am ashamed and hurt and infuriated by them and because I don’t want anybody else to have to house this vitriol.

When I was younger, I never thought I would ever in a million years want to meet or even know about my birth mother. Today, though, just for a little while, I admitted to myself that I do. That not knowing sometimes hurts. I still don’t know for sure whether excommunicating my adoptive parents was the right thing to do. I know that my depression and anxiety are my things and not necessarily linked to them, but I also know that life without them is easier. I know that I feel healthier.

I’m not good at burning bridges. The fire hurts my eyes, burns my fingers. Everything I am is equipped for putting them out instead of starting them.

Anyway, enough of that. Airplane Day is always a bittersweet day, but I’m going to end this post on a sweet note. What’s important to me is connecting with my culture and connecting with people who share it and can teach me about it. On June 5^th, 2016 I received my Ancestry Composition Report from 23andme.com and was able to confirm my Korean blood; on June 13^th, 2016 I connected with a second cousin through the same website whose parents were born and raised in Busan. I have joined Facebook groups for Korean-American adoptees and have joined the Portland Korean Language Meetup Group. I haven’t been brave enough to make real life contact yet, but I hope I will gain more confidence soon. ^^;;

I’m also keeping up with KEDIM, even though by the time I publish or upload anything it’s a day late. As long as I stay motivated, it’s okay. Right? ㅠㅅㅠ

Tag: WRITING