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❣️

EXACT

Why would you do that to me? I keep trying to locate the moment everything broke. Like it’s a pin on a map I can circle in red. But there is no clear shatterpoint—no clean fracture, no dramatic climax. Just pressure. Gradual. Relentless. Until one day, I couldn’t carry it anymore and I don’t even remember deciding to drop it. Maybe the line was never drawn. Maybe I was never taught I could draw one. Is that my fault? His? Does fault even matter? Was it an accident? Was it cruelty? Was it just the consequence of being small in a world that teaches people to take what they want? I don’t know. And I’m learning to live with not knowing. But lately—strangely—I think I’m healing. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But quietly, like the way snow melts: slow and almost imperceptible, until suddenly there’s grass again. I’m letting go of the obsessions that gnawed at me. I have energy again, like I finally remembered how to move. I’m picking up pieces of old joy, half-buried but still intact. I’m remembering the things I loved. The things that loved me back. And maybe, most importantly, I’m forgetting the things that never really mattered at all.

@baileyxward

3d ago

🍄

ROOM

My room is a corridor of doorways. Not a space, not a shelter, but a network of half-thoughts and abandoned exits. The floors reek of piss, like some wild dog marked its territory and then left me to rot in it. The walls pulse with memory. Or maybe delusion. Either way, it’s loud in here. Thoughts swarm like ants — frantic, mindless, pathetic — all scrabbling for something to hold on to. Information. Meaning. But there’s nothing. Just famine. Starvation of sense. A thousand tiny legs searching for crumbs in a house that hasn’t been fed in years. And every day the sky breaks open again. Not metaphorically. The rain here isn’t poetic. It hammers. It devours. It doesn’t cleanse; it drowns. The ants drown, but they don’t die. They keep moving, twitching, twitching, twitching. Not alive. Not dead. Just full of guts and nerves and the viscera that keep them twitching. That hard carapace we all grow when the storm doesn’t stop. That’s all they are. That’s all I am. Sometimes I think I’ll dig my way in. Crawl through the iris of my own eye — molecular, meticulous — and enter the network of my brain like a savior. A surgeon. Maybe a god. Maybe I’ll find the ants and teach them how to be more than twitching muscle and damp despair. Maybe I’ll name them. Maybe I’ll give them something like hope. But dry drowning is real. No matter what they say. And the terrifying thing is — there’s no evidence it isn’t.

@baileyxward

May 27, 2025

😃

“GRADUATING”

In threefold lives and twofold tears I hold my breath but I can’t pretend it’s not happening anymore. I keep finding myself saying “we’re graduating” again and again with no intonation because I truly don’t know what to feel. Maybe it’s a manifestation or maybe it’s just a recognition of the eventual, the eventuality of the end of the various hues I’ve been painted with at scad. In my minds eye lives a collage of all of the people whom I’ve cherished for four, (or five years if you count dual enrollment), to say I love them is an egregious understatement. To say I will miss them is simply diminishing an actuality. With me I carry this collage of love it keeps me warm when I am cold, and tender when I am stone. I helped me grow into my bones. Seen me and shone, people I’ve adored. I leave this place adorn with knowledge and love and a want for more.  Chest heave practical in armor, holding onto the alternate dream of me, hoping, hoping for an offer, offering a life I am to live, if I just turn and run, if I just turn and run this time, lime green coconut leaves, spotted bedroom sheets, but the change is making me feel like i’ve already tried to hold myself a million little times,  I try again, felicity in the way I falter, tell you endlessly, screaming colors of the ocean, push me in I adore it, let me live, I pour it out, strangers color me in the night, pieces of each of our mind, in a way we see each other demise each time, turn in, torn into sequins, sequential nightmares, its going to just end, in a way that I sink through the sun, into I construe again, I was just eighteen when I started this, made some friends I cherish, even, even if I lose them, I’ll still have a memory, of my beloveds smiling back at me, seen me grow, seen me weak, bleeding in through my knees, crying on their shoulders, painful hollow little laughter, walking through a tunnel, holding onto each other, I’ll love them like no other like a dream, no other could it be, in my perfect dream, many lifetimes lived with thee. 

