2022 Nonfiction Winner: "My Emotions in Various Forms" by Khloe Kuckelman
Photo Credit: Camila Quintero Franco (quinterocamilaa) licensed under Public Domain and obtained from Unsplash
my emotions in various forms
“My Emotions in Various Forms” is a collection of Khloe Kuckelman’s (under the pseudonym overrbite) emotions in stories, extended metaphors, and memories. She began writing this in October of 2020 and has become a way for her to cope with the ever changing world.
“Isn’t That Something?” articulates the feeling of positive change and how it can bring hope for the future. “Feeding the Clock” is both a memory of graduating high school and an acknowledgment of how frightening the concept of time is. “Control Envies Freedom” describes how Khloe’s obsession with control often combats against her desire for freedom. Nostalgia is the inspiration for “Youth That Seeped,” in which she tells the story of a family reunion. In “Blue Gas Giant” she uses Neptune as a metaphor for pessimism and depression. “Mayfly” reads like a diary entry, testifying to a nameless sadness that she likens to the life of a mayfly. “Tucked in With Lace” is a strong declaration of what femininity means to Khloe.
Isn’t That Something?
There’s this arachnid, the whitebanded crab spider, that can change colors. While I’m not particularly fond of spiders, I do find this one fascinating. Only the females can change and it appears to be limited to two colors: yellow and white. They do this on flower petals, sometimes to hide from butterflies, their prey. Not much is known about this creature, but it does take them longer to turn from yellow to white.
Evolution is such an odd thing, how powerful and transitory it is. What happened to this spider years ago to teach it to do this? How many trials and errors did it go through to understand how to present itself just right? Can I expect the same from myself?
Yes and no. I don’t believe there is a “just right” version of me. I heard somewhere, I think in a song, that the more I know what I want, the less I’ll have. I agree on some level in that knowing how large the box of life is limits my ability to fill it to my heart’s content. There’s not just one box, though. There’s millions of them scattered around Earth, sometimes in places I’ll never be or maybe right under my pillow. I know I want more and that reminds me of how little I have, but why should that sadden me? Why should I allow myself to shrink to fit what I have right now, when I can create more space?
If I want to be hidden in the flowers, insecurities covered in white camouflage, then I can. If I want to be yellow, bright and full of bad memories, then yellow I’ll be. Unlike the whitebanded crab spider, I can be jade, sorbet, periwinkle, lavender, blue blue blue. I can be different fonts of myself and still be one whole person. Still be me.
Isn’t that something? I can make myself miniscule, monumental, minute, monstrous. I can bend and shift and transition so many times if I want to. I allow myself to change with the seasons or the sunset. I can be the moon and the sun and the stars and the whole solar system if I want to. I am allowed to be known.
***
Feeding the Clock
In middle school I rode the bus. My sister and I were the first stop, 6:12am. The early morning rush was inevitable as we worked our way to Seneca and when I couldn’t fall asleep, I used to watch the streetlights flicker out as we passed them.
On May 19, 2021, I watched my classmates flicker by as their names were called. Each one had someone cheering in the crowd, someone waiting to see them walk across a stage. It seemed that time moved all too slow when I waited for my turn, and all too fast when the wood creaked under my steps. Still, those few seconds of my name bouncing around the auditorium made me think of the bus rides, counting dying light bulbs. Watching the sun rise as if it waited for me to do so.
There is something so terrifying about the concept of time, like a metronome tick tick ticking while my internal clock tries its best to keep the beat. When I am at my worst, time feels like screaming when I got the breath knocked out of me at age six, gasping on the playground. It's heavy lead slipping through the spaces between my fingers.
But there is something so beautiful, too. The way that the human body listens, takes its advice. How music can throw itself into common time or it can completely ignore the rules. How there is no way to truly know how long a thought will dance around in my head until it turns into literature. How I can watch diplomas being handed over to people I’ve seen in the hallway for four years, but not know a single thing about them.
I desperately wish I did.
I crave control over time so deeply that sometimes it feels like that’s the only thing I’m meant to do. Like my true purpose is to outlive it, to find a space in which seconds and hours are only a construct. Like time is a beast starving in my basement and the only way to get what I want from this world is to feed the clock.
***
Control Envies Freedom
I have four heating pads.
