bellamy artemis
thank you everybody for reading these stories and poems it means a lot ✨🤩✨|| he/him
bellamy artemis
thank you everybody for reading these stories and poems it means a lot ✨🤩✨|| he/him
thank you everybody for reading these stories and poems it means a lot ✨🤩✨|| he/him
thank you everybody for reading these stories and poems it means a lot ✨🤩✨|| he/him
you hold my worst memories and thoughts and actions, yet in that state of being you somehow remain my comfort.
i look into you when i’m okay and when i’m not, and i feel better.
i look into you and i become someone else. someone completely new.
you are not only my therapist, you’re my guidance counselor, my college professor, my fucking hero.
you remind me of my young self. you retain so much information and somehow all of it gets out one way or another, and that isn’t even your fault!
some outside force is pulling information from your brain to your lips, and it tastes so bad you spit it out. that is how i functioned, and how you function now.
back when you were a brown notepad with yellow pages, my best teenaged friend and babysitter wrote me a note. it was along the lines of
have a great day! i love you!
and it made me smile endlessly.
back when i was going through my emo phase (for the first time) you were there to catch the tears and the god awful writing.
and for that, i thank you.
This week’s harvest was a fairly peculiar one, even for Depression.
He’d caught the typical grievers in their fourth stage, he’d swallowed trauma survivors whole, and he’d captured an innocent and lonely man sitting in the middle of a custody battle.
But what was so different this week was the children.
This was not necessarily an unusual path for the ailment himself to take, but the sheer amount of young souls he held in his pantry proved quite heavy on the dark wooden shelves.
He wasn’t quite tired of sucking the absolute life out of people until they were rotting flesh and bare bone. Blood ran dry quickly whenever Depression was involved. He was a beast, and he was always hungry.
This week he chose to focus on youth simply because he just felt like being a dick. That’s the honest truth, and if you’d asked him yourself that’s exactly what he would’ve told you. Depression was shameless. Tall and shadowy, he was a stark contrast to the small, bright minds he so loved the taste of. He was as hollow as he was terrifying, and every lie that escaped his cracked lips was meant to be heard by somebody, no matter how quietly spoken. All of his promises were empty, but at the same time they were fulfilled within seconds.
So when the young souls started tumbling out of his pantry and surrounding him in a dreadful red sea, he took a mental note:
Nᴏᴛᴇ Tᴏ Sᴇʟғ: Bᴜʏ ᴀ Bɪɢɢᴇʀ Pᴀɴᴛʀʏ
how incredibly annoying is it that words cannot capture everything?
i will sit here and i will ramble on for hours to you about how the ocean caught the red blazing sun in a perfect reflection.
you will nod your head and smile, but you did not see what i had seen.
i then will tell you that the flowers are in bloom again, and they’re even prettier this year than they were last.
you will nod your head and smile, but you had not been to the place i spoke of.
then i will say that your bright pink lips are perfectly painted, and i will advise you not to stay out for too long.
you will nod your head and smile, but you have yet to come back to me.
no, words cannot capture everything.
they can only hold so much emotion before they’re just dots and crosses on otherwise empty paper.
but colours are a different story.
this is why whenever i think of you, my world turns a faded shade of fuchsia and i begin to wonder where my purpose has gone.
this is why the only paints i ever buy are red, white, and a little bit of blue.
this is why i take pictures of seaside sunsets and pin them up on our bedroom wall.
this is why i sleep on your side of the bed now, hoping to fill the empty space with the weighted presence of my guilty conscience.
but i can only hope to be a ghost of the light you left behind, a mere particle of the energy you radiated.
my favourite colour was fuchsia.
now it is dark green.
and until you come back to me, i will be lying in the forest behind our house, looking up at the trees and waiting.
Charlie was in a band.
They were called The Death Within, and they were absolutely terrible. For some reason, the locals couldn’t get enough of them.
Every now and then, a group of drunken teenagers would band together to write scathing reviews of their performances online. It was one of the only times those angst-ridden loners talked to anyone besides themselves.
Charlie knew this, and he let them be. ‘Kids will be kids,’ was a common thought.
The Death Within played 3 nights a week at a raggedy bar south of the Mississippi. They had fans and lovers, they had haters and hecklers. But above all, they had mad fun.
Charlie hated the fact that he couldn’t remember most of the best nights of his life.
This group of teenagers started getting a little too serious with their reviews on the same night The Death Within decided to spend the night sobering up at a motel.
This group of teenagers that wore colourful bands around their wrists. This group of teenagers that spent all their weekly allowance on parking lot smoke sessions and cheap beer. This group of teenagers that all hated each other and themselves just couldn’t get enough of tormenting Charlie and his band mates.
Charlie was going to be okay.
That’s what he told himself when he saw the latest review left on TDW’s FaceBook page.
“if ur not as stupid IRL as u r on stage, u might lock ur door tonight.”
It was half-hearted, vague, and definitely not to be taken seriously.
Or perhaps, it was something much heavier.
Whatever it was, and whoever these people were, Charlie had decided he was going to be okay.
A red rubber wrist band thumped against the motel’s already-cracked window.
The door knob started to shake.
Charlie was going to be okay.
Different bands of different colours hit the same window in the same spot, desperate for the glass to break—or even bend—just a little bit more under their pressure.
The door knob kept on shaking.
Charlie’s band mates, Matt and Ben, were outside having a smoke.
Cigarettes under the stars. They wouldn’t be back any time soon.
Charlie was not going to be okay.
He sank to the stained carpet as he rolled his ever-growing list of last words through his aching head. It seemed that he was going to need to pick a few good ones, and quickly.
The wrist bands ceased to thump on the broken glass.
The door knob ceased to shake.
Charlie was not going to be okay.
Bullets came flying through the window where the coloured bands had been flung just seconds before.
“Time moves quicker as it begins to run out,” Charlie said.
He thought those were pretty good last words, even if he was the only one to hear them.
Charlie stood up and let the bullets crack through his skull, sending him back to the stain-soaked ground.
Charlie was in a band.
There’s no inspiration in this window, in my bones, or in my blood. No inspiration at all. I need to let my hair down, and I need to let things happen. But things never happen, and that’s why the window is open.
I say there’s no inspiration in the window, and it’s true. The inspiration lies in front of the window, but not behind it, and certainly not within it. If I can see what lies in front, I might just be able to grasp a good idea. Or two or three. Ideally ten, but I’m not an optimist.
The wind comes rushing in, bringing with it the air of city and nightlife. It’s breathable and fun and loveable in its own way, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. That’s a damn shame, because a good metaphor right then would’ve been a shock out of your certain boredom. You, as a reader, have a right to leave me alone right now. I just beg of you to stay for a few more sentences.
And maybe it’ll come to me.
But I stay here, sat in the window. Almost always in the window. Rarely in front, and sometimes behind. It’s become dull. Boring. Bothersome, even, that I cannot think of a single thing to write. Of course this is a streamline of words, but don’t judge my credibility on that alone.
Please, don’t judge my credibility on any of this. I am aware of how hopeless I may sound.
How helpless I just may be.
Tonight I will suffer within this window. But someday I will thrive in front of it.