Kind not Nice

primordial/perishable

Ava Bellows — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:58:11 GMT

sweating before i open my eyes and it’s still dark when i do, though not for long.

cheeks hot like a stove left on, the dog glued to my spine, fused, my anchor keeping me from floating away.

i’m out of place in my own body this morning. missed a step and i’m falling, falling, awake —

falling always ends. wet and gasping and here.

i’m wanted somewhere. not …

Where the Water Gathers

Ava Bellows — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:37:19 GMT

I am thinking of you and how much you would have love this, the deer who come when I call them now, who eat out of my hand and nuzzle against the fence and I am thinking of how once I would have wished you could see this, but you are very far away dreaming up your own kinds of secrets in a world I don’t know about.

Tried for a moment to experience it as…

thank you

Ava Bellows — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:31:39 GMT

It’s early and I’m texting my vet whose name is Paulette and I find this funny and I know it won’t be funny once the coffee kicks in so I am holding it carefully, this small stupid joy, like an egg I found on the sidewalk.

This is what I do now. I collect things.

I was twenty-three with a furrowed brow and a sleep schedule like a drunk on a bicycle and always a little hungry, a little sick, a little proud of it. I thought the furrowed brow was a personality. I thought being tired all the time meant I was paying attention. I was so in love with my own suffering I used to accessorize with it. I’d wear it out. I’d wear it to dinner.

I don’t do that anymore. I do something worse. I say good morning to strangers who don’t want it.

The dog gets the full unedited stream. Every thought, every fragment, every half-formed thing that crawls out of my mouth before I’ve had coffee… she gets it all and she looks at me like yes, continue, I am with you, I have always been with you. The deer on the walk gets a hello. The birds are singing and I am listening, actually listening, not just logging the fact of birds the way I log everything, the way we all log everything, moving through the world with our little clipboards going: birds, yes, noted, moving on.

I don’t want to move on.

I want to stand there and let it be insane that birds exist.

!!!

That sound exists.

!!!

That I have ears and they work and somewhere in the evolutionary chaos of everything that’s ever happened, some small creature developed the ability to hear and here I am, still using it, standing on a hiking trail at seven in the morning completely undone by a bird.

!!!!!!!!!

How did we let something that beautiful become a fact.

I am stressed more than I am not. I find new rooms in my cathedral of anxiety the way you find rooms in a dream: oh, this was here the whole time, I just hadn’t opened the door yet. I am a fist of knots. I complain with real artistry and I’m not stopping, complaining is one of my spiritual gifts, I come from a long line of women who could find the dark lining in anything and I honor that tradition daily.

But I make wishes on eyelashes. I see 4:44 on the clock and something in my chest goes mine. I am texting Paulette the vet and finding it funny before the coffee ruins it.

No one is giving out the magic. I looked around. I waited. I checked.

So I’ve started making my own and I’m carrying it in my pockets and I’m spending it like I have more than I do, like there’s always more where that came from, like the world owes me wonder and I am here to collect :

thank you, more please, thank you, more please

Open House

Ava Bellows — Sat, 16 May 2026 17:41:25 GMT

Tomorrow you are born. I want to be clear about this. The day exists and in the way that all days exist at once, in the way a song exists inside the silence before it starts,

tomorrow you are being born in a hospital somewhere and your mom is tired and the world is loud and new and you don’t know yet what you’ll do with it

and the light in the room is t…

how to save a hummingbird

Ava Bellows — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:58:17 GMT

The music was loud because my brain was louder. Sally pulled ahead. The sun was going down when something came at us. I thought it was a strawberry with wings, I swear to god I did.

It wasn’t.

A hummingbird with a broken wing. So bright it was almost embarrassing. And nearby, a second one, a female, hovering over every spot he stuttered to, flying off, co…

nothing happened

Ava Bellows — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:19:06 GMT

it is hard for me to be kind to men lately. even the nice ones. especially the nice ones, who wear their goodness like a merit badge, who seem to believe being harmless absolves them from the harm.

i am trying to find a way through this feeling, but it is exhausting to share a world with people for whom existence is frictionless. people who move through …

long lost letter

Ava Bellows — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:19:34 GMT

it’s been a second…

sorry!

i’ve been in the midst of some exciting things i can’t talk about yet but am very excited to share with you at some other point and i’ve been using my precious bits of free time to see the people i love and eat food with my hands and touch and be touched and sit in traffic and take thousands of photos of sally and about a hundre…

motherhood

Ava Bellows — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 06:36:18 GMT

this is your brain on progesterone

Ava Bellows — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 04:01:25 GMT

I was a cunt on a conference call.
Which just means I didn’t immediately agree.
Didn’t nod fast enough.

Didn’t smile like a good girl on Zoom.

And now, of course, everyone hates me.

