We Are Always Burning

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when I get too attached to someone I have a method 

the sunset soothes me to silence until the whitest pearl balances upon a neck of black sky  

my room becomes: 

a shrine……………….

a collage……………..

an articulation……

blankets bury the corpse I become when my eyes close  

in dreams I rip apart a polaroid of us  

I put the pieces in: 

a pot to boil……………….…

a fireplace to burn……..

a kiln to animate………..

I use it for warmth every time and I know-  

it means we are always burning  

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I will never beat around a bush  

the berries inside are too fruitful  

and I will invite you to taste them with me;  

know we are reflections of each other  

know that means we are infinite  

know that means we are always burning  

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My Room Becomes a Shrine 

Confined in this shrine in which I lay myself to rest each night I am never alone. Forty-two pairs of eyes watch me as I sleep; they protect me, they make sure I never forget. They’re spirits of friends, lovers, holidays- intertwined phases of lives lay in the plastic and cotton and button eyes watching over me. Generations of stuffed animals my family has fallen out of touch with, my brothers’ friend’s Totoro collection, Pokémon Christmas gift collector’s items, a dog and two bunnies once spry in my crib, parts of my cousin’s Sanrio collection, keychains I attach to belt loops and bags- they’ve gathered in every nook and cranny of each shrine I’ve inhabited.   

If you know me, you know my room. And when I say that I mean I love unconditionally. I’m the same way with all my shrines: my Instagram page, my outfits, my writing, the media I consume- I love to show them all to people. The second I got out of my car and arrived on U.N.E.’s soil with its thick salt air and plaid-wearing men, I decided to express as much of myself as possible.  

Overflowing on my shelves, shoved between nicknacks, and piled on my desk you’ll find manga, anime DVDs/VHS tapes, video games, and art books. Each is carefully placed, neat, pristine with my adoration. My mother has always hated physical touch, so as babies she’d send my younger brother and me to our Korean cousins’ house so they could interact with us for her. They loved to show us anime and had us watching Inuyasha, Princess TuTu, Lum Invader, Kimba the White Lion- I haven’t left that realm of art since. Last April I bought a collector’s box set of my favorite artist, Yoshitaka Amano, who painted over 500 full sized prints of characters in a three-year period for the early Final Fantasy games. I have all his art books in my room, bookmarked and read through countless times. Nothing sits on my shelves unread, because again, I love unconditionally. From author Haruki Murakami to mangaka Shin’ichi Sakamoto to video game designer Hidetaka Miyazaki, I’ve always appreciated creative story telling outside of Western culture. French, Korean, Portuguese, Singaporean, and Chinese storytelling via animation have also caught my eye; I believe that being worldly in different mediums of art breeds appreciation for others’ walks of life and makes you more palatable, too.  

Until early high school, teachers’ words fell on my ears like white noise, tutors were quick to frustration because I couldn’t comprehend their content, and no adult understood my Type One Diabetes. However, Ken Sugimori and Satoshi Tajiri’s character designs and world building were a language I found myself fluent in. Throughout high school I was told that the Achilles heel of my shrine was the amount of Pokémon merchandise that ravaged it. I was also told that I wouldn’t graduate with such a low GPA; that just being good in English courses would get me nowhere. But Sugimori and Tajiri’s ideas reflected my own; they stood unwavering, untainted by the pressures of what adults they faced told them were impossible feats at the time; and after two years of development in 1996, they released Pokémon’s first video games: Red and Blue. Pokémon are alive in my posters and handbooks, they adorn my bedsheets and pillowcases back home, cards are tightly packed away in five full binders and two storage boxes under my nightstand, and now they decorate my shrine in the crevices of my bed and shelves.  

If you think this is filler, you’re missing the point- loving unconditionally doesn’t mean you’ll tolerate bullshit: it means you’ll love the meat of the media you consume, but also the bone and the broth you can make from it. My bone, my meat, my broth, has been a part of each shrine I’ve decorated and worshipped, and now that I’m in college, I’m applauded by all the things that have led me to love and appreciate unconditionally.  

