Perspective is a frustrating notion to think about because although it can often be similar, perspective can never fully be understood. However impossible the act may be though, I think it is necessary to attempt to understand the perspective of one another, and attempt to shift your own. Those who are sedentary in their thinking blame others for not understanding them. It is their lack of perspective, or rather, the lack of effort toward trying to see what other's see, that leaves them feeling isolated. This is not to suggest that everyone should think the same thoughts, and see the world the same way. That's rather dull and depressing. Uniqueness should be embraced. It is what is different from ourselves that reveals what is also the same. Worlds exist with in and around us, but we are only given glimpses of them. There will always be a hidden piece that can only be shown to us by someone else, like catching your own reflection in someone else's eyes. Try to see yourself as other's see you, and if you don't like what you see, change it, but before you change it, attempt to understand it. There is no right or wrong. There is only different. Who you are, and who they think you are, are different fractions of the same whole, and you will never know yourself, until you can know others.

lock the door. shut off the lights.

i sit in a box of four walls. poorly constructed. and the air is always too hot and too cold at the same time.
i sit and i stare at these walls every day and i dream of a world that exists beyond them but for fear that my own legs are not strong enough to carry me
my arms too weak
my soul too fragile
i stay with in the confines of this room that i have grown to resent and yet seek refuge in.
there was a time when i used to be brave but the world scratched and scathed
my once unwavering, now faltering spirit
i used to walk in leaps and bounds eager and bright at the slightest glimmer of a promise
and now promises are silly notions i no longer believe in because someone once told me that that was naive, and i, in my naivety believed them.


belief in and of itself is a silly notion
i didn't always believe so
my beliefs were once handed down and spoon fed to me and i gobbled them up greedily as if starving for their guidance
but the words in my mouth that dripped down into my stomach didn't mix well with my conscience, which too sits in the pit of my belly
the two collided like oil and water.
there was no substance.
and i was starving.
emaciated and confused i spat them both up, and my gut collapsed in on itself with nothing inside of it to hold up its walls.
i couldn't stomach food for thought
or food for the soul
the idea of consuming anything from the world, one which no longer concurred with what was supposed to be and what was actuality
was nauseating.
and with out sustenance my legs and arms and soul grew weak
and i couldn't stand on my own two feet.
walking a block in the world became walking a mile
and the miles stretched on
and the days grew long
and my mouth grew dry
but there wasn't anything in the world which i dared to drink.
for the waters of the world no longer ran clear, they were murky and muddled with the waste of it all.
the waste of lives like my own, half lived.
the waste of potentials never actualized.
the waste of dreams awoken from before they could be remembered.
the waste of time spent chasing shadows.
the waste of words of wisdom falling on deaf ears
and the waste of beauty falling on blind eyes
the waste of the world because someone, somewhere
whispered doubt into the air, and it carried on the winds into unsuspecting minds. it found a vacant space previously carved out by one misfortune or another, of which we all posses.

the doubt rooted itself in that space, and allowed itself to grow there.
once a crack that we would eventually heal ourselves in time, as doubt grew and stretched it wide,it became a canyon with half our souls on each half of the divide.
and maybe we could cross it, and maybe we'd survive.
two halves reunited, courage reignited
and the strength once lost, regained, and the hope that now whole, this world is one we might just thrive in.


but i've yet to cross that trench that's gouged its way into myself, for fear that i have grown so frail that what is left of me would shatter with the slightest shift of gravel beneath my weight.
and so i wait in my four walled cell. blinds drawn tight to keep out the sunlight
that reminds me of days when i was brave. it reminds me of the world i thought i knew and reminds me of the shame i now carry for having hidden myself from it.
my company is the doubt that i have shared my bed with. and it is that doubt that has nursed my fevers and my fears. it is that doubt that has cradled me to sleep, in the darkest hours of my darkest hours. as i lay in bed, locked away from what was dangerous and unknown my doubt cooed and hushed and whispered me lullabies assuring me that this is what was right. singing to me "everything is going to be alright, i'll be here in the morning, sleep now. goodnight."