@fern_poppy

May 4, 2025

Top Recs from @baileyxward

🪢

KNOW

I unblocked him today. Stupid, really. A gesture that meant nothing and everything at once—flick of a finger, avalanche of consequence. I don’t love him. I know this the way I know fire burns and poison kills. But there was a time I did. Or at least, I believed I did, which might be the same thing. And now, in the pit of night, he comes back. Not in memory, which I could handle. In dreams. Those cursed, wretched dreams where love feels like a trick played on me by some malevolent god. We are soft together, whole together. It feels real. Worse: it feels good. I wake up gagging on it. That intimacy, that false safety. My brain taunts me with what could have been, and I can’t even scream back. So I dissociate. That’s the clinical word for it. But really, I haunt myself. I float through the day like a ghost freshly exhumed, skin buzzing with sleep that clings to my body like mold. Am I still dreaming? Has waking up ever felt this fake? I ask myself: Do I still love him? Then a worse question: Did I ever? And the worst of all: Did I make it up, the whole damn thing? Because if I did—if I built it all out of nothing, like straw houses and paper people—then maybe I am what he always said I was. A liar. A little girl who makes up stories and calls it truth. My father’s daughter. And that’s the most disgusting thing of all.

@baileyxward

6d ago

👗

DREAM

Last night, I dreamed—though I can’t tell you what of, not exactly. There were fragments. A lawn, half-mown, or cats—dozens of them, maybe. Their shapes flicker now at the edge of memory, insubstantial. That’s how it always goes. I dream every night, I know this, but each one slips through my fingers by morning, evaporating like steam before I can grasp it. It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I kept a dream journal. Religious about it. Woke up, wrote it down. And something about that changed me. Sharpened the recall, made dreams more solid. Realer. And then, over time, something turned. Now they vanish even faster. Like the act of remembering too hard wore out the muscle. I’ve thought about starting again. Journaling. Documenting. Not just the dreams, but the moments around them—the texture of waking, the taste of forgetting. Because vivid dreams begin with remembering, don’t they? But I hate recollection. The way it drags old feelings back up, stale and bitter. The way it stains the present with shadows of things that never happened. There’s something foul in remembering too much. Still. Maybe I’ll try.

@baileyxward

6d ago

🍄

ROOM

My room is a corridor of doorways. Not a space, not a shelter, but a network of half-thoughts and abandoned exits. The floors reek of piss, like some wild dog marked its territory and then left me to rot in it. The walls pulse with memory. Or maybe delusion. Either way, it’s loud in here. Thoughts swarm like ants — frantic, mindless, pathetic — all scrabbling for something to hold on to. Information. Meaning. But there’s nothing. Just famine. Starvation of sense. A thousand tiny legs searching for crumbs in a house that hasn’t been fed in years. And every day the sky breaks open again. Not metaphorically. The rain here isn’t poetic. It hammers. It devours. It doesn’t cleanse; it drowns. The ants drown, but they don’t die. They keep moving, twitching, twitching, twitching. Not alive. Not dead. Just full of guts and nerves and the viscera that keep them twitching. That hard carapace we all grow when the storm doesn’t stop. That’s all they are. That’s all I am. Sometimes I think I’ll dig my way in. Crawl through the iris of my own eye — molecular, meticulous — and enter the network of my brain like a savior. A surgeon. Maybe a god. Maybe I’ll find the ants and teach them how to be more than twitching muscle and damp despair. Maybe I’ll name them. Maybe I’ll give them something like hope. But dry drowning is real. No matter what they say. And the terrifying thing is — there’s no evidence it isn’t.

@baileyxward

May 27, 2025