Panel from Yoshitaka Amano’s “Arslan Senki” (1996) 

My Room Becomes a Collage 

Strewn around my dorm room are letters and doilies and petals and stars and carp. Despite such cheeriness, for a very long time, I was convinced that it would always, only, ever be me and my shadow. Each medium of my collage knows this, because I’ve never been able to keep to myself in full- I’m a writer, after all. 

Shaking legs carried me through our middle school’s annual end-of-the-year fun run in sixth grade when I met Sara Richtmeyer during a low blood sugar. I’d been dared to give her a flower, and when I saw she was walking the length of the fun run alone, I taught her how to braid hair. Thick, ravenous, and black- she explained how her mother was a mirror image of her own unmanageable hair that Cubans possess, and I realized over the next years of understanding Sara that our lives were similarly matted in knots not so easily combed out. Our mothers were the sole providers for our families until middle school, and our fathers had re-entered our lives around the same time. As we acclimated to our newer lifestyles, we decided to start a group therapy club when we went into high school together. Over the next four years we facilitated others in surrendering to their own vulnerabilities during each discussion. As our own homes were constantly wracked with social workers and instability, we knew that our solace could grow through the pain of neglectful households because we always had each other.  

The sound of a mouse feverishly clicking through an Undertale fight was an attractive distraction to the history class I’d been failing in seventh grade. When I went up to May Delprado after the lesson, I was promptly invited to her birthday party at an indoor racetrack and bumper car arena. She told me she had just moved from the Philippines, and when I introduced her to Sara, the three of us were at May’s most days after middle school drinking copious amounts of Kapri Sun and discussing the newest “Attack on Titan” chapters as they released on fan-translated manga pirating websites. We’d sooth each other through depressive episodes and quickly found that while trauma can’t be remedied through anything in a first aid kit, you can grow around it with compassion. May showed me Skate 3, C.O.D. Zombies, Hollow Knight, and several FromSoftware games that hard launched my admiration for other forms of art outside of Pokémon and anime. Sara and I would stay overnight at May’s most of middle school, and we found the world softened when it was just us; we found you must be that way to harness the firmness laying within loving intentionally.  

My eyes were glued to the second episode of Parasyte: The Maxim as a freshman in high school during robotics club when Finn Mahon first came up to me. He was bright-eyed, Finn was an energy that Sara, May, and I didn’t grow up with; he was innately kind. When things got tough for May, we’d all sleep over Finn’s house in high school. While his dad juggled art projects of all mediums, his mother taught us Japanese- she has a One Piece shrine in her room and the biggest manga collection I’ve seen. Finn has ambitions with no directions to them, dreams without regard of judgment, and has never had a plan on slowing down when he finds a goal he knows tangible. He graduated as an Eagle Scout and immediately traveled to Africa to teach English and build schools, then came to visit me in Maine over a summer while getting his EMT license, his advanced EMT license a year later, and now he’s going into the Coast Guard. Being human means you can achieve anything, but knowing Finn makes those unreachable realities possible. 

When backup plans failed and bullies treated us like exhibits to be torn down, we were always there for each other. Pain had nothing on Sara, May, Finn, and me; we wrung it out just as it had to each of us. We’d bring bruised knuckles and broken bones to school and find ways to laugh about them. We were always burning in one way or another, but we used that as fuel to help other people- and each other.  

(Left to right) Me, Sara, May, and Finn circa December 2024 

My Room Becomes an Articulation 

As much as I love to talk, I’ve never been able to articulate much. I can’t kiss people the way pen kisses paper; I don’t have enough ink in my inventory to talk my way out of a bad day, however I have more than enough material to write on. School notebooks and waitressing pads and academic essays and the back of my hand and any surface I glide my pen across lets me translate what I lack into more than enough to go around. Anything I don’t have comes from an expectation I have yet to meet, a passion yet to be strived for. Piles and piles of poems and essays blanket the body beneath them; where I feel I’ve laid in rot beneath this paper canopy, my writing has bloomed from each fell tree. When my thoughts wed ink to paper, I am fueled by each part of myself I’ve decided to sacrifice. I thoroughly believe that when you write, you must be fervent in emotion. You need a catalyst for passion, a reason to care for why you spill yourself empty. Writings of love (anything can be a muse), outgrown friends (I’m “too busy” to pick up calls), and grief (decaying is part of a cycle) litter my bedroom.  