The first is in the corner of the guest bedroom (my brother’s old room) ((my current hideout)). It’s gray and the wires are cracked. I know this because it’s the one that gave me the red burns across my lower abdomen when I fell asleep with it on.
The second is a blue wrap around that I swear by. When I’m at my worst I heat it for a little too long and let it burn my sides for a couple of seconds. It reminds me of when I used to stick my hands under the faucet when it was steaming back in Family and Consumer Sciences. Eighth grade me didn’t understand what it meant to use external pain to calm internal storms.
The third is the basement heating pad. Only one other soul understands why the air is easier to breathe when I am tucked away in the emptiest part of the house. This one gets very hot and turns off in two hours. It started out too stiff but has softened while it helped me through anxious nights.
The fourth is my favorite. It’s red, padded, turns off on a timer, and has six settings. I think about it when I’m panicking, when I walk into work, think about the warmth and the sense of control that comes with it. It’s a little sad, to me, how much it helps. How much it reminds me of when I didn’t need a heating pad at all.
I don’t remember who saw the burns after I did. The first time my doctor saw them was an uncomfortable experience. It was after I lost a lot of weight, around June of 2020, and she was checking my spine. When I stood up she saw a flash of crimson and I got banned from sleeping with any of them on.
I do it anyway sometimes, just for a sense of control. Just to fall asleep. Just to see the orange light blinking in the darkness before it turns off.
My greatest weakness is my yearning for control. I collect things that let me feel like I have it; heating pads, albums, five dollar drinks, pill bottles. I hang my medals next to the mirror and sometimes I wear them late at night, when the electric warmth and haunting medicine don’t do their jobs. I let them clang against each other, look at the Scholastic keys pinned to the fabric and I tell myself that my words are free. That they aren’t constrained by mortality, phobias, society. That I don’t need to have control over them because they do just fine by themselves.
And they listen to me when the timer has gone off, when the room goes dark and it’s just me and them. They understand that control envies freedom more than it’s ever loved certainty. They understand that I don’t quite know how to have both.
***
Youth That Seeped
Family reunions.
The epitome of drama.
My mom’s side likes to pretend that they all get along. Reunions always have this sort of sugar coated frustration; rooms full of small talk and pointed phrases. It’s odd to see my mom in that mix because she’s the quietest person in the room. She’s the corner dweller and Switzerland. I just avoid everyone I can and play my part, fill the empty seat and speak when spoken to.
My favorite reunion was when we went to the Lake of the Ozarks. I don’t remember how old I was, just that I still had my awful bangs and that I was rereading the Twilight series (I was team neither. Both made me uncomfortable.) Most of it was spent with my immediate family which is how I prefer it; less petty silence and more interesting debates. Really, the trip as a whole was bad and full of sun burns but one small section of it is clear in my mind: the cliffs.
The climb up was difficult and slippery but then I was standing at the top, peering at the water below. I was at the age where I had just begun to overthink absolutely everything and so I kept musing about what the impact could do to my body if I hit it just wrong. That led to me thinking about how young I would die, how I hadn’t even had the chance to understand life before my neck would snap in this dirty lake.
But I liked the fear. I liked that one second of bravery would have me flying. That human need to fall without caring what’s below. Jump and sink into the abyss of blue.
I ran off the sharp rocks, plunging like all of those before me. Gravity had tugged on my chest like this heavy necklace, taking me down and down until I shot through the water. I came up gasping for air and then I smiled, swam to the bottom of the cliff, and started climbing again.
It’s addicting, the glee that comes from being a child. I think I’ll always miss that first jump, the first time I felt vibrant. There are so many firsts that I will never get back, the youth that seeped into my floorboards, the desks I sat in, the broken phone chargers. I understand that that’s how it has to be in order to grow as a person. Life is supposed to be lived and I am not able to memorize each moment I spend breathing, to make space for the next.
Every once in a while, though, right before I fall asleep, I can feel the rock cutting at the soles of my feet.
***
Blue Gas Giant
I used to be terrified of tornadoes. Whenever the sky turned green I’d start to panic. I’d grab all the necessities and beg my dad to get off the front porch. When I was around seven I’d draw rainbows with whatever markers I could find and make a pile of the completed papers. Doing this made listening to the howling wind less scary.
