Hurt

It hurts me.
I know it's real.
Somehow I feel it and I know it's real and then I don't even know why.
Why is it real?
Why can I feel It?
I wish sometimes I could just walk away and forget all about you just to avoid this confusing pain. I wish so hard, I crunch my eyes up and squish the years away fighting to let you go, because I love you.
And I don't even know why.
Then I look out the window and you know what I see? A figure out there, between the ridges of the white wood, chasing fences. Never ceasing, always moving. Where to? I don't know.
I used to think it was you because through the thickness of the fog really it could look like anyone. But now I see it. Now I understand.
I see what it really is and it's incredible.
Past the tears and pain and all this heaping hurt--I see me, alone, chasing an idea about me and you that runs along the fences like a mad beast.
Somehow I thought if I caught it and held it long and soft enough in my arms it would settle and push against my chest until it was calm and sweet and all the jagged parts of it melted away into what it really was or rather what it was always supposed to be.
I thought that I could save it and help it along its way, together, as equals.
But I don't know if that is ever meant to happen now. I don't know what to do, waist deep amidst the grief and misery of almost losing you. How can that even be? Grieving a living person? Can the dead still walk and talk and love each other, even in this life? Yes. They can. One can love a thousand sunsets and be alive without a heart beat, while one can see no hope in the glittering multitude of stars and be dead with that heavy drum thrum-thrumming within them. It's true.
I still look at you through glittering eyes and watch the clumsy, fervent way my heart falls over you, over your blue eyes, the slip and push of your glasses along your nose, your whole being begging to be loved.
I see everything.
And I still want you.
It's tragic and astounding all at once.
Kind of like life itself.
That's it.
My love for you is life itself and someday soon life is going to want me back and where our love will be I do not care to know.
They say life exists here and now and that is what mattered when it came to us. There never was a here there was always only a there. What a tragic waste.
If I could say one last thing before I leave it would be only this, "There won't always be an 'us', you know. Someday you might miss it. Maybe."
Maybe.
-k.p.

11/24/16
8:24pm

Paperbacks & Postcards

"An Education"
You don't need scores of people looking at you admiringly to feel beautiful.
You don't need Chanel no. 5 lingering on your skin and heels that click only on the ballroom floor next to the empty bottles of champagne to know the good life.
Here, right here, in this moment, feeling the gentle thrum of life vibrating within you--that is it. Loving things. reading books. letting music penetrate your soul, kissing, taking a moment from your jar of time to watch the sunrise or the sunset and if you're extremely lucky, both of them in one day. Life is simple. Life is to love.
Yes, I have felt loneliness. I know its touch like the familiarity of a comb through my hair in the morning. I know it by name, just it is knows me by my own and it is nothing more than neglecting the things that are beautiful and wondrous and meaningful; forgetting the people you love. It is nothing more than ingratitude for the wondrous life you have been given. I won't pretend I have never been this way for I have. I have forgotten. I have neglected. I have wondered, "Why me?" and even, "Why not me? Where is my fair share of love and life in this world? Why am I alone?" But truth is, I am not alone. I am lonely by my own doing. I haven't known true loss until I have found something that is worth loving more than anything and the key to finding that is knowing that you already have that. I know that I do. Oh, I know that beyond anything in this confusing and beguiling world.
Think of your favorite coffee mug. Your key chain. Your pillow. Think of the things that bring you comfort and the little things with which you bear your soul into. For me, it's paperbacks and postcards. It's useless coasters, pens, my watch, my beautiful headphones, the "clack-clack" in the heels I wear or the orange juice I consume more than air and, gosh, the stars that I dare call my own--they all are more meaningful than I could ever explain. Then there are things that are invaluable and precious beyond comprehension--my mother, my father, my four sisters and two brothers. My God, my twin sister, my friends (though they may be few) and this world. This riveting, riveting world.
It isn't until I've experience what little powerful and painful things I have in this life that I have realized with deep gratitude that there is something that gives us a gift, or rather someone. He looks at you when the time is right and with his hands held out to you places something heavy and dark into your hands. For a long time you don't understand what it is and so it sits on the shelf within you, weighing and perplexing and it watches you until one day the clock sings the perfect song and suddenly this gift that is within you, always beside you--it is nothing like you ever remember meeting, but somehow you've known it all your life. Yet, it isn't until this moment, here and now, that you realize you've never understood it, only now you do. Now you do. The small darkness, the heavy perplexity is pain and it isn't until now that I realize, this too, is a gift.
Not the best you'll ever get and undoubtedly not the prettiest, but undeniably the most important of all.
This I know.

-k. pauline benson

november 7, 2016
9:31pm
monday
"An Education" (part i)

It's the sound that arrests my soul

Rain.
Sleep.
Breathing.

Turned pages.
Skate blades on ice.
Crackling embers.

Crisp Leaves.
Symphonic crickets.
Wind chimes.

Distant thunder.
Wrapping paper.
Skipped stones.

Butter on bread.
Clinking glass.
The ocean at night.

A good kiss.
Rustling trees.
Pensive silence.

The way your name rolls of my tongue--effortlessly, purposefully, deliciously and beyond any discription I could know.

-k.p.

3:20am

A Thought, Virginia Woolf

"You never should have let me listen to your heart beating. In all the seriousness I can muster, I can remember the way it beats with perfect clarity. The rush when I put my ear against your chest like a shell and oh how I could hear the vastness of every ocean when I did. So beautiful. The pounding of a deep, chaotic drum thrum-thrumming against me. Though it entrances me, it disturbs me also. It vexes me because it beating that way reminds me that you are human even though you treat me as though you are not. It reminds me there is an innocence existing within you, collapsing and rising like a fallen star that even you cannot find the strength to name or acknowledge and what a tragedy you are--to have a bit of universe inside you and not know its name. To be a star and not know it. To be alone with your chaotic beating, never to be dancing.
But it's that innocence within you that makes me want to start everything over and pull the record back to where the song was soft and delicate and exciting; pull the record backwards to where the song of just your heart is beating and let the needle snag there forever. Always rising and falling, rising and falling. I'd be a happy woman, content with a shell against my ear and a pounding I can never be rid of. What a sensation that would be."
-k.p.

Redflag

You were the only redflag
the only redflag that I could never hold
I could never raise for my own.
You were the only redflag that burned the scarlet blue
and draped from my heart
instead of flew.
Love is a one-way street
running away from me
but you are the only redflag
that I want
the only redflag I need.

-k.p.

11/2/16
1:44am

i've got a plan

i've got a better plan--
let's fall in love
and let this be what it should've been if
i held your hand that one night
forever ago
with you
and me
and regretful
nothing.

-k.p.

11/1/16

dreams that I dare call my own

"She started writing notes and keeping them under her pillow, and then she started writing them on her pillowcase, hoping they would help her have better dreams. And if she couldn't sleep, she could just read them and be reminded of something so stunningly beautiful that her heart would swell and her bones would sigh and for just one second, the world would not seem like it was going to crush her."
-Emily Brontë