In high school I’d lay in my bed like a fist protesting my own fate. Friends from robotics club had expected me to take on a Bio-Chem major to appease their standards and continue down a path of stable future. They’d all gone into science-based fields at Ivy Leagues and once I switched to the English major as a sophomore, they expressed how I’d never amount to much because I wasn’t academically smart enough to be at their level-  

“English is so easy, it makes sense you’d pick that over Bio-Chem,” 

they’d told me, as if the two are even comparable. While throughout high school I thought we were all inseparable, it suddenly became apparent they thought of me as a complacent girl they could interrupt to flex their own knowledge on maths, sciences, and engineering. They still don’t understand that writing for me has always been and always will be a lifeline; that when you grow up in torment art becomes a form of breathing.  

I knew Kevin Campbell would be my best friend when our car doors clanked together a week before our freshman year began, and he caught me in the middle of a rant about Dark Souls II with an ex-boyfriend. He was in Avila, I was in Freddy (gross, I know), and while the odds of a Mar-Bio student and an English major ever crossing paths were low, both of us were early for the Living Learning Community. If you’d told me, a nerd, at any point prior to college that my best friend would be the head of U.N.E.’s club lacrosse team I would have punched you. But we’ve been inseparable since the hour we met, and while I preached earlier about my willingness to express myself once I arrived here, it was Kevin who pushed me to do so. He urged me to open my shrine to more people, to share my writing with a wider audience. 

Kevin introduced me to a multitude of future teachers, psychologists, doctors, scientists, and friends in Avila. Coming to U.N.E. I was scared to put time with anyone over academics. It was as if integrating any social aspect would have to have been clean cut altogether so I could prove to my friends back home I’d be able to focus and learn. But I found that the people Kevin introduced me to were a means of support, and instead of being held back everyone pushed me to become an English major. Now when I pass by Avila and the brick wall hides the stiff sofas we used to laugh in behind it, I could swear in that moment we’re still in there; our laughter not a ghost but a spirit. That the room we once called home will carry that torch, and the weight and possibility of being burned with it. I’ll always be thankful to the people who once lived there for showing me it’s possible to write to live, not just to survive.  

✜»✜«✜»✜An Interlude for Anton✜»✜«✜»✜ 

I met my boss over the first summer I stayed at U.N.E. when I was going into my sophomore year of college. I was still a girl then, but the path ahead of me was winding down towards womanhood- towards maturity.  

Anton works at the Ketchum Library where students and faculty busy themselves with academics and hurried talk in brief passings to lunch or class. They’re neat and bright-eyed with a background in English studies, and everyone who meets Anton takes a liking to them. They’re soft spoken and caring with an earthy air that is only extended by a kind presence and willingness to help and cater to everyone’s needs. Anton looks like an autumn hike- green eyes and long, auburn brushed hair. They always have a cup of homebrewed Kombucha with them, and in classic Anton-fashion, they pause to take a couple steady sips. They’re smiling as they always do and always will. It’s a huge part of them, anyone who pictures Anton in their mind can say with confidence that they’re smiling. 

We’ve discussed how they’ve worked at public libraries in the past and served in a role oriented towards crisis work and referrals, but how over time they ran out of room for growth. I’ve understood through my own relationships with environments and people that it’s hard to recognize when you’ve outgrown something, but it’s harder to take the first step in what comes after that.  

Anton could talk for hours about how beautiful U.N.E. is, and how the drive from Portland is intricately woven with eastern white pines, silver maples, and vast farmland unique to Maine. With the physical location of the Biddeford campus being so beautiful, I can’t help but agree. We’ve laughed about how whenever they find themself on campus, when they step outside, they feel like they’re about ready to take a hike every time. 