Burn.

My heart was not softened or warmed by your love,
It was engulfed by it.
Ravenous, all consuming, uncontainable; my heart
had become over run
For fear the flames would devour it, I tried in vain
to rid myself of you
To take back my heart, but in reaching for it
Your love spilled out
It ran like rivers through my blood
Polluting every vein.
With each contraction I pulsed with
Love for you.
My very being, maddened and tormented
By the ecstasy of you
No longer belonging to myself, transformed
By your love
Into a vessel to move
My love, to you.

I'm writing.

I want my life to be an interesting read. I want you the reader, to sit and look at pages, not a screen, but real honest to god pages. The kind made from paper, made from trees. From the earth. I want you to see ink on paper and for that ink to form symbols that you'll recognize as words and I want those symbols to paint images of my life and I want those images to inspire, awe, and to teach you.

But, as of yet, my life could not fill a novel and if it did it would not be an interesting read. Amusing at times, perhaps. But interesting? Inspiring? Awe worthy? Hardly.

And so you, my reader, who may very well be myself at a future date, or someone else who is either procrastinating on something more important, or who in sleep's absence was crawling through cyberspace and ended up here, you read this. These words not of my life, but of my yet to be life. Not on paper, bound neatly between front and back cover, but on the screen of some machine that is cold and unfeeling.

There is something about holding a book that makes me excited and anxious. I don't get that rush from reading something off of a screen. Machines detract from the reading experience in the sense that you lose that contentedness you feel with the author when you are holding their words in your hands.

Think about it.
You are holding their words.
Their thoughts.
Their mind.
In your hands. Something that is an idea, a glimmer in your sleep that you just barely grab hold of before you become too awake and lose it completely, can be turned into something tangible that anyone, anywhere can hold in their hands.
It then has weight. It is actual. It is real.
Because you wrote it.

Am I crazy for getting excited over that? Does anyone else feel that?


I want to give that feeling to someone.


Today, over coffee, my Dad said to me "So what's your plan?"

My plan?... "For the evening? For the week? What do you mean?"

"Well you're going to graduate and then what?"

Did he mean, my plan for my life? I asked him, "You mean like... my plan for the rest of my life?"


He did.


Fuck. I don't know.

"Dad, I have no idea what I want to do. For the first time I'm a day by day kind of person"

Ever since that conversation I've been thinking about it. I didn't expect to find an answer and I still don't have a plan. But I know that I love to write. And I want to do that. Not for a career. That's not the plan.

However, I think it can be in the plan.
I don't need to be noteworthy. I just miss writing. It's such a catharsis for me. So I'm going to write more. And read more. I'm going to hold other people's ideas in my hands and maybe their ideas will spark my ideas and I'll finally figure out The Plan. And that plan will lead me to do amazing things. And those amazing things, I'll write down. And maybe it will be something of worth to someone else.
And they will hold my thoughts in their hands.
And I will spark something in them, just as that same fire was ignited by those before me.

"I suppose it's like the ticking crocodile, isn't it?"

“I suppose it's like the ticking crocodile, isn't it? Time is chasing after all of us.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan





Last week I was at my parent's house. No one else was home at the time, and I, in my musings, found an old box of photographs in our office/workout room/blue room (My parent's let me pick the color. It doesn't match anything in our house and sticks out like a sore thumb. But I love color). I pulled the box from the book shelf and pulled out a stack of photogrpahs and turned them over one at at time. Memories I'd forgotten I had. Summers at the beach. Dance recitals. My Father's 50th birthday.

As children we think about growing up. What we're going to be, or who we'll marry, where we'll live. Our time is marked by grade levels, sporting practices. Prom. Graduation. Baby teeth to braces. Puberty. First kisses. Hair Cuts. So much spinning and changing around us. Drivers licences at 16. Legal at 18. Drunk and not hiding it at 21. I've always been aware of my own time. I've been labling, counting it down, marking it, waiting with it, and spending it at my own leisure, my whole life.

