#olivia larson

"Today is all far off stares. I sit at a desk at a job I know I will not keep and I do not know where I belong. I am stuck looking off into the distance for a future I cannot put into words. How do you know where you are meant to be if you haven't visited that place yet?"

"I don't have yesterday or tomorrow or last week or next month anymore. Those ways of time are meaningless. There is before and there is after. And they are drastically different. Maybe, I am drastically different too."

"I thought I had healed. I had left all the words behind and now, maybe I need them more than ever. New wounds have formed. No one talks about what trauma looks like opening on top of trauma - it is a violent, painful thing. It leaves you whimpering, crawling, and confused. I can't make it pretty. I can't even write it yet. But times are dark again, so I've picked the pen back up."

Someone make me real. Remind me what it is like to feel a crisp autumn breeze run through my hair and not flinch as it whispers secrets in my ear. There are ghosts here. One of them is me. The dead rushing by so fast that you can’t see a thing but we see you. We envy you. Real girl, you are. Solid and aching. Warm and slow to hunger. My dead and I have forgotten that burn, long matches lit in the dark and they take forever to reach your fragile fingertips. Our hands haven’t known fire in so long. Make us real. Let us catch with the flames and escape the growing chill.

Violet had been right. Life was messy.Too bad she hadn't said anything about how to clean it up.