Paint me a palace.

Be careful with nostalgia, it isn’t what it used to be. It twists and turns and chokes, and sometimes in the rightmoments, it even makes you cry.

I do remember when the years passed gently, when we were full and sleepless, loud andpounding. I remember when I used to make wishes on people like they were lost stars, when we werestill chasing something sunlit and violent, something whole and wide awake. Iremember when I was still young enough to trust the world and old enough toknow that I shouldn’t, but human enough to do it anyway, and I remember whatit’s like to be left fractured and changed. I remember being hemmed and halved, loosely bound to things you know will never last and the other half chasing after the infinite you know you’ll never have.

I have twenty-two years now rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box. I am seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and twenty. I am that fourteen year old girl cryingin my mother’s closet because I felt the weight of everything and didn’t havethe voice or the words to explain how fucking lonely it is when no oneunderstands and you’re constantly looking for a feeling that’s never far butalways fleeting, that’s too complex to try to explain to anyone else so youkeep it in soft-spoken places where no one ever looks.I am fifteen and looking out over the edge of what felt like the entire universe.I am sixteen and realizing that nothing will ever be the same. And I know what it’s like to have the people in our livesleave blind spots on who we used to be. But I also know that this cramped and crooked place is the only thing that can knock the wind out of you, that can keep us alive.