Growing up means shutting up the parts of you that want to give up, mess up, fuck up. It means holding yourself together at your seams as you feel the energy rumble just under your skin. It means silencing the parts of you that want to be wildly relentless and widely wreckless.
Gold is valuable. It exists to look beautiful, but is fickle and malleable compared to other metals and alloys that rust with age and wear and tear. You can wear gold to adorn your body but that's all the wearing you can do. It decorates otherwise plain visages, surfaces, ornaments, fixtures. Gold is valuable because it doesn't tarnish.
That's more than I can say for your reputation adored by gilded glossy words.
When these words were spoken before, they were repeated pleas to affirm what I so wanted then. The empty response was barely the remnant of an echo. Reciting them again and again diminished their meaning. Those words once powerful became a powerless please from me.
Despite their enormity, who knew these words could be cut by hollow affirmations? That they could also be taken from people who did not know the weight of them on my lips? Each time these words were broken from me, they were hollowed of their meaning.
When silent affirmations turned into quiet whispers, you took these empty words and made them hallow. The pleas turned to peace and the repetition of the words were not made from echoes, but from fulfilled wishes.
Safe in sacred spaces, we share these words in time with the beating of our chests. And with each repetition, may our words leave our lips to reverberate from our chests.
Perhaps, as my final plea, may the joy we create radiate from us for each day that I'm blessed to be with you.
It's a difficult thing to reconcile what goes on in my head. It can't just be me but who knows.
To expect the best but also just accept that's how it is.
To fight with what you want to do and what you should do.
To want to cry at your own frustration or to tell yourself to suck it up because you're being a child.
I feel like I'm saying things and no one hears me, but I know that's not true. Someone else's experience doesn't invalidate mine. That's how it is for everyone's narrative though, so it doesn't make it a different feeling from everyone else's emotions. I've always said I was selfish, but when you haven't practiced how you say... an unarticulated thought is worth[ ]less than an articulated one.
But look, I just did it, splitting myself up again.
Then again, that's just how it is.
How quickly our teeth become pearly gates, damning ourselves to some unspoken fate. Hold them closed and water may leak from the sleeping waterfalls above. Speak too swiftly or too soon, and drown everyone else. The sloppy, slippery words rushing into their ears, choking them as they breathe in anticipation of speech.
Do we drown in silent secrets or in the currents we create with the dams that we break?
Is it any wonder we don't regrow our tongues?
Do your nervous ticks manifest in your skin? Are they like weeds that just grow and you pick and they scratch and you itch, only to hide with potted plants and waterproofed decks.
I guess it doesn't matter if your neurosis commands your hands and you spend your days on your knees, picking out weeds. In these time, I'm more intimate with the dirt than myself, exterminated by anxiety but searching for a root deeper than my fingers can reach.
I'll spend my time then, paralyzed here, with no mercy, as I get muddied by the blood of the earth on my hands.
When you bite your tongue, you're the only one who bleeds. Keep that in mind when you taste the salt from your own tears and blood, and decide then if you prefer the taste of someone else.
That or be wholly agreeable; you're better off just biting off your whole tongue and forgetting yourself soon after.
Bite your tongue till it bleeds, and season the air with the bitter salt like the sea.
Flames consume my tongue as they lap desperately at the same air, aching to suffocate us with the shrinking space.
Ghosts become us.
We set sail our inscriptions of well written wishes. As the lights left our faces, the night-time traces enveloped us as the fleeting fire found flight. The shadows and we became like the trees that darkness hugged as light was released.
The ghosts watched, these lanterns to the sea, as we released them, like fireflies into the night.
Would you believe there was a time when my feet did not know the ground and Insecurity did not shackle me to the earth?
Being up and alone in the middle of the night is a challenge, with or without the light.
Heavy thoughts settle in the side of your brain, like mosters nibbling the edge of your sheets. A light can scare monsters, but thoughts not so much. Darkness is a place to play and in tandem, they purposefully pull you away from the escape of sleep.
What is it to dream?
To dream and dream and dream, of that which has never happened before.
Hoping you'll return to a place you've never been,
Once more.
There's something so lovely about the way the clouds meet mountain peaks; just as her hair falls on your face when your lips meet.
Tonight I thought a funny thing. That maybe the clouds call the mountains home. No matter how fast or far they go, they'll always find their way to each other. Maybe they're cuddling. Isn't that a funny thought? To see the earth and endless sky entangled in such a dear way.
I had a funny thought today. Imagine, we grew up and evolved with the world spinning. We changed with controlled chaos and never felt what it was to be truly, wholly, still. It's a strange thought to have, to think that there are people who can bring our constantly turning world to a an exhilirating halt.
Then, there are some people that get you spinning again.
You could count your breaths before your dreams, or count the dreams from one to infinity. Each one has a question or second or pause, multiplied by uncertainty. We've added all our hesitances and subtracted our own skills. We're divided between do or don't, at least only in half. Nothing is that easy, and we're fractured by more than that.
Before we knew to tally our lives, we took the air to give ourselves fire. We cried as we breathed to give ourselves life, before we made our tears messes and insecurities relentless. Forget what we've taught ourselves and use what we've known.
Breathe.
Inhale possibilities and exhale all doubts.
No one's got it all figured out.
Isn't it strange that we mourn like muscles?
Each movement we make brings back painful experiences etched into our tendons. Each inch we stretch is temporary relief before we fall into old habits and the tension pulls into our strings. Each breath is a simple release of a hand held too tightly or a misstep corrected by shifted footing.
We try to correct the pain that strikes us quicker than lightning. We walk through our days as if we were lightning rods for triggered pain. Each movement a practice of gritted teeth and each tendon pushing and pulling us so hard so we do not break.
How much more do we breathe or stretch or shake until we snap? Or do we snap?
Perhaps one day, you will wake, and you'll no longer feel the tightness that gripped you. Maybe then you'll have exercised the resilience within you and the memories will sleep in your muscles until needed again. Until then, we look for fixes in quickness or elixir filled kisses.
Or we practice until the pain is no more.
We mine so deeply for the riches in the earth that we forget the wealth of the sky.
It's much easier to look up, than to spend time on your knees looking for something never hidden in the shallowness of dirt.