My mistake was implicating what I know into a story-telling style I thought to be impressive but wasn’t mine.

Every word seemed to come out deceitful. The creator in me was born from lies, but I no longer fall back on that hate in the real world. So long as I am true when I write, I will rectify who I was then with who I am now.

Still, our thoughts are dormant seeds in the ground. 

Yesterday I dug them out, and the results were positively wrecked. If they were written in pen they’d be in a trash bin and I would never again get my hands on that outdated mess.

There are zero attempts to disguise this demotivating narrative among socially emotionally struggling people that the reason we’re not willing to be brave about our life choices is because of an apparent lack in creative environment. Perhaps undoing this self limiting mindset where multi-directional blame pointing everywhere but internally arises is the highlight that every twenty-something-year-old experiences. The fictional reality where your motivation, based on material possession and/or dream-like location, doesn’t actually come to fruition. In fact, that glass encased studio in the city with a center bed-frame hovering in mid-air by steel chains, white duvet complimented by succulents growing out of the walls and impeccable space saving interior design is still not going to solve your cliche, utter lack of connection with people. You really want to know the answer? There is only life’s high tide and your ability to stand firm without being eroded away. This can be achieved anywhere.

We can take someone else’s bravery and wear it like a suit. Even give a little to those who have none, but it won’t be eternal. The quality stuff? It’s buried in the ground underneath our feet. It has been the moment we were born. Excavation then, should be a delicate process. It involves the failure at keeping good relationships, success in keeping bad ones. It involves being above-average in a lot of.. nothing useful really. 

Location, possession, even people-- these are all fine as adjuncts to the process of unearthing our final form, but the most important thing, I think, is that we brunt the most grueling parts alone, all while working with what we already have. Not to say that we can’t strive to be more ambitious. It is actually necessary that we are. What I’m saying is that we tend to make excuses as to why we can’t choose to live happy and create things due to on our current inescapable environment. We learn to work with what we have, or until we discover the underlying truth that we already have it all. 

If you don’t know how to drive, you’re going to crash. Rampant, oblivious, quasi-directional steering until impact sounds more appealing than learning the mechanisms behind ourselves. But in the past and now, when we destroy the things around us, it’s because we don’t care nor comprehend to know how to use the breaks to our emotions.

When a thousand times I remind myself that we are through and proceed to believe you are still mine- that there is still time,

Once more, you make it clear that you are stardust quickly burning a million light years away.

I do not reach you in this life.

We so desperately cling to the idea that a connection imbued with the promises of longevity could withstand the forces.

Resting upon our own human volition then, we aim to be unstoppable.

But time runs out, our stomachs become empty, our fuel runs dry.

In the end, we replace connection with worldly possessions nonliving and unfulfilling, our physical selves fed but spiritually we are deprived, until suddenly we are looking back at the years gone by.

For this we can only blame ourselves if and when, at our darkest expected hour, the deafening ring of liberation has gone silent, and we begin to remember all those we have set aside in exchange for the freedom to become who we are.

i simply dove

maybe i was tired

maybe complacency dulled my senses

maybe i thought i was invincible 

as if i didnt expect the ground to come up, as if i didnt know what that felt like to face plant into cobblestone

with what regard, i fell freely with no assurance, no endgame, not a trampoline to land on as i hurdled towards solid ground at 30 mph

i expected “you” to be there or at least test my parachute before I jumped out of that plane 

but no, you let me board that thing knowing full well that I’m curious, that I jump at the slightest opportunity. I might go so far as to say you took advantage of that quality in me 

I bet you liked imagining what I would look like when my body met the ground and went ‘splat’

I always have so much to give.

I thought it was good things at first, until it was clear people were running away. My body is like a vessel that can’t contain a plague.

Things that love me, either way, end up sorry for it

“I’ll be good this time, I’ll be good this time”

Curious how it always ends the same.

Curious, they linger too close to my flames or breathe me in for too long, singe themselves, and end up scarred forever with bitter taste and regret and somehow continuing to be chained to the dragon of curiosity that initially trapped them in the first place, the illusion of an enigma masking a shell. 