Anton has their own twist on the need to make acquaintances while attending U.N.E.; their day consists of networking to make things functional in the library, so while working here, you’re constantly bombarded by strings of cordial, welcoming emails. Anton will always emphasize teamwork.      They lean on the word as if they’re being held up by each hand of the library staff themselves- it makes me laugh when I think about it. 

When I asked if I could write a segment based around a question I had for them, I knew their inner English major would want in. I watched as Anton took another sip of their Kombucha and gave me a big smile as if they’d told me it tasted delicious before nodding “yes.”  

“What’s some advice you’d have for an individual prior to college?” They looked to the flowery stained-glass window next to us, and what Anton said next sticks with me over the next few days-         I’m glad I have the chance to share it.  

“I would let go of expectations of a specific outcome of what your college experience is going to be.” They don’t even pause here. In fact, they gloss over one of the realest things I’d ever heard. I was stuck for the next minute thinking about what my boss had told me, because they were so right. Not just because I, myself, had changed my whole way of thinking the day I arrived and switched to an English major at a science-intensive university- 

They were right because you make connections with people you’d never thought you’d be friends with in high school. College is skipping an important class as a freshman because the only friend with a car you know offered last minute and you haven’t been off campus in a month. It’s the fact that you’ll scramble to get your grades up in a class that you were sure would be easy. It’s a snowstorm out of nowhere and coming into class with full gear on after you thought it’d be cancelled because of how horrible the walk is from Sokokis to Featherman, and you wanted to go sledding with your friends, instead. 

College is so unexpected, so random, so tedious– but it’s a lesson in understanding that nothing is ever guaranteed to fit your expectations.  

I Put the Pieces in a Pot to Boil 

As the pearl sits in her neck of sky, I ask if I can caress her beauty. I’m seven. I’m told “No, Coco.” I do it anyway. She’s unrelentingly cold and smooth, only comparable to the glass of my bedroom window. My mother was young then. She was the same age as the pearl. As the moon. As the sky. Everything was.  

Every time after it would happen, I had a ritual of sorts. He’d leave our upstairs bathroom after turning the sink off once filling it with ice water, and my body was left to shake uncontrollably in his wake. I made it a point not to look in the mirror as I was often left like this; choking up ice water that made its way through my throat and then down my nostrils as my vision blurred and my face welted. My back would crumple down against the sink, pulsating in bursts of broad twinges as the wood counter caressed fresh brush strokes of blues and purples. I didn’t always sob right away, sometimes I let feelings of feebleness and pathetics coax me into their arms instead. Tears were a refreshing warmth on my face, but sometimes my father would come back to shove my nose into ice water and porcelain all over again. I don’t look in the mirror for days at a time. I don’t wash off my face or brush my hair or brush my teeth or shower over the next few days that he’d keep me home from school until the bruises weren’t as noticeable. But in those moments when I’d dance on the edge of crying, killing myself, or taking revenge on him- I’d look down at my knees while my head rang, socks sloshing with excess water. It was at eleven, when I was forced to move back in with him, that I realized I was burning.  

There are no pictures of me in any of the houses I grew up in. My dad came back into my life in sixth grade, and from then on I pivoted between my mother’s apartment and my dad’s house until he moved out when I was in eighth grade, and my mom moved into his old house. There were walls decaying from water-damage, carpets with dog urine soaked into them, two unusable showers from black mold, and a roof with a hole in it from a summer a tree fell through after a storm. Despite my belief that my parents’ funerals couldn’t keep them separated from me, there were never any pictures of me in that house.  

When my mother would lock me in the bathroom overnight without insulin, I had little concern for death as I’d heave over the toilet from high blood sugar after drinking excessive amounts of bathroom sink water. Now it makes me think how when the doctors come to pick me apart, if they’ll discover how scared I was when they peel back the flesh of my still heart. Will they know how fast it beat when my mother told me she wished CPS would take me away? I wonder if when they pick apart the wrinkles in my brain, they’ll see her livid face plastered into each one, so I’d remember what kept her happy, what kept her stable. I wonder if when the doctors pry open my jaw and remove my teeth, if they’ll hear the screams I’ve coveted in wait at the back of my throat. I ‘d inevitably believed I would die in that neglected house in Hopewell, New Jersey; but for a long time, I wondered if I’d fear such an embrace. 