While flipping through these photos I realized something. It struck me all of a sudden and took over every other emotion I'd been feeling, replacing them with gut wrenching saddness and anxiety. All this time I'd spent grwoing up and getting older I'd failed to realize that so had my parents.

My hands were trembling as they held a picture from Dad's 50th. It was him and Mom, dancing. My mom was smiling, my dad, very obviously counting steps in his head
1,2...3,4 1,2...3,4

He's a terrible dancer, my father. and he's very graciously passed his lack of rhythm onto all of his children, myself included. My mother on the other hand, she lights up when she dances. She can be silly and sexy and entirely free when she dances. She's infectious on the dance floor, everyone watching has a better time when she dances. They catch her bliss. Her liveliness. She's really quite pretty when she dances.

My Dad has never cared for dancing but he took lessons and learned as best he could anyways. Not for my mother who never lacks a willing dance partner, but for himself. He couldn't bare the jealously he felt when he watched Mom dance with anyone else. Adorable, I think.
I remember every Sunday morning Bob and Elsie the dance instructors coming to our house to teach him. I'd wake up to the sounds of Samba, Foxtrot, West Coast and East Coast Swing, Salsa, Two Step...
They danced the whole lot of them.

Which my parents were dancing in the photo, I'm not sure. It didn't matter to me at that moment. What mattered to me was that my dad still had hair on his head in the picture.

Funny, I thought he'd been completely bald for as long as I could remember. I forgot, his hair was brown, same as mine. And his skin, it was so smooth. When had the tired lines I've grown so accustomed to first ripple across his face? Hadn't they always been there? And my mom. She was so skinny. I'd never noticed that she'd...
Well, I'd never noticed any of it.
All this time I'd been so preoccupied with what I thought was MY time, I failed to see that it wasn't just me but ALL of us that were subject to it. My sisters. Our family dog, Shelby, she can't get up and down the stairs or jump up on the couch anymore. We used to run around the block together.


All these years, it all went unnoticed, and then with one photograph it came crashing down all around me. It was so obvious. How did I not see it? I held the evidence of it in my shaking hands. Frozen in time, a couple that looked like my parents but weren't. Not really. My parents didn't dance together anymore. I didn't wake up to music on Sunday mornings anymore.

I was a 20 year old girl, or maybe, woman? young lady? No longer child but some strange child/adult hybrid. And my parents
they were,
Old?

This realization unsettled me to my core. Time, once an unseen, and unobtrusive fact of the matter, a freckle you've always known you had but hardly remembered you had, was suddenly in actuality a looming specter, a ticking bomb, and exposed artery that could burst if you made a sudden movement, sneezed, laughed...

I wanted to cry and I wanted my father to hold me. I wanted to be 5 years old, getting picked up from kindergarten in our beat up van. I wanted to drive past the Jr. High and look to see if I could see my big sisters running the track. I wanted my mom to make dinner again. I wanted to roller blade to my grandma's house, being pulled by Shelby on her leash.

I felt as though I'd been sleeping all this time, and woke up to a strange world where nobody skipped anymore, and didn't have time to watch Boy Meets World in the mornings before school, and everyone thought about money, and boxes were for packing your toys away in to put up in the rafters, instead of playing make-believe inside of. A world where your Dad goes to bed at 9:00 because he's tired. And where your mom doesn't have time to dance anymore because she's too tired. Because I woke up and was older. And they were older. And I was sitting there, hands trembling, trying to think of just when it was that this all happened.

And then I took a deep breath. Looked at the culprit that brought this terror to my attention, and ran my thumb across my father's face. I surprised myself by laughing. I laughed because despite it all, and despite the years, on the occasion that my parent's do find the time to dance together, my dad still needs to keep count in his head.

This comforted me in some strange way. I smiled at them, my parents, and put the picture back in its box. I put the box back on its shelf. And I went to find which of her three napping spots Shelby happened to be occupying.