I wasn’t yelling.
I heard myself.
I was calm, clear, a little too clear
which is what screaming looks like
when you’re a woman
who doesn’t smile between points.

I didn’t smile last we…

Evidence of Not Belonging

Ava Bellows — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 03:50:50 GMT

The sky was gray
and the heat pressed down like a hand.
Everyone smelled like armpit and leftovers,
so we did the reasonable thing:
we went to the movies.

I wore white. By the end, it was ruined.
Icee bleeding down my chest
like the Chamberlain prom queen.

Later I cut my hair
because that’s what I do instead of buying plane tickets.
I tell people it’s “for a chan…

Holding Him After

Ava Bellows — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 06:46:55 GMT

Four years since Henry died, and I wake up like someone screamed in my sleep. My neck won’t move. My shoulders are locked. My whole body is grief with a spine. It doesn’t speak in words. It just hurts. Like a character who won’t get off stage, holding up a sign:
Remember.
Remember.

And I do.

I remember Joni Mitchell playing, cracked and unsteady, like her v…

His Hand

Ava Bellows — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 12:29:25 GMT

That first grief was a fist. A screaming drunk

in a parking lot who wanted to fight everyone.

I wanted to be a god with a remote control,

to rewind the tape, un-happen the whole stupid thing.

I was a TV repairman for the universe,

certain I could fix what was so terribly broken.

But the years…

the years are a kind of weather.

They come and go and what’s le…

My Face Is a Room I Can’t Leave

Ava Bellows — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:49:18 GMT

There are days I want to see everything. Every shimmer of light on every stranger’s wrist. Every chipped sidewalk square. I want to eavesdrop on lovers and old men and people on phone calls saying ridiculous things in the grocery store. I want to see their freckles, their messy buns, the small nervous rituals they think no one notices. I want to feel cl…

Calm Enough to Be the Clown

Ava Bellows — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 23:44:28 GMT

When I was seventeen, I got my first tattoo. I was impatient to skip ahead, to brand myself with permanence before I even knew what I wanted permanent.

It was a Tony Hoagland line, looping across skin still soft with youth: “and I am calm enough to be grateful for the lives I never have to live again.”

At seventeen I didn’t understand it, not really. I …

Alan, Sally, and the Rest of Us

Ava Bellows — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:46:26 GMT

Finished a pilot. Again.
Wrote about a party, sent it in,
got dressed for another party.
This one had mirrors and mezcal,

no stage directions, no act breaks.

Alexia came.
It’s easier to be shiny
when you’re with someone who lights you up.
We hid in the steam room.
Tried not to look at each other
while a man—an actor, of course, always an actor—
talked at us like a…

delete the photos

Ava Bellows — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 06:34:18 GMT

Someone smashed my friend’s heart, so I turned the oven on and kept it burning.
Cupcakes that were brownies that were cookies.
A loaf I folded over and over, like an argument, like the night before:
what he said, what she said back,
what to do with the gifts (return them),
what to do with the photos (delete them),
how to live when forever stops mid-sentence.

I…

Micro-dosing misery

Ava Bellows — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:20:30 GMT

My dog is alive and I’ve already mourned her a hundred times.

Sally is nearly five. Young, healthy, a hippo-seal with soft ears and a dumb, trusting face. She follows me from room to room like we’re attached by an invisible thread. She lays on my feet while I brush my teeth. She leans her whole weight against my leg when I cry, which is unfair, because she’s usually the reason I’m crying.

I cry about her death constantly.

Not because it’s happening. But because it will. Eventually. One day. Some terrible, not-yet day that I’ve decided to live in early, over and over, because I don’t know how else to love without also grieving.

The Twelve-Mile Stretch

Ava Bellows — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:33:59 GMT

My brother moved out today.

Twelve miles away. Still in the same city. Still under the same sun, breathing the same air.
But the air between us feels stretched out now. Thin in the middle. The kind of thin where you can still walk across it, but you’ll feel the give under your feet, the little bowing down of a bridge that isn’t as taut as it used to be.

We…

weather report

Ava Bellows — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 23:43:19 GMT

My guts are outside my body. I mean it.

Kind of. But also not really at all.

I mean: everything hurts my feelings.

I cried because the fork was bent. I cried because the song knew my name.

I called my friend. I said, I’m dying again.

She said, The moon’s full. We’re bleeding.

She said, We’ve got tides inside, all witches do.

And it helped. The small science …

Close your eyes

Ava Bellows — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 15:45:46 GMT

I feed the sourdough starter like it’s a dog

that might forget me if I don’t speak.

Say good morning. Say good night.

Say look at you, still breathing,

still wanting something from me.

I talk to it in the voice I use with Sally—

soft, unhinged, maternal,

like love is something you can wrap in vowels

and give away for free.

Had a dream someone I used to love

died …