Welcome Meet Kat Tour Dates Bookings Writing Audio/Video Out of Your Mind

Prevent Suicide In Memory, With Love Donors

Welcome Meet Kat Tour Dates Bookings Prevent Suicide Prevent Suicide In Memory, With Love Donors Writing Audio/Video Out of Your Mind

Tour Schedule

Past Performances

Follow @thesunshineyears on Instagram and never miss a story.

Today, with deep reverence for Suicide Prevention month, I am asking for your support in pursuing my dream of a world where suicide doesn’t exist. To me, mental health isn’t the issue. The issue is the band-aid cures, the ways we don’t communicate, the emotional vessels within us that we fill with concrete and sand. Something happens when we experience depression. The visceral vein that connect our head and our heart, the life line that provides us with feeling alive, disconnects to protect us from feeling too much all at once. It is the thread of resilience alone that we must pull on to connect the bits of our spirit back together. And it is the experience of poetry that helps us get there. I’ve seen it. And I’ve survived because of it.

I’m at a point where every door is wide open, all the lights are lit green and the map is a wonderful shade of ambiguity. This is the time to go for it, to speak about mental opportunity and perform to young adults, to make films about depression and turn every poem into a song. I want to be loud. I want to help. I want everyone to see what I saw the day I realized that behind my eyes lie a painfully beautiful mental opportunity.

If you’ve ever felt the honest words I’ve poured in hopes of reaching you, if you’ve ever dared to believe in poetry, become my patron and support my journey to prevent suicide and illuminate the mental opportunity that’s been there all along. Any amount helps me continue creating content, films, audio and supports future inspirational speaking engagements at schools of all ages around the country and beyond.

What you will receive is exclusive content. The Sunshine Years has given me an incredible outlet for over three years but there are so many more words outside of the small windows I carefully piece together here. Every patron receives a monthly email with unique audio, interviews, travel tips, articles about tiny living, my favorite bus/van life recipes, film photos, and other various forms of my artistic expression.

Suicide affects everyone. If you would like to donate in memory of a loved one [cont. below]
.
.
#thesunshineyears #mentalopportunity #suicideprevention

There is no way to keep track of the days. Life on the road has no calendar the only appointments to keep are with yourself. I decide to grow my hair long to measure time. I don’t return the bus for 1/8th of an inch. When I do, it’s as I destroyed it. Salinger wrote, “The fact is always obvious and much too late, but the singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.” I take the hands I used to build the dream to reconstruct a tangible metal glimpse into happiness. September Sun transfers her heavy honey crown onto my head through the emergency hatch and beads of joy cascade down my sternum beneath my Camp Randy tee. I feel, something. I don’t cry. I get dirty moving stove pipe and snow tires, sinking my teeth made of screws deep into the frame of the pallet wood couch. I ring my hammer steel-on-steel, nail the shelves back with vigor and organize each book by their respective name, and then feeling. I wipe down the cutting board. I make the bed. I set everything back where it belongs, look around, and make the second promise I’ve ever made to myself that I intended on keeping.
I promise to never stop trying. To so deeply believe in a world where suicide doesn’t exists that I will chase my dreams no matter the risk, the doubting. I promise to help others see what I saw the day I realized that behind my eyes lie a painfully beautiful mental opportunity. Above all, I promise to be resilient and ask that the ground beneath me always be uneven because I’m not looking for an answer. I’m just wanting to see the story.

This could have been the end of this rope. The part where I dust off my resume and let my dreams to the back burner to simmer and seethe.
Instead, I stuff a healthy heap of marbles in my pocket, turn on Nina Simone’s “I Got Life”, shift into drive, remember I’m from Jersey, and step from the wings into the stage light. These are the sunshine years, my bonus time, and I am worthy of writing along for as many hours as this earth will keep me. Magic or not, the adventure is me. .
.
.
#thesunshineyears #mentalopportunity #suicidepreventionmonth #skoolie #homeiswhereyouparkit #vanlife #ontheroad #resilience

The red tow truck backs across the bridge and lowers the hitch in front of my yellow house. I beg my mind to take me away from here. ... It was raining along the coastline in Galway when I decided to go for a long walk with every intention of getting lost. I walked haphazardly, left along the canal, right up an alleyway, circling whole blocks more than once in an attempt to shake my own scent to no avail. I am always painfully conscious of where I am. The Galway cathedral erupts from the wet, black pavement standing with a hard-shelled permanence, drawing me in like magnet to metal. My attempt to get lost leads only to nostalgia as I pull open the decorated cathedral doors and move along the floor with the slow uncertainty of a saturated cat. There’s a mild sense of comfort from a former life that settles on me. Memories of first Friday mass, uniforms and nuns with straight upper lips & rubber black shoes move my muscles into a mechanical genuflect as I slide into a pew near the wall to the left of the empty altar. I start to cry for no reason in particular, turning the stained glass windows into pools of technicolor marbles. I don’t believe in things I can see so I close my eyes and talk to the universe for awhile, asking for some feelings to stay and others to kindly piss off. 30 seconds pass and I start to feel better, the same way one feels after vomiting suddenly, the same way I use to feel when the priest would slide the confessional screen shut leaving me, a sinner, out of the light, back in the blackness. I walk outside. The rain has stopped. I feel so alright I stop by the Róisín Dubh for a pint of Murphy’s. I feel so alright, I buy two. A pair of old Galway natives are sitting at the tables adjacent to mine. The woman on my left, with her pack of smokes and whiskey, is talking to the man on my right with his nearly empty pint, his fishing pole resting drunkenly on..[cont. below]
.
.
.
.
#thesunshineyears #homeiswhereyouparkit #skoolie #memory