So with wholesome individuals I will hesitate, and keep them at a distance despite how I want them and crave them.

Despite wishing to be like them.

I dream one day I’ll learn how to behave so that when we touch you don’t shatter.

And if I mess you up and you break, I would just fix you whole again.

I followed someone for five of the most important years of my young life. There is an encyclopedia behind the dynamics of a bond so enduring, and it cannot be found, and it cannot be written down, it can only be known by the two who were a part of it.

I remember those years. I hated being more aware than my peers, it made me feel alone and it made feel out place, but with him I was understood and I was safe. I remember that.

There is solidarity that comes with years, compared to flames that lasted months, as well as wonder and amazement and hope in that two people can never stop learning and growing despite only being with each other.

When that chapter ended I couldn’t come to terms with it. I remember that. Like I had lost a family member, I remember how solidly I denied it. And how it felt to feel my future split into two dimensions. One where he and I married, and one that was the reality that actually happened, a new arrival, unfamiliar and unprepared in every sense. But considering I am here now, it means I have known acceptance in every sense. And that beyond is always in existence.

I found that there is life after love.

I found me. Again and again. God. Death. nature. you.

I have tasted that, in my young life.

I have known that.

I keep it with me.

I wear it proudly.

You can come close but I may erupt.

You can contain but I spill at the seams.

I would show you love if I knew what it means.

But these days a lot of things aren’t real like they used to be.

You were born, a gaping hole, starving for the truth to life, and the knowledge to maneuver entirely.

You were born empty, and unsatisfied, an illness which you’ve cured time and time again, and contracted just as much.

When life is low, you are empty. You destroy yourself because you can feel it.

Eric’s not coming back.

Do you destroy yourself or do you wield it?

I want to spoon out the heart of me that you broke.

When I want to conquer the world at my feet, I remember how you’ve rendered me pointless, in the moment.

But, everyday I carry the lessons you brought with me.

My hands balled into fists, I carry them because they can make me do better.

You are the strongest person I’ve ever known.

Every time I feel like giving up, I think of you. Try to be strong, like you.

Try to disintegrate the limitations I’ve set on myself, because they’re only as real as I believe them to be.

What you still do for me, you’ll never know.

One day I’d like to know you again.

I wonder where we will meet.

Will you fall for me?

I can revisit you in memories as many times as I want. I could fall in love with you there.

I know you can’t make homes out of people, that was my mistake.

Underneath a self deceiving role where I play the unconcerned, unburned— it’s shallow enough that, it works for days, until one night i am cold, my blood is drained, and I am suddenly drowning.

The flaw is how we choose to fall. Like committing to the existence of heaven and hell, when there is a good chance that the moment we die it will all be one big reveal to be told, that from the beginning of time there was nothing, it was all chance— like how I met you, nothing more than a happenstance of luck; in anticipation we pursue it, just over the horizon.

if we had stopped to even think about the ending, that one day we would grow outside of our fantasies that nurtured us like cocoons, and into our own hands to become replaced with concrete realities that were manufactured before we even existed, before we even decided to, which we would shoulder for the rest of our lives until our body has turned to dust.

Was it an empty pursuit of a forced reality? When we imagined an end for ourselves and for each other— when we attempted to solidify the idea we both created in our minds— 

For the way I wasn’t before you came,

The folds in the linens you gave.

For the light you allowed inside.

Stacks of black and white replaced by the colors you introduced.

Did you even realize,

As you walked out that door,

Could you barely recognize me from before?

And were you glad to have left all that work behind, knowing I was better than when you found me?

Your selflessness and — perhaps it stems from pieces that you lack instead, proved to be my undoing.

It has become that the spectrum of what we allow and select into our lives is thin.

As I became immensely estranged from the world as I knew it, it was suddenly inside of you that I saw the god in me.

I was quick to let you in.

Slower to see you leave.

Finally, for me to step into the room I dared not enter after you had gone, imagining all the broken pieces in disarray, and to actually find that you were careful— that you did not run through my space like a hurricane.