It's silly to worry about time. It's certainly a poor way of spending it. I've decided to be aware of it though. Use it more wisely, more gratefully. Tell Mom that she's pretty. And tell Dad I love him more. I've decided to make time for skipping on occasion, because who says I'm too old to? Its quicker than walking, and I challenge anyone to skip without smiling. You can't. I'm going to make time to laugh more. Because one day, like my parents, my face will wrinkle and when I catch my own reflection, or stumble across an old photograph, I want to be reminded that what caused those lines, etched so deeply in my face, was not the passing of time, but was a life happily lived.

i'm not sure what's gotten into me but i havent be able to write a coherent piece in a long time. i'll start with an idea and then it fizzles out and lead no where imparticular and then i end up going off on a completely random tangent.
everything has been very ... free versy as of late.


i'm not quite sure what it all implies.
but really when am i ever?











___________________________________ A pang. A thought. A glimmer.


here are words for when you find you can not find your own.
for when your tongue is trapped between your teeth, your lips pursed tight.
your breath held.

here is is grace, for when you find yourself faltering.
align your chin with the nearest star, and follow it.
head high.

here is a a song to sing you to sleep on nights when silence stings your ears.
it was the first song you heard.
it began when you did.
it plays for you. its never stopped.


remember this. remember the man that ran from home? so far. he ran until his feet bled, until his muscles cried. he ran across the vastness of it all, the earth and seas and mountains the plains. he stopped only to scatter pieces of himself by the wayside as to lighten his load.
he thought only of the distance.
and how to get as much of it as he could.
and he did.
until.
he found that he'd circled the earth quite entirely
and landed exactly at his own front door.



here, take this, it is my gratitude
for days when you go unnoticed
forever i am thankful


and this, this is humility for when you're pride is shattered
it lays in pieces at your feet but such is life
so brush it away and now without it you have nothing to preserve
now you can laugh again.


here is a sparkle. i saw it in you and i took it for myself
it glimmered in the light, it rested just behind your ear and you didn't see it.
so i took it and kept it and buried it within myself
and i've had it all this time.
but it was never mine to keep.
it doesn't shine for me like i thought it would.

rambles.

Free Association: My Train of Thought:

I could never keep rythm. I can't clap on beat.
I see my sister struggle to fight time. Cling to what was simple and good. I see her see the world grow old around her. They aren't children anymore.
Houses. Careers. Marriage.
The natural order of things?
I'm not a child anymore.
I see my parents.
They're tiered.
I see them for what they are and not what I thought they were.
I thought they were parents.
And they are. But they are also
Human.
I want to marvel at something. I want to stand in front of a being and be encapsulated and consumed by felicity at their existence. I want
I want to be something someone marvels at.
Marvelous.
Magic.
Wands. And wizards. and Once upon a times.
My favorite stores used to start with once upon a time.
Now my favorite stories end with the protagonist laying face down in a pool of his blood.
Gatsby. The Great Gatsby.
Great.
Greatness.
Great.
I can't say the word without sounding sarcastic.
I love sarcasm but I can't help but to be sadened by it. Why can't we ever just mean what we say and not say the opposite of what we mean.
Mean what you say.
Say what you mean.
Mean. Meaning.
Mean.
Isn't silly how the word we use for what is actual, what is the the truth, i.e. the meaning contains the word Mean instead of Nice as if what is true is never nice. because the world isn't nice and the facts aren't nice because realistically speaking no one is ever as nice as you hope they are going to be.
Because Gatsby gets shot and Daisy rides away with that ole brute Tom and we're left wondering what the devil its all supposed to mean.

I know i'm a bitch but when you call me one its hurts my feelings and so I throw my feelings out and decide that i'm better off without them.

I feel like when I lost them, gave them away, lost them, like my innards had been scooped out like a pumpkin for the carving, and the rest of my body collapsed in on itself because I had no soul.


I used to I think