Excerpts from various poems, short stories, and essays.
Note: My grandmother’s maiden name is Peck and I often use her surname when I write.
All words and images are my own.
Poetry
Making sense of life and love as I go.
Some images are excerpts.
“So she told herself again
what was true about love
that her own was never wrong
her love was real
her love was love.”
from Love, she knew
Short Stories
Reflections on love, belonging, and self-discovery. Full writing available upon request.
Essays
More reflecting, at length. Full writing available upon request.
Her heart had always been sure, her feelings as natural as thunder across an electric sky. But even in its splitting, magnetic truth, she let it allude her. She reworded her heart’s only story, too ashamed to listen, and she redefined its very rhythm, too afraid to follow.
She ignored its quick lightning, desperate to feel what she was so sure she should. She willed her feelings, honest and intrinsic, to slip silently from her atmosphere, like clouds overhead or summer’s soft rain. Surely if she wanted it enough, her sky would turn a shade more appropriately blue.
From Her Love
Sometimes, it takes many things to make meaning of it. For example, if someone were to somehow darken the whole sky except for a single star, it’d be almost impossible to know which way the rest of the sky was tilted. Looking back was a little like that. I didn’t have a single moment that I knew. I didn’t have a date from a journal entry or a grand realization one afternoon when it’d all become clear. Instead, I had a million little moments and memories and feelings, and I needed all of them to see the whole sparkling constellation.
From Experience
It was easy to understand the parts of herself that she could see, features she couldn’t ever erase, refute, or hide. She knew which parts of herself resembled her mother and which resembled her father, and that between the two, she probably took more after her mother. Every so often growing up, and even today, her maternal grandmother would pause, catching her concentrating, counting her stitches, or doing, in her mind, nothing at all.
“You look like your mother,” her grandmother would say, her knowing eyes studying her face in the shadowed glow of the living room lamp. There was comfort in moments like that one, as though she were a new character from a beloved series, a favorite before the story had even begun. And all she hoped then, as the rest was read, was to stay seen that way. To be held safe still. Loved still. For every page.
Like both her mom and dad, her eyes were brown, but she also had marks that they didn’t. Some she was born with, and others she’d collected along the way, like the oven rack burn on her forearm, or the surgery scar down her middle. They were things everyone could see, if she let them. What they saw was what she saw. What they knew as true, was true for her, too. For the most part.
But there were also pieces of herself that no one could see; that no one knew about but her, that weren’t reflected in a mirror, a storefront window, or a stranger’s sunglasses. Things that ran deeper than the surface scrapes and bruises and birthmarks. Alone, in the dark, these things were easier to erase, to refute, to hide. She once thought that if she couldn’t see them, they didn’t have to belong to her. Not in the same way her brown eyes did.
So she buried these unseen parts from even herself, pretending that they were never really hers at all. She thought that maybe over time, their truth would break down, like leaves into soil. But they didn’t. That, she knew. Some parts of stories, she realized, could never be rewritten. Not when the words were imprinted in her center, written in every heartbeat, invisibly tattooed.
And she realized then, too, that perhaps what she held inside was truer than the parts that resembled her father and mother, the marks all her own, and the scar down her middle. That what was seen in the light of day wasn’t her, really. Not the whole of her. Not the soul of her.
Maybe, she thought, the only parts that belonged to her at all were the things no one could ever see. Things that could only be known from being read in the dark. Held safe in the dark. Still loved in the dark. And it was those things that said who she was, seen only in her heartbeat, and felt all the time.
It was those things that said who she was, even more than a smile like her mother’s could.
She had once told herself that she could rewrite the unseen, somehow. That she must. And when she couldn’t, she said instead that she’d been wrong. Over and over, until she believed it, she said she’d been wrong.
And that, she knew now, was the most dangerous thing she’d ever done. Because she’d believed it.
from Dangerous
Eva Nienhouse 