Learning to Love Well

Graduation

I’m dancing with shadows and flirting with daydreams. The sky is opening into a chasm sending down the rain and the hell-fire and the sunshine and all of the things that come with the unknown. Who I’ll be tomorrow is the same girl with no clue if she’s going left, right, or straight ahead. I’ll be the same girl with her eyes open wide, careful not to miss a thing. My heart will still belong to the aches I’ve given it to. My head will still be swimming in an open sea, drowning beneath waves of uncertainty. But tomorrow I’ll have something new and tangible. A chapter some say. The beginning of the end others will shout. Goodbye to the best years of my life, my lack of responsibility, and the late nights that I still hold in my memory for rainy days. I fill my head with such nonsense lately because I’m much too afraid to deal with reality. I’m growing up. There’s no do-over. Not another chance. I’ve played my cards and tossed my bids in. I was fifteen once. My favorite smells were a cold, crisp night and a bottle of cheap wine sitting dead in my hands. It ran down my throat with a sad satisfaction as I sat on my roof, staring at the sky. The stars were a Picasso. They shifted and gleamed and gave me hope that one day things weren’t going to feel like they were empty. My heart wasn’t going to constantly drop until it sat with nothing but a hollow want. I’ve been sixteen before; a self righteous age filled with falling fast and falling hard for anything that grabbed my attention. I gave piece by piece of myself to people that year. Each fragment contained a hurt, a broken-off end. Something still to be fixed, coincided, given a second chance. Stuck in the moment trying to find out what it really meant to be free. High school brought another year and gave me another perspective, another change. Seventeen was difficult, it was the mountain that sat on my shoulders. Each day took a new step and I began to become strong. The mountain eroded into but a mole hill as I pushed past the lies and the misunderstandings. My leaves were blanketed by the snow that came with the cold, and now at eighteen I stand in full bloom. My watch is ticking. The sand in my time glass is running on E. I have a little over twenty-four hours until this unknown is no longer but a few steps behind. Tomorrow it will catch up with me even though I’m sprinting as fast and as far as I can, pretending I’ve got it all figured out. Can you keep a secret? Only time will whisper it. I’m standing alone in these crowded rooms and I’m scared as hell that this is all I’ll ever be. Tomorrow I’ll be the girl that is told, “Welcome to your future.”

Sappy Thoughts and an Open Locket

Distracted by the endless ocean that is your eyes, falling back into step with the way we were. Your vowels and consonants are ringing through this space. So close your smell lingers in my mind taking me to sea. I’m on a ship setting sail for the always forsaken horizon. Oh the pinks that bleed so softly into the orange - just as I melt so easily into our worn-in conversation. The waves toss and turn but I am safe under the canopy that I’ve built in my own reality. Im dreaming, always dreaming. The clock and the cosmos they spin and twirl with me under an open sky. That’s the way we like things. Free and easy. You seek me out and I’ll play by your rules because there is no other way. The mist from your ocean sprays leaving me thirsty for your lingering questions, your fragile thoughts. Understand my song - I spend every ounce of my hope desperately pouring myself out onto these pages in my blackest ink. My locket lies open with a faded picture of your lazy smile. Its been opened one too many times but theres nothing more I love to see than the grin that brought my empire falling to its knees. Raw and real, I’m trading my cards to the highest bidder as long as you’ll say you want me too. Then we’ll dream and dance through the Pacific with your guitar on your back and my quill resting perfectly between my fingers. Dreaming. I’m always dreaming.

Sometimes I swear I have no clue what’s going on in my own head. The cosmos align or some battery powered antennae signals me to just stop at a stand-still as everything passes by making no sense whatsoever. Like when the moon sends the waves crashing over the jettis and I’m running as fast as I can, gulping in the saturated, salty air. Only fools run at midnight in a lightning storm. Or how but forty eight hours ago I was filled with an insatiable passion and in this moment I feel nothing but a quiet apathy that lulls me into some other kind of world. It’s a place where all of the lost things go to when they’re forgotten and finished. I mull over scenarios, capture the hearts of millions, and remember what it means to be imperfect. all while my eyes flutter up and down struggling to stay awake. Caught between subconscious and reality, the fragments run through my mind letting the characters of my untold stories form subplots that span from Argentina to a garden in downtown Los Angeles. Not a lot of my thoughts form much of a conclusion. Maybe it’s best I just keep to dreaming.

I watch everything around me move but I’m a still-frame. I can’t breathe. I can’t speak. The waves toss and turn for the moon that creates their elegant dance. All around me the earth sings the songs of the ages, but I am quiet. When I finally speak my words have the grace of a fallen empire. They’re ruins and rubble passing the ears of my listeners. No one understands.

I am so lost and in need of strength.

Waaaaalk up in daaaa cluuuuub, fuck errrrbody!
For real doe. Fuck everybody.

The next person that screws me over is getting a big hug. Because we’re suppose to love our enemies right?

This is seriously getting so old. Where did peoples integrity, character, and decency go?

No one writes anymore and it makes me so sad. Writing just helps you feel, ya know? It’s like staring at a sunset and knowing the peace that comes only from something with the power to take your breath away. It’s laying down all that you are and all you want to be and spelling it out for everyone to understand. Because that’s all we ask for - someone to understand. And if one person doesn’t another will. Humans are very relatable beings, we feel therefore we are. Some of us paint our sunsets and some of us sing them into oblivion. But me, I write.

I haven’t been sleeping lately and maybe that’s why I’m so down. I’ve got no rhythm but I’m singing the blues.