Category: Thoughtless Words

Black nail polish

Maia Anjolie1 Comment

I only wear black nail polish on my toes. It is a sharp, clear, bold color, a way of showing myself how much time has passed. We can’t use our hands as evidence. No, we use those resources too much. So I look down. I let my toes tell me what I sometimes forget to notice: that time has been moving, even when I haven’t known what to do with it.

You know, being sad and in love is the only time I feel entirely alive. It’s like I can never take a full, deep breath when I can’t feel my interior self, my soul. I have spent so much of my life trying to find the words for what I feel, when sometimes the body responds to what the mind doesn’t have language for yet. So I wait. And I chase. 

I just watched this movie, Eternity. In the movie, people return to the afterlife at their happiest time. I keep thinking about it. If I died right now, where would I go? Would I return to that morning I left 407 Misty Wood Way, when I saw the dandelion in the grass and walked to my car, the sun slapping me in the face after spending the previous night (day) with someone I loved? I was smiling for no reason, like it was my first time. My shitty roommate, the outside noise, everything that had been taking up space in my life suddenly didn’t matter. I was so happy. So, would I go there?

I’ve been trying so frickin hard to remember the happiest times of my life. I want to scratch at them, get underneath them, replay them a million times, like I’m in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I want to remember them the way I remember the best days of my childhood, when a moment could be a moment without my knowing I would one day miss it. How strange it is to live through something and only later understand that you were happy. How strange to want to return to a life you know you cannot have again

I love smiling. I love that it stretches across our faces. I truly do. 

My mom always tells me, “Maia, attract, don’t chase,” whenever I’m waiting for something impatiently. I smile because I know myself. No, I chase. I chase every goddamn thing on earth until I can barely hold on. I chase the feeling, the answer, the person, the memory. I chase until I forget that I, too, am someone worth returning to. 

I tell myself every day that I am the love I give, not the love I receive. I’m trying to understand what it means to fully believe that. To recognize that the love I have given is still mine, when the person I gave it to is no longer beside me. To stop treating my capacity to love as evidence of what someone else owes me. To understand that I can be the girl who chases and the woman who is learning to stay with herself.

Maybe that’s why I’m trying so hard to remember. Not because I want to become that girl again, or because I want to live inside a memory, but because she was me, too. I want to make room for every version of myself without asking any of them to disappear. I want to be present for the life I’m living now, even when part of me still looks backward. I want to be able to tell the truth about what I loved, what I lost, what I learned, and what I am still learning. And I think I’m finally ready to let someone see it.

When too much time has passed, when I get stuck, the black nail polish is all gone.

Baby girl needs a pedicure.

Serialization

Maia AnjolieLeave a comment

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Book 1 Thoughts 🙂

Research Exercise #1

The installment pattern adds another personal history to the novel itself. Realizing that readers first received A Tale of Two Cities in parts rather than as a whole reveals an opposition to static narrativism. History here is not fixed; it is unfolding. It is cyclical progress, interruption, and return. The novel opens with duality, “the age of wisdom, [and] the age of foolishness” (Dickens 5), and serialization mirrors that instability. Each installment offers fragments: glimpses of the ugly face of royalty, chaos in the streets, religious undertones, faith, and fear. Suspense is not just in the plot but in the waiting. The first installment ends with the haunting image of a man buried for eighteen years. There is no resolution, only absence, and the name Mr. Lorry. A serialized reader would have to live in that uncertainty. Reading continuously softens that experience because the explanation follows quickly. Suspense becomes brief instead of sustained.

Reflection and memory function differently as well. Dickens gives us a line, “In any of the burial-places of this city through inhabitants are, in their most innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them” (Dickens 15). Who is harder to read? Who is more impossible to understand, the buried man, the cities, or ourselves? In installments, such questions remain open longer. Readers must remember them across weeks. Memory becomes active labor. When Mr. Lorry says, “‘Recalled to Life’; which may mean anything…” (Dickens 29), the phrase becomes a promise without immediate fulfillment. “Which may mean anything” truly means anything when you cannot turn the page. In a single volume, however, memory is assisted by proximity. You can flip back and move forward, and the gaps shrink. 

 Empathy also stretches under serialization. The introduction of the Defarges and the uneasy calm surrounding Lucie and her father deepen emotional tension. When Monseiur Defarge says, “‘And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possibly, and not only possible, but done…Long live the Devil. Let us go on’” (Dickens 39), the tone goes from this tenderness to menace. Reading continuously compresses that fragility, each passing moment holding even more weight. The emotional instability has less time to breathe. Each installment reveals growth, not only in characters but in readers. Serialization forces patience, endurance, and participation. Continuous reading offers immersion and control. The difference is not only structural but also experiential. Beneath this structure asks the difficult question of whether resurrection is ever complete, or if history only allows partial returns. Serialization refuses immediate closure and makes readers sit inside that uncertainty.

Unnamed Poem

Maia AnjolieLeave a comment 
I am waiting to turn on. Must I always have to choose? 
My decisions are no companions or enemies. That is only my relationship with myself.
My soul becomes bitter and my heart remains conditional. Must it always have to be like this?
My head swirls to the middle of what I must be be
when will I turn on and grow?
When will I not give into my own persona molds.

Stop staring into me. I see you are damaged too
We stomp on the bodies of the dead, yet their distribution of souls are within us.

I weep with you. I lie with you.
I must not choose the vulnerability of your given sides.

This world is brighter for everything you gave it.”