I feel rot infect my skin when I’m angry, enough so that if you were to place a mirror in my hands, I’d only see my father before me. Growing up I’d often fantasize of a teacher, friend, or crush busting in and rescuing me. When I moved to Maine, I found my grip on childhood loose compared to everyone that had just begun to process their own trauma. I was jealous, I’d been forced to throughout each day in middle school and high school- during lunch Sara, May, and Finn would come through for me like it was muscle memory; and now when I need support, Kevin does too. Each summer night I’ve stayed at U.N.E., when black drank the light of a room I’d sat in isolated, I’d tell myself this was the only universe I didn’t succeed in killing myself. I sat with my pain, let it be felt through me, carried its weight; let it carry me. All that matters is that I’m standing, even when I’m burning.  

The Franciscan Monastery in Kennebunk Port circa June 2024

I Put the Pieces in a Fireplace to Burn 

My first poem, though unfinished, was about love. I must have always had a knack for writing about it since I recently pulled this poem from the depths of an elementary school diary. It was my first, written circa December 2012- drawings included…. 

Love Is Connected     INNERTWINED  With Loss: 

A sweter with nothing under it 

A plate with no food 

A morning walk to scool in Decembre but the sun still shines 

I want to schqueeze myself into the hole in your heart 

It’s too big for me to fill 

I love this poem; I look back on it often, puzzle piecing its themes into most of my work. I’d written it about my mother while I bore witness to her pain as she was being cheated on by my ex-stepdad, which made us move from Franklin, Massachusetts to Hopewell, New Jersey so my dad could support us. Between three when he left us, and eleven when I lived with him again, we’d Skype and visit him over holidays, long weekends, breaks, and summers. For as long as I’ve known my father, his love has been fluent in violence’s tongue.  

As a poet, as a writer, as someone who sees a muse in most, my heart has no room for the love I’ve held within it. Love is a playful thing, love is a brilliant light, love is a baby- so I write until my hands shake. I write until my tears fall and dry onto wrinkling paper, letting pain soak; and inevitably suffering shoves itself into love’s small, upturned palms. 

I let two men and one woman ruin me and decided that was enough of talking to anyone for a very long time. Her arms wrapping around the small of my back, she carefully made sure my insulin pump was tucked into my pocket before I let a hug’s carnage ravage me. No matter how many times I’d tried to wash them, I couldn’t get his and my memories out of my bed sheets, or any of the shirts we’d exchanged. My desperation told me at a time that him and I were written into textbooks together; as someone who works at the library on campus, I know where each one would’ve rested. My lips meet hers before unrequited passion rips her from me. The phantom of his hand tracing over mine becomes an attempt to calm myself as I sat there haunting his room. I let a sinking mark and a hair tie in his bed be the death of me- I always know the outcome, I told myself, I could write about it a thousand different ways; the ending won’t lose its brutality. I blinded myself to follow love’s faith, thought that if my hands weren’t bound and my knees weren’t dirtied and bruised, that I didn’t deserve love- that I didn’t desire it to the point of destruction. 

And then there was Alex. I’ve walked the halls of his inner arms, he’s kissed the soft harps under my eyes, I’ve traced my hands over the prickled cliff and dip of his chin, he’s hushed the blabber of my tongue with his- I will admit I am not used to writing about love’s pulp without suffering’s gaze steady on my heart pen. But when I pull the curtain of hair back from behind his ear, I-love-yous tumble off my tongue like yarn. Alex remembers everything I’ve ever said in a brain busied with MFDOOM lyrics (he loves “Dead Bent” and “Hey”), driving around his hometown of Kennebunk Port, Pokémon Showdown, comedy sketches, and horticulture. He lets me take my time when thoughts of me walk through his mind; he tells me I own the damn place, after all. Alex says one day I won’t have to come by just to leave once more- that I could stay after hours, or forever. I will love Alex with every ounce of intent I’ve been scared to give for a very, very long time. 

