Alejandra Carrasco
Bio
Writer, artist, performer, sunflower
Based in BC, Canada
Stories (12)
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Vanity Card #13
Change. Everything is going to change so fast and at the same time. It's already starting. Looking a week into the future has turned into looking two years into the future. The packing has begun, and soon, my life will never be the same. The checklists are made and tomorrow I'll be adding my first check mark to that list.
By Alejandra Carrasco4 years ago in Poets
Vanity Card #12
It's that time of my life when my friends are my family. I keep typing a sentence and then immediately pressing the backspace button. This is free form prose. The purpose of a vanity card is to speak freely and passionately. I am not short of words or ideas. I hop on the word document to make sense of my life. Perhaps picking things apart will provide clarity on the things that make me feel but don't make logical sense. Suddenly my problems don't seem so dramatic or poetic. And then what ends up on this drafting page appears more disorganized than the mess in my head. It's troubling as a writer. The threads are supposed to weave harmoniously once the words reach the white space. Today I left work early because I felt I was reliving a traumatic experience. I walked through the parking lot and the sun wrapped me in motherly warmth, except my face was soaked and I could barely see. What beautiful weather for such a shitty day. I opened my journal once I got home and realized I hadn't written in days. It's no wonder I feel wound up and sensitive. Isn't it funny how we chose what is wrong with is? What's wrong could be something we'd never consider, an unexplored symptom? The tears have dried and left a thin film on my skin. The first line of this vanity card is essentially the log line for the TV show Friends. Nothing can stop the thoughts, rational or not, to enter and leave my mind. However, I could look back on this day, on this vanity card, and find that my real problem sits in the subtext of it all. Maybe then will I forgive myself for writing like a child looking for a lost toy.
By Alejandra Carrasco4 years ago in Poets
Vanity Card #11
After pouring myself a hot cup of coffee I jump on the computer and open the drafting page. Usually it's unknown to me what words I'll regurgitate. Trying to spell "regurgitate" was a momentary challenge. I'm procrastinating cleaning my house before I have people over for board games. The fog is thicker than molasses outside. My mind is littered with 'I can't' and 'what ifs' that are not realistic enough to bring me down, but it's enough to tie my into a knot and paralyze me in an uncomfortable chair for a little bit. I need to write. Oh to explore the injustices of my life or not. To express gratitude for the hundredth time today. To make a to-do list that I certainly won't follow. There is nothing that drives me to type this vanity card except that I have this deep rooted urge to type something. If I don't do this now, I will feel weird and incomplete for the rest of the day. The caffeine is kicking in and I fear my sentences will turn to gibberish, which by the way, I hear you could major in now. That's not true. I don't know why I said that. See what I mean? It's not that I have anything to say, I just need to say something. There is comfort in knowing that the void will always have an open ear and an open heart. If all else fails in my future writing career, I can always speak into the vast nothing and hear the echoes fall lower and lower into an endless something, or nothing. We forget we have the option to do our hobbies for us instead of money. We forget we have the option to fuck off and do what we love for us only. After pouring myself a hot cup of coffee I jump on the computer and open the drafting page. Usually it's unknown to me what words I'll regurgitate.
By Alejandra Carrasco4 years ago in Poets
Vanity Card #3
What is it about music? It's a biological, evolutionary, spiritual, scientific, religious phenomenon. Music seeps into our skin like strong black tea. Music opens our sanctuaries and allows them to bleed in peace. In every time signature, every change in key, every minor and major chord, we get to know ourselves a little better. Like the blues. A God given gift that mankind can drink and cry to. When it comes to the heart, there is no music more intrusive. No matter where in the world you are, if you walk into a pub and put on the blues, magically, patrons will start passing whiskey and calling their spouses. There is no limit to the ways music can move us. Metal allows us to open our chests and invigorate our spirits. Metal being my favorite genre, its fantastical principles in its arrangements perfectly stimulate the little electrons in my brain. Then there's the classics. The real classics. The royalty free classics. The symphonies and arias that seem to have been summoned on this planet by wizards for a biblical purpose. It's easy to get lost in the philosophy of music and its effect on humans. Perhaps this card has lost direction. Nonetheless, if the hairs on your arms don't raise during a face melting guitar solo, or a belt of sorrow, or a roar of brass instruments, chances are you are not really living.
