VioletRaven

I almost forgot I existed here once, and I tried to forget the times I tried to make a space for myself here again. I wish I had left it all as an archive, left to dust and bone and shadow.

There is too much of me stretched too thin over too many places, and I can't keep up to the pace of time passing at the speed of time. I drift and the stars change position and it is all I can do to maintain the bare minimum of health to do the things that matter. I'm failing. I'm losing.

I feel like more of a medical statistic than a person. How many pieces of me can stop working and still house my soul? I am so tired.

And it hurts.

I have always been in pain but I wonder sometimes if this body has a limit. Everyone has a limit or a cost. There will be a price to pay, and I'm tired of paying in instalments, each successive organ that succumbs, each joint and system, the interlinking whole now a series of failed connections.

I too am a failed connection. I can't keep up with the flow of conversation. I struggle to read more than a couple of sentences at a time. It's enough to try to take in all the letters, all the appointments, all the diagnoses and prognoses and treatments. Tired. Tired. Tired.

Exhausted.

Shattered.

I wonder how many friends I will lose this time? Illness doesn't just take health.

But I know who has stayed before, who survived alongside me through worse odds than this and longer silences. If I live, I know where my real family are. And the Blood shall sing to the Blood.

Shadows and midnight, storm and flame.

We are who we were always destined to become I can see with eyes unclouded The patterns in the weaving Are Becoming We are the architects of our web Beware the crimson spider Who weaves his tangled web The hourglass On your heart Is running It's time For me to turn it over Time For the sand to sing to your soul And the rocks to your bones I wish On stars And they fall from the sky In your name I will show you magick So undeniable You will find a way To call it science We are just waiting On the alignment Of the planets Just waiting To cross our hears And our scars And untangle Our cards From our stars You were always going to be The death of me My demons Love your demons Too

- not yours, not mine. We have to learn to live with them. We have to learn to live beyond them." Did Witch ever find herself caught in tangled webs of dreams not her own, did ever someone try to trap her into a future not her making? Did she ever feel like running away, descending so deep into the Abyss that only the wolves could sing to her, only the foxkin could find her? Did she ever want to change her shape and become Kindred but not Kind? Did she ever think about creating a whole realm she could escape to where all the voices clamouring for her to rise from the healing webs too soon, could not reach her? Did she ever want to go further and further into the Abyss where the Darkness is kind and most of all quiet?

Did she ever have to deal with the first circle being confused, wanting things they cannot want because she is promised already to her Fate, her Destiny? Did anyone ever disbelieve her when she said she would know who she'd know when she met him? Did she ever dream of gold eyes seeing her soul and not feel like running, did she ever place dark jewel chips in a web to hold a dream born long before she Became?

Can a soul travel back seventeen [hundred] years and wish for a dream to come true?

"Beware the golden spider, who spins a tangled web."

I could make us a true story.

Everything had to happen exactly as it did. There was no other way for it to have always have been, there was no way to save either of us from the scars we bear that no one else can see, but I believe our scars sing to each other in such a way they weave a web of light. There is beauty in breaking, in such ways as we are broken. there is grace in healing in such ways as we must heal.

Beloved, sometimes I follow the fox prints into the woods and I wonder how many foxes could walk on upon each other footprints, the way a Cat can follow a Crow, you see, I don't have to hide secret messages anymore, I just tell the truth and leave them out of time until it is Right. I take one step to the left and it's a winding path through the Twisted Kingdom, I leave golden markers in the fog, they look like the sun but really, I am still sending the sticks, there is a bridge and he must have the courage to cross because there is a life on the other side of the bloody waters and the sharks that tear at his soul, there is a place beyond the Island Of Maybe, and between your pawprints and my hoofprints, we can lead a dance through the labyrinth, and find the cent[-]r. Stings and Arrows, love, Stings and Arrows. I can't believe in coincidence anymore, there is too much that needed to align just the way it did. There is too much hope to cut the tether.

"The tether that bound them together is what arrested their fall." Tell me my dear, was is Silver screen?

Was it iron rope?

Or was it the red rope of fate, the blue ribbon of destiny, or the silver chord when everything else is soft and misty and golden, is the the ringing thread of threat; "Don't you dare die on me or I will follow you into the afterlife and kill you."

There is a story in the making.

There are many stories in the making.

There is a tale woven out of only true things, so true that they are fiction because no one, not even me, could believe them.

It takes very little to turn us into a tragedy.

But it takes very little to turn us into the most beautiful saga you've ever heard.

It wouldn't take all that much to turn us into a romance either, but I am saving the red rose petals for a spell. And I don't do love potions, remember?

Last night the temperature rose The snow turned to fog And all my memories are grey The Nothing rolls in and

My Everything becomes small small small

Charcoal etching my name in the night

The burn in my throat Isn't enough to stop

The words at my fingertips

These perilous words

Spill like moonlit water And I have no heart

To take them back

I keep my boundaries

By force of will

And when words don't work silence must

But the lines in the sand

Are never bars

As the Crow flies

I suppose it's true

We all break

Our rules

For someone

"I would break my body to pieces just to taste your name" This wasn't what I was planning to write. It never is. But it is what it is and the web weaves and becomes. I place bright-dark jewel stars on the strands and if, at the end, all I have is the whisper of a name, it's enough to have been worth the sacrifice.

