Streaming Thought

After a While by Veronica Shoffstall

When things in your life seem, almost too much to handle, When 24 Hours in a day is not enough, Remember the mayonnaise jar and 2 cups of coffee. A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was. The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was. The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous ‘yes.’ The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed. ‘Now,’ said the professor, as the laughter subsided, ‘I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.’  The golf balls are the important things - family, children, health, Friends, and Favorite passions – Things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, house, and car. The sand is everything else —The small stuff. ‘If you put the sand into the jar first,’ He continued, ‘there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.’

This is for all the people I’ll never meet. This is for the person I might have kissed had I taken a different subway line on Saturday and the person I might have been if that boy hadn’t broken my mother’s teenage heart. This is for the people I would have loved if last winter hasn’t been so cold and for the city I would have called home if I had written haikus on napkins and carried pens in dress pockets and in the knots of my hair. This is for who I was, who I am, who I might be. This is for you.

It’s said it takes seven years to grow completely new skin cells. To think, this year I will grow into a body you never will have touched.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

What’s unnatural is homophobia. Homo sapiens is the only species in all of nature that responds with hate to homosexuality.

If you were mine, I’d kiss your ankles and neck and the tip of your nose. I’d bring you film canisters filled with love notes and interesting books and I’d send you texts with random facts whenever I discovered something new. I’d show up at your house at midnight with a pot of your favourite kind of tea and a blanket and tell you to come down so we could lie down on your lawn and look at the stars. I’d go into the city with you and throw away your map and search for someplace beautiful. I’d photograph you every day. I’d buy you baggy t-shirts and sing to you constantly. I’d give you your space if you wanted it, I’d make you mixes for every week we’d been together, I’d hold your hand underwater, and I’d love you until you asked me not to.

My mouth hasn’t shut up about you since you kissed it. The idea that you may kiss it again is stuck in my brain, which hasn’t stopped thinking about you since well before any kiss. And now the prospect of those kisses seems to wind me like when you slip on the stairs and one of the steps hits you in the middle of the back. The notion of them continuing for what is traditionally terrifying forever excites me to an unfamiliar degree.

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps but other people emphasize my loneliness.”