By Alejandra Carrasco4 years ago in Poets
Vanity Card #9
I have reason to believe that my dreams are trying to tell me something. After several tired days and sleepless nights, I've concluded that I am, in fact, at a crossroads with myself. As I watched the sun rise high enough to kiss the mountains the other morning, it dawned on me that I'm in my mid-twenties. This came to me as a shock, as though my mind had skipped a beat, well, six years worth of beats. In three months I'm expected to move back to the city after living nomadically for years. I'm going back to university after having dropped out three times. I'm going to attempt living The Adult Life. I don't have a back up plan if it doesn't work out. This is it. My only shot to follow through on all the things I so cowardly backed out of time after time. I've started noticing little things in life that I hadn't picked up on before. The air in my little basement suite feels too lived in. The dust collects more quickly these days. The lack luster routine is getting stale. Soon, this living room that I have cultivated to feel peaceful will be torn down and put in several boxes. My little treasures won't find their place until I'm settled in a space that I don't even know what it might look like. Everything is up in the air. The discomfort of change is not something that's unfamiliar to me. But given how the last two years have influenced my way of being, change feels like the scariest challenge thus far. I'm only twenty-four years old. There is not shortage of challenges ahead of me. Then how come moving, something I've done a million times, seems so daunting this time? Why am I just now clueing back into what being me means? Somewhere along the line I've forgotten who I am. Now I'm reintroducing myself to the self that is an adult. She's intimidating. It will take sometime to warm up to her. The self I thought I knew is no longer there. My dreams are trying to tell me something. They're telling me it's time to grow up.
By Alejandra Carrasco4 years ago in Poets
Vanity Card #8
I miss summer days. Liberation. Warm sleepless nights. The tint of your loved one's hair. The smile they give you when the sun sets. Sweaty hands clasping as you both leap over the cliff. Drinking without consequence because time lasts forever. Saying "I love you" when the tide rolls in. The everlasting freckles that are conjured under the nourishing sun. Summer days are to live for in rural British Columbia. It's worth the winters that deplete me of color and spirit. It's worth the constant intake of vitamin D supplement when night falls before dinner time. I miss summer days. Liberation. Yes, I long for it. Liberation.
By Alejandra Carrasco4 years ago in Poets
Vanity Card #5
I firmly believe drinking coffee on a day off is counter productive. I'm not one to judge, I caffeinate without intention all the time. When my mind is operating at lightning speed, and what feels like full capacity, and the world slows down around me, I have the urge to tackle a huge task. The Huge Task. But on a day off there are no huge tasks. So I'm left with restlessness and frustration. Nothing needs to be accomplished. A small void widens on days like these. I could walk into city hall and tell off those no good, greedy scum to take a hike with energy like this. I'm a bite sized star waiting to illuminate galaxies in a grand explosion. With no where to direct my elevated alter ego, all I have are little things to fixate on. The more I fixate, the less perfect the world seems. Oh boy, I've had a lot of coffee. Let's wrap this up before I go down yet another rabbit hole.
By Alejandra Carrasco4 years ago in Poets
Vanity Card #4
On today's episode of My Life, I repeated the pattern of wishing I had rescheduled everything last week so I wouldn't have to worry about timing everything I do this week. If I just took the fifteen minutes out of my day that other day, I wouldn't be freaking about how late I'm doing the thing now. If I had just made that quick trip to the gas station last night, I wouldn't have to woken up extra early to make sure I had time to get gas in the morning before work. If I had written that reminder and stuck it on the fridge yesterday, I wouldn't be cursing at the wheel because I forgot to buy peanut butter. Oh, man. The glitches and malfunctions a person can experience in a short period of time. What an incredible train wreck it is trying to maintain a functional lifestyle. That is, if you intend on living in society. If you don't live in society, well, I respect you from the bottom of my tired heart.
By Alejandra Carrasco4 years ago in Poets
Vanity Card #2
How are we built so differently from the geniuses that wrote entire symphonies before they had their first kiss? How haunted were those with the deafening call from the Gods to conjure compositions that would be reveled for centuries? What nightmares did Mozart have at night, at fourteen, knowing that he had the power to change the world? History books will never fully illustrate the torture that lived in the hearts of these pioneers, and how the suffering was necessary for them to succeed as prodigies, as legends, as madmen. Perhaps it was supernatural. Perhaps rock and roll said it best: They sold their souls to the devil.
By Alejandra Carrasco4 years ago in Poets
Vanity Card #1
For vanity's sake. Here we go. An unfiltered look through the microscope of consciousness. Where twisted thoughts come out as untwisted words. Or vice versa. Where philosophies collide with insignificant to-do lists. It's the subspace where everything goes and the points don't matter. It's the confessions of an unhindered mind. It's where a sentence can transform a reader. There is no rhyme or reason for this. I type in spurts because I can. Because there is freedom in writing without an agenda. There is freedom in writing for me, to put it out there for no one to see. Today that's not entirely true. Today I write for Mr. Meredith, my former creative writing teacher who passed away. He taught me how to deeply engage in the writing process. He taught me what vanity cards are. And, well, Mr. Meredith, you were right. This exercise is fun as hell.
By Alejandra Carrasco4 years ago in Poets
