Revisiting the Past Through Prose
So it doesn’t revisit me…
Dear Vocal,
2024 is upon us and I am asking you for a huge favor. Please help me to avoid my greatest fear, the one that keeps me up at night, the one buried beneath all angers and anxieties. Help me to put feeling and thought to paper and to work out what only my body remembers, what was too painful for the mind to comprehend at the time. Help me to revisit my past.
You see, my greatest fear is that my mind will deteriorate and I will spend my last years stuck in my past years. If dementia or Alzheimer’s takes hold I don’t want to remain frozen in a child’s mind. I don’t want the past to come for me, to take hold and force me to relive the pain. I want to relive it now, through presence, therapy, and doing the emotional work. I want to meet with it and then leave, back to the beautiful present life that I have created. My heart will break if in my later years I am forced back into the past life I fought so hard to leave.
Vocal Community, does this resonate with you? Can we dive into our fears together? Can we work through whatever is lingering in the past, festering deep down, this year?
I want to revisit it through my writings and posts, to work it out, feel it through, and guide myself to peace. I want to relive my past while I am still aware of my present. I want to soothe the scared inner child and create calm where once was only chaos. I want to revisit it now so that I am not calling out for a mother or father who didn’t come then and certainly won’t come in the future. I want to be so still and serene if the past comes haunting that the ghosts will exhale and join me in peace.
2024 is the year that will challenge me as a writer and as a human. I want to feel. I want to memorialize. I want to love. I want to move on. I want to be free. I want to stop looking back and begging for things that won’t come. I want to be in the present and the future and make peace with the past.
Vocal audience, please be tender. Please give me grace. Derision and shame are the heavy boulders I am trying to wrest from my psyche. Vulnerability is hard. So very hard with a last like mine. Vocal is my first baby step in sharing my thoughts with a community. I have always been searching for community to soften and soothe it all.
Dear Vocal readers and writers let’s inspire each other to create and share and be as human as we can be. We don’t have much utility beyond our humanity, do we? So let’s lean in and feel as much as possible. Let’s interact and cheer each other on. Let’s replace jealousy with inspiration and criticism with grace. Let’s create a space where we all grow and all rejoice in it.
2024 can be the year we all take our last deep inhale, the one right before the big action, the one who fills up the space where anxiety and fear reside. We will ride the exhale to creative freedom and to presence.
2024 will be the year the little girl can stop covering her eyes because she can now see all the monsters without fear. The monsters will become tamed and beloved collaborators on this journey. 2024 will be the year she shrieks again with joy and allows herself to be seen!
About the Creator
Jackie Adams
chronic, acerbic truth teller with memories for days. my hope for writing is to illuminate the shameful, murky parts so they feel loved, come to dance, and make merry.
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Grief in a Nail Salon
“Hello, I’d like a pedicure?” “What color?” “Black, please. This one.” “Oh, getting ready for Halloween!” “No, black because that was the color of my dog. She just died. Like just a few days ago. She’s gone. And I want her to be here. So I’m getting black polish on my toes so when I see them I can pretend she’s here. I know that doesn’t make any sense. Like I do really know this and I know I sound crazy. I’m sorry. I just really miss her and I don’t know what to do about it. And I need some comfort. I told my mom my dog was dying and she said “oh that stinks”, so you see I need someone to take care of me for a few minutes, so that’s why I’m here. I just want to sit and think about my dog and maybe pretend you are comforting me, pretend I am someone who has people that comfort them. My dog comforted me, but like I said, she just died and now I don’t really know what to do because she was the one I need for things like this but she left. Well she didn’t leave, I had to decide when she should die, and that part is sort of crushing my soul because I don’t know if maybe I did it too soon. She gave me a look before she died that made me think I did it too soon. The vet said her tumors were enormous and the bone cancer was spreading and she couldn’t walk anymore and when she did she fell on her face and it still hurts my heart when I think about it. Every time she would have to go up or down I would hold my breath and close my eyes and pray she wouldn’t scrape up her face when she fell like she did that one time. The vet told me “it was time” but what is “time” when you are killing your best friend? Because she was my best friend and my daughter and also my protector and my confidant all rolled up into one big package. She was so big. Everyone commented on how big she was. I loved the feel of that big body next to mine. She was just gorgeous, the face of a dream. But I guess it had to be time because I knew she was hurting. She wasn’t herself. She hadn’t come to bed in over two months. And I tried to pretend that was because of the new baby, did I mention I just had a baby? A son. After two miscarriages. My life just became complete and now she is leaving me. Right when everything became perfect, she had to go. I want to tell her I still need her here especially for the good parts but I don’t want her to feel like she has to stay for me. I have to be her mother and make the hard decision to let her go so she can stop being in so much pain. And part of me died when I made that decision. And I am so fucking angry at my husband that I had to make it. He was tripling her pain meds because he really loved her too. So I cooked her steak and fed it to her piece by piece and had all her favorite people come over for cuddles. She died with the sun and the breeze and my tears all on her back. She rolled that big body into my husband and stared at me. I tried to send every ounce of love into her and prayed she could feel it and it would carry her to the next chapter. I know her death was beautiful but I still am nervous that maybe I didn’t make the right choice today. Because now she’s really gone and I feel like I am going to scream. I feel really really scared and sad and alone and when I feel those things I go see her except now she’s gone and I don’t know what to do but I think I’m starting to panic a bit. Where is she? Where did she go? I screamed for her in my car. Yup, I was driving alone at night and I just started screaming for her. My whole soul needed her and you see we were just getting to the good part of life, the parts where all my big wishes had finally come true after so much pain and heartache. And I guess that is why she was able to go now because we got through all the hard stuff. But that doesn’t feel comforting, it just feels cruel.”
By Jackie Adams2 years ago in Petlife
Ida Shaghoian and the Quiet Architecture of Feeling
In a contemporary art world often driven by immediacy and spectacle, Ida Shaghoian offers a markedly different experience. Her paintings unfold slowly, rewarding attention rather than demanding it. They are not depictions of places one can locate on a map, but emotional environments shaped by memory, sensation, and atmosphere. Through abstraction and restraint, her work creates spaces where viewers are invited to pause, reflect, and reconnect with their own inner landscapes.
By Ida Shaghoian4 days ago in Art
A Modern African Tarot
The thirteenth card in A Modern African Tarot invites a radical shift—not in motion, but in perception. Where XI JUSTICE confronts truth and accountability, XII HANGED MAN asks us to release control, embrace stillness, and see the world from a new angle. This card reimagines the traditional Hanged Man archetype through African patience, spiritual surrender, and the wisdom of waiting.
By Vongani Bandi6 days ago in Art
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