Was revisted by my sixteen year old self today. I realized I’d been complacent at pushing boundaries as often as possible, dictating when I want to run with barefeet. Sometimes I still forget my own strength… still discovering too. Uncertainty is one of the finer spices of life; Fear is oftentimes a challenge misperceived, right?

Hot chocolate moonlit nights as I ponder

continents half a world away

that a part of me calls home.

Fluorescent lighting on iridescent friends as I ponder

legal systems from  home

that make us all alienated.  

Nonfiction:

We are all authors of our own lives.

perspective:tone/ eyes: unrelenting details/ ears: rhythm

and our actions crafting the way our story unfolds.

If we chose not to dictate what we contribute for the day then we become mere readers of the previously written syllables of our past days.  Every day is a story. Tell it. 

Wait scratch that. PAINT IT. 

…She desperately clung to the hope that when she stopped running in this dark dense wood, that she could lay down next to you again—that you and her belonged together.  You would prove you were not the arson and she’d start pulsing passionately with relief and comfort, able to connect all capillaries of this complex understanding and find nourishment from you once again.

 But since you flicked matches behind your back with your nose in the air, let me explain what actually happened when my heart ran away looking for solace.  The echoes of your words hitting the walls of this once majestic basin set wildfire and obstacles in every turning direction. 

Singed with burns increasing in degree, my heart and the surety of her path were destroyed in searing pain. 

Where she’d engaged and held you in all nakedness, you sat back in your Dionysian recline to nod satisfactorily at your current indulgence.  And when I sobbed to you about the loss of our love and you sat there with stone eyes, moving only when I curled underneath your arm for you to hold me because you admitted “you owed it to me” you owed it to me… I realized.

I realized she was chasing after something that did not exist.  That what I thought was fantastically beautiful precisely because it was mutual was not a reality.  Our love, was a chimera. 

The fires went out dully and silently.

My heart’s frantic running just the sign of a crazed fool.

In that dry arid desolate space that once used to fill so much of me,

all of it turned to ash.

Every piece of dust uncared for blew away with the wind.  Her hand that so often reached for yours uncurled to see the grey matter uplift and swirl, observing in numbness. She let out a mute scream and that was the last of it. 

The world did not notice.

You did not notice.

My heart found the last standing rose, browning and alluring.  She picked all the petals, ended on “he loves me not”, and walked away hoping her pulse still carried the resilient rhythm of dignity.  

So if in days to come you trek back to this place to survey the mess and to tend to the void, my mind at least can meet you there.  In fact, she has already taken out her tape measures of worth, her protractors of practicality, surveyed the place, and nodded with respect.

But if you intend to restore it, I hope you know the price of your soil.  Go and collect each particle—scattered in God knows what direction from our wind—and reassemble them into something you think might pulse again.  Good luck Frankenstein. 

I laid here once.  Thank you for showing up, better late then never. 

But what’s done is dry.  

La liberté individuelle de conscience est le cadeau de l’humanité.