Magdalena Poost

tender collector
public space,  storytelling, & climate



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Often when I have the urge to write, it’s really that I want to transmit a vibrating feeling in my chest from me to you. I want to write a hole through space so that you can crawl in my walnut shell, we can lay on our backs and look at a dark covering, with our heads nodding to the same rhythm. So many people write about this - I mean, so many people make about this. I feel good. I feel the way an angel does. I feel a hum in my chest, that is also a texture, that is also the interplay between two colors next to each other, that is the feeling of light. Ultimately, I am so saturated with light. I am so in love with being alive. 

A couple weeks ago, I shared a piece of my writing with someone I love. The writing was an offering; I saw myself in it and I hoped that they would remember me through it, that they would love the me that I saw inside of my writing. It didn’t quite work, which wasn’t surprising to me. What was surprising, in a way that both cut and delighted me, was that they picked up some edges I left dangling. Ultimately, I want to be noticed in my particulars. I want someone to pore over my tiniest pieces, to be seen and considered. I think that everything is worth poring over like a holy book. I think there are the holiest hidden layers in every utterance, however flippant. I think this. I love religions that read in a circle, marking time by where they are in the same story on repeat. What I do think is that there is nothing inherently more complex about the bible as an entity than any other collection of words - which is not to minimize the bible’s complexity, rather to say that I believe the whole of the world could be found in any sentence. Which is another way of saying that maybe there are no soul mates (maybe), only the choice to hold and pore over someone until you see it all in them. I think we are all soul mates, actually. 

The thing this person noticed jabbed me a bit like a needle, mainly because of the intimacy of the fact that they noticed a piece of me that I had assumed to be flying under the radar. How much love do you make and give to others, and how much do you expect to receive back? I don’t really think that’s the way to think about love, but there is something true inside of it. I’m thinking of those poems that people share online, that say you should wait for someone to love you like you love them, because it is real, it is possible, because aren’t you real? Isn’t your love real? I guess what I’m getting at is a sense that there are certain things about me that feel a bit hidden in plain sight, I suppose. I have been able to relax my grip on certain things, with the trust that I am not actually being pored over, noticed like a holy thing. We don’t notice most things about one another. But, here in this moment, someone was noticing something about me, and moreover - why was it so sad that this was being done by someone I believed loved me? Why did it surprise me that they were there, noticing me? 

I’ll get more to the point: what they noticed was that I tend to walk around myself. ‘Censor’ is actually the word they used. In the same instant I voice a thought, I begin destabilizing its honesty, its validity. It is as if my central motion is to aim just to the side of what I am trying to say. Or maybe it’s that I am afraid of being seen straight on? I have a deep lack of trust that what I have to say is worth saying. That’s what I’m trying to say, here, veering off to the side. Funny how things keep doing that.