I Put the Pieces in a Kiln to Animate  

I am in a constant pursuit of falling in love with being alive. It’s a passion of mine, motivation and support systems helped Sara and me run our group therapy club. Below are some of the messages I’ve gotten across over the years, and lived by, myself. Here lay a couple of beliefs I’ve decorated my shrine with, and posts I’ve written on my Instagram. 

To be dictated by someone else’s opinion/judgment is not a life to be lead! I decided long ago that NO ONE can expand their mindset and extend their boundaries if what binds them is comfort. In high school, my own desire to remain as I was in the presence of other people ultimately limited my capacity to experience and grow until I came to college and met Kevin…. what kind of life is stasis?  

Kevin told me once how people believed flight would take man 10,000 years to achieve. The Wright Brothers flew weeks later. Sixtyish years after that, Neil Armstrong stepped out of his lander and onto the Moon. My twist on that is how recovery can seem 10,000 years away, but if you take that first step and keep trudging through, even when you’re miserable, even when it sucks, you’ll get further than you thought possible. 

I’ve always preached about my journey into vulnerability. But to be vulnerable, to be approachable from every angle, is to know that which is understood as weak becomes what is truly strong. Those who are rigid paradoxically concede to the supple every time- water softens rock.  

Hatred is corrosive to wisdom and conscience. I’ve seen many people adopting a fickle black and white mentality of bias. What they don’t know is their enmity poisons whole nations, instigates brutality, destroys tolerance, and halts progress towards a greater freedom of judgment. I hope to transcend my personal vicissitudes by understanding the developments within everyone, therefor countering hostilities, and diffusing hate with love– with understanding.  

There is never a “correct” path to a certain destination since every person is formed and shaped by different obstacles in their lives. I learned that coming here, and both Anton and Kevin certainly stabilized that idea in my head. Most times having a direction in mind ruins the experience of making it there at all. You don’t have to have a destination, even. Not knowing where to turn is a blessing, an opportunity to reflect, evolve, or anchor yourself; like a buffer that’ll propel you. Everyone is constantly experimenting, exploring their unique rights and wrongs for the first time. People will fuck up multiple times going in the same direction- just to learn from each in a different way. To be human is to be curious in the pursuit of experience; it’s to feel uncertain.  

Failure is not romanticized enough; it’s been the backbone of every bird and every child as they take greater risks. When you fail, resilience and lack of embarrassment are crafted into grit and determination to succeed. Failure may pull you down, but once you‘re falling, you can only be pushed in the right direction- humans are built to persevere. Learn that failure is inevitable and embrace it as part of the learning process. Channeling embarrassment and self-doubt into a learning opportunity that will motivate you means much more for growth than never trying again to begin with.  

Some people are born to a broken mold, but that doesn’t mean you can’t reshape yourself. Everyone has gone through something significant to their volume of tolerance, and because of that, we are able to find solace in the fact that we are always burning. Sara, May, Finn, and I found we were given the opportunity to learn how to put ourselves back together, and help others through that, since we didn’t have a mold to fit into in the first place. People often forget that they’re loved and needed, instead shrinking to fit others’ perceptions of them- others’ molds they were born into. Remember that living is an experience that defies a purpose. While trauma is horrible and disgusting, it makes you realize you don’t have to conform to ideals to keep the peace. Because really, if you stay quiet about it, who’s peace are you keeping? 

Finally, never shrink your dreams down to the whims of what others can even consider possible. Take up space, it’ll not only change your own life but others, too. Be palatable, be open to change, never polarize yourself because another’s ideals scare you. But at the end of the day, always have something to stand for. People who don’t fight for anything will get nowhere through catering to others out of fear! 

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my shadow is ritualistically alone. 

an army of collage pieces beg to disagree 

but their shadows bend with my own 

we know when we’re alone we hold ours to our hearts and 

lay in her graced shade 

trace her silhouette 

feel the teeth of her unforgiving frost 

yet when our darknesses converge they tell me 

that to have a body is to have light 

and that mine is- 

“Swelteringly warm!” 

ours are- 

with love, 

“Always burning”