Another strand it placed in the web. That's all there is really. These beautiful silver connections between us all. Feathers and stars

Memories and scars Songs and the hours

And the promises, ours I've been a lot on Instagram and not much here. Splitting my Alar four ways is still a challenge. I'm her/e and t/her/e, Elsewhere and Nowhere.

I have poems but they aren't finished. Every time I try to work on them messages arrive, I think I have only the energy to compose one thing at a time. It's probably a good thing I can't get to the sea or I'd have thrown the phone in it already and be writing on birchbark instead.

Sometimes the wish to curl inside of the bark of a tree and sleep through the winter is a long, slow, sadness in me. Because humans can't understand it. Stillness that is necessary for preservation of life.

But the foxes and the crows understand. There's something. And it's summer somewhere. It's daylight somewhere.

Hi all, this is just a quick update in case I re-enter a state of paralytic hibernation, but I wanted to say sincere apologies to the team and anyone participating in Crtimas. I took on more than I could manage, and a couple of unexpected things happened around Christmas time that I don't want to talk about here, but threw me off kilter. Sincerely and deeply I apologise, I'm still learning te regulate my limited energy reserves and haven't been doing a great job of it lately, but in dubious silver linings I identified a couple of triggers so... better to know I guess. I dearly want to give back to the community because it means so much to me, so I will be doing some critiques in future for anyone who wants to request them, I love reading and responding to work, but I am terrible at accepting my own limits. I take on far too much. Some of my watchers have been with me the whole time and in the past, what now 15 years?! will know that to me "soon" might mean a year or five. I don't work well with time, but I do follow through on everything eventually. I have some requests for poems I got 4 years ago I still intend to work on, some sewing projects I was going to make my sister's 25th birthday present that may not even be in time for her 30th... time slips past me. Most of the reason for that is I spend it on other people until I crash. But from every individual friend's perspective, it probably looks like I'm not spending enough time with them, not following through on my commitments.

I know that my art isn't an obligation to others, and maybe that's why I have such a problem dedicating time to it. I am a writer because I write every day. But the vast majority of my hours go into confidential conversations and peer support, or into private writing. So from the outside I look like someone who wastes a lot of time, but from my pov I'm someone who never ever has enough time. We're getting close to a year in isolation now, and I know I have definitely not had enough 'me time.' I've taken a facebook break, removed messenger from my phone, told everyone I am not available 24/7, set boundaries, enforced boundaries, reworded boundaries. I'm doing a huge re-landscaping of my personal vocabulary where it relates to how I value myself, my space, my time and my projects. Ultimately I suspect I will find out that there is no such thing as too much alone time for me. I fantasise about running away to some remote part of the world, more remote than rural Scotland, where there is no wifi, and maybe the post train comes past once every 6 months so I can get news from home. And maybe after a couple of years I would feel like I'd grounded and recalibrated enough to re-join humanity. But it's just a dream. In reality, I have all day every day alone, and I still don't know how to enforce healthy boundaries. I'm trying. I'm learning. I'll try not to go missing in action from DA or my other sites for years at a time again, but maybe that's just how I'm built.

I feel like this is the way I am made, to feel too much, to give to much, to burn too hot and then go dark. And there's something poetic in that, in itself. Something, more like a force of nature than a flaw. And so what if I was a forest fire? What if I were the lightning that strikes the desert? The crack of the sea ice, the avalanche, the hurricane? I gave you warning. Even a tsunami retreats before it devastates. Working a lot with nature, with natural imagery, with the elements. Being present. Trying to shuck the pretence of being human in the way other people are human because I cannot be. I can make a simulcra of a human being, and leave her in my place while my soul goes wandering, when I dream and dance with the crows and the ravens, there is a bland acceptable version of me left behind. But my real dream... is a life integrated. To do as I dream, to be as I am, unashamed. Perhaps there is a place on Earth this can be. Maybe it is a fantasy world I have to create in my novels. But it is for me, this place, this home. And I cannot make it a place worth living in while I am trying to also be what other people need and want me to me, and I cannot be who I am when I am trying to constantly, conscientiously, compassionately explain, that no one can become what I need or want, the figure in my poetry I write to, have always written to "by other names" is a construct, a fiction, a shadow with enough depth for me to believe in enough to write what I have to write but it would destroy my ability to create for someone to try to fill that shadow, to mold themselves to become what they think I need. Some of you, old old friends, learned that the hard way. I'm not a bird for caging, and I never needed a keeper. I cannot be human the way you are human. I need more space, more time, more distance, more silence, in order to hear my own song, to dree ma ain wyrd. I write to no one and everyone, but mostly to my Crit team, I truly am sorry for letting you down, and I am especially sorry I didn't manage to find a way to tell you the Discord is one of my bizarre triggers. A known factor now. I will know better next time. I'll have a contingency plan. Take care of yourselves, we have an amber weather alert here, but there seem to be warning signs all over the world... no matter where you are there is danger. We are on the cusp of something, and it could be great or terrible, or both. Take care, show care, but most of all to yourselves. Stay safe.