The dark spots of Neptune are a little odd. At one point there was only a single spot and it was wider than the Atlantic Ocean. NASA and other astronomers tracked the storm’s movement as it was headed to the equator, which is considered to be the drop off zone, and it reversed travel patterns. Another spot was seen with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2021.
Neptune has the highest wind speeds in our solar system and it’s reached up to 1,200 miles per hour. It’s insane to me to think about how a tornado on Earth wouldn’t do any damage on Neptune. I’d have piles and piles of rainbows and my stupid little backpack with expired granola bars. There would be no chance of surviving that sort of power.
Triton, one of the planet’s moons, is the only large moon in our solar system that orbits counterclockwise. Its orbit is slowly decaying and I don’t really understand why or how that’s even possible but it seems sad to me. This lump of frozen nitrogen was thrown off its path to orbit a gigantic blue planet and it will stay there until it’s completely gone.
I stopped being afraid of tornadoes when I realized that I was already orbiting my own sort of blue gas giant. I don’t want to be Triton. I don’t want to fall apart while I circle around my incessant melancholy but that might just be who I am, in the end. I may be the sort of person that’s both Neptune and Triton. I listen to the storms and I have dark spots, too. I’m the destroyed and I’m the destroyer and I think it’s clear why that’s a hard thing to cope with.
***
Mayfly
I started writing the titles of my works on sticky notes and based on the date of creation, I put them in a finished pill bottle. I wish that I could do that with emotions, too, but I guess that’s what this is. This collection of aching I’ve been trying to transform into something that I can be proud of. Something I can call progress.
I shaved my head. The thought always seemed so far away until I was sitting in a chair at Great Clips watching inches of my hair fall to the ground. It was powerful, then, to say goodbye to years of growth before I had a chance to back out. There was strength in staring down the guy in the chair behind me whenever we made eye contact in the mirror, telling him yes, I am doing this and no, I won’t regret it.
Today it seems like there’s still something to get rid of, something that never quite fades— and I remember that there’s no name for it when I shove poems into Escitalopram. I just know it as when the lights start to mingle and getting out of bed feels like lifting concrete. It’s not quite as encompassing as apathy, not so soul-rotting as being constantly out of place, but it’s there doing damage.
There’s this saying from a humorist named George Carlin: “The mayfly lives only one day. And sometimes it rains.”
And what I’m trying to say is that today it rained.
***
Tucked in With Lace
Florence + the Machine released a new song called “King.” There’s this part where she says “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king.” And since I don’t care that the word king is used to describe a male, I’m taking it for myself.
When I shaved my head a lot of older men asked me why I got rid of my “pretty hair.” The urge to spit critiques about their physical appearance is always strong but what follows it is this loss of femininity. Like my sole purpose is to embody the vision of what a woman is supposed to look like. As if I am a hunk of clay that they get to mold to an ideal figure with a thin waist, small shoulders and an innocent face.
The downstairs neighbors have deafening laughs. It seems like I’m intruding when I lay in my bed at night while their voices boom through the floor. I’ve got a loud laugh, too, just like the man that’s announcing his own laughter with a deep bass voice. And there’s nothing “girly” about the way I do it; my shoulders hike up and my mouth goes a bit too wide, my teeth are bared and my nose scrunches. Sometimes my head falls back or I gasp out a raspy breath, my eyebrows scrunch or they climb up my forehead. I am not delicate. I am not something that can be put in a jewelry box, tucked in with lace.
I am no mother. It has been forced down my throat that I was born with a womb for a reason. But I decided a while ago that it is every person’s right to decide what that reason is, regardless of biology and the male gaze.
I am no bride. Outside of my sexual and romantic orientation, I am not made for white dresses and diamond rings. There will be no declared ownership, I belong to me for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. No one gets to change my last name.
I am a woman. I am feminine. I am king.
Khloe Kuckelman, also known as overrbite, is a writer from Kechi, Kansas. She’s won 7 Scholastic Writing Awards, as well as the Prodigy Award at Cowley College. She is currently a freshman attending Kansas State University and is majoring in creative writing. Her dream is to publish both a creative nonfiction collection and poetry collection, and live in a lighthouse with her awards framed on the wall.