Cousin Emily reads my tarot cards at the reunion. The first card she pulls is heartache—a red, bleeding organ with three swords piercing the flesh. She says there will be much heartache in this move. I say I’m not surprised. If only I knew.
I can’t keep Pem. Not practical for the road, the van. She’s never been off the Branch but I love her so much I try to keep her. Mom offers to look after her. No one willingly moves to Jersey but I can’t lose Pem. I exercise selfishness and it feels like shit. I buy her a collar with an gold, heart shaped name tag just like the one her mama wears so she won’t forget me. I put it around her neck. I look into her bright green eyes. She hates this. We both hate this. Audra let’s me borrow a carrying case and Pem is so scared I hang my fingers in the godforsaken cage the whole ride. She nuzzles my hand with her small, white mouth. I weep incessantly. I tell Pem everything. She has listened to every boy story, heartbreak, practiced poem and horrible singing. She kept me warm the winter we had no wood for heat, licked my face when I was too depressed to get out of bed, made me laugh chasing butterflies in the driveway, slept on my chest every time I came home from running away, pressed her paws to my lips to wake me in the morning.
Audra and I stop on the parkway for a picnic lunch. Pem is on a lease, in a harness she has never worn before. I’m trying to get her to eat but we both can’t, and won’t, when we’re upset. Audra and I chat, laugh a little. I start to feel like I’m doing the right thing then,

Pem slips her head from the harness. I instinctively pull on the leash. The harness falls the ground. She’s free. She runs.
I run.
My heart pounds in my neck. The blood drains from my face and I chase her, careful not to frighten but my panic cannot be hidden. I sprint after her into the woods. I can’t...I can’t lose her.
She’s moving just ahead of me. Slow and low, she doesn’t recognize where she is. She’s frightened. I’m calling in a soft voice. The blackberry bush thorns are cutting [cont. below]
.
.
.
#thesunshineyears

Dear god,
send me a prayer. I’m talking to someone but nobody’s there.
Dear god,
send me a prayer. I’m taking to someone but nobody’s there.

Suddenly, it’s been three years in the driveway and it’s time to move on. The humid hands of July white knuckle around my throat. I have so many panic attacks I stop counting the times I find myself unable to breathe. Uncertainty presses a hot branding iron to the center of my chest and twists. I look around at the home I built with my own hands and am unable to find the strength to destroy it. I am so heavy. I’ve been to so many unbelievable places in the world..Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Turks and Caicos, Hungary..but when I close my eyes..when fear wells up in my throat and I can’t sleep..I think of the Branch and the way the wind sounds when she hums through the hollar. The way the maple trees smell in the summer. The way the porch swings back and forth. The way the creek fills and falls and never stops moving. No matter what, the sound of the water never stops moving, even at night. The universe tries to give me edges of hate to hold onto—a piece of glass lodges into my foot on the metal floor; the ceiling springs a new leak and I misplace every lighter I own so no rice, tea, no decaf coffee. I keep the emergency exit open so I can look at the moon..try to remind myself how big the universe is. How small my hands are around the tangible. Nothing hugs me back. Pem’s stops sleeping with me and starts killing small birds and baby bunnies in the grass. Every familiar face in town starts to feel like an apparition and I wonder if the last five years have just been a long dream and I’m slowly starting to wake up. I try desperately cling to the present but I can hear the metronome clicking and everything is fleeting and I hate the feeling of making a memory. I think of a train. Better to watch it coming or turn around, feel the ground and imagine the hit? Prepare for the worst. Soak in the vibration for one last elation. When animals know they are about to die [cont. below]
.
.
#thesunshineyears #poetry #poeticprose #write #home #grief #skoolie #nomagic #insadness

I've cut every curl
from my scalp, onto the floor.
the decision to
snip scissors, cut slow.
I can hear the color of
my blood. me, alone.

Quiet & alone,
the loose curls split into strands
coloring the floor
with bits of my scalp
that I snipped. these hands are mine.
it’s my decision.

a bad decision
sits alone with me. I’m bald.
no reverse snipping.
no curls for comfort.
no magic in sadness scalped
and colored by blood.

what color makes a
good decision? should I have
kept my scalp heavy?
kept feeling alone
kept twirling the curls like I
didn’t have snipping

in mind? skipped snipping?
lied till blue was my color?
until curls grew black?
Until decisions
don’t need to be made alone?
til cold scalps were
in season? scalping
made a snipping tradition.
quiet, and alone.
Brown is the color
I have decided I need.
my curls...what have I
.
.
“Done.”
.
written in the Haiina poetic form (a sestina made up of haikus). Form invented by The Undercase, for The Undercase. @r.thomas425 @the_towns_end .
.
#thesunshineyears #goodbye
#curls #decide #alone #poetry #poet #write #sestina #haiku #haiina

| Copyright 2019 |