That Is The Curse Of Living, That We Choose What Is Familiar And Not What Is Good.

I am glad for my misspent youth, my contradictions, my stupid ideas and my fear of stepping out of line. I am glad something wild lived in me once and I did not hide it. I feel no shame, no regret. Only peace that all of me got to exist in this one short life.

I often love men I know I have no future with. I build castles in the sand near rising tides, and I watch lovingly as they are eroded away by reality. I don’t know why I make things that don’t last. I’m afraid to have something that matters to me I think, that could hurt me more than I want it to.

Fires burn in the shape of mountains, mere miles from my porch step.

The vegetation cries in red and grey.

My feet in my front yard grass ground themselves there, against the peeking patches of dirt hiding beneath the stiff yellowing blades, as if nature itself is afraid to look at its destruction. I cannot look away.

Our dry seasons get drier, rain will become myth, and water legend. I wonder when it will be my turn to record the destruction, to tell others of what happened to me, and not hear of what happened to others. I wonder if that day will be today.

If I must abandon myself to earn their smiles, what are they worth to me anymore.

I’m trying to hold onto myself.

Rushing water.

I can’t remember what I came out here for.

Rain coming down.

I wonder if my mascara is running.

Wind pushing.

But I can’t bother to wipe my face if it is.

I am tired of hiding. Of being embarrassed. Unsure. Reluctant. Ashamed. I am tired now, more than all of those things. And it’s a fatigue I love, the sort that kicks in to spare me misfortune, and only spare me misfortune, in an awfully painless way. After all isn’t that fatigues purpose, to stop us from continuing on and hurting ourselves.

What sort of torture is it to know what one has done wrong and know deeper so that it can never be fixed? Must ever inadequacy be magnified, extracted, and plastered in the infant space beneath my eyelids?

My age is, youngish, oldish? Depending on who you ask. I have time, and I don’t. The future is so far away and right outside my doorstep, and I’m just sort of here. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting to become my future self and grow out of all this childish shit. I have trouble discerning bad habits and personality traits, what grows from me isn’t all me after all. I have to take care with what I cull and what I cradle. I could become a walking quirk from middle school that I misidentified as wildly important to my sense of self and not just a random cultural reflex. What makes me myself? And how did it get there? What is genuinely me and what is grimly biding it’s time until I figure out it’s a stranger’s voice and not mine?

Intelligence grand and ever expanding,

his head pounds with new ideas, while the heart in his chest beats slower,

his empathy is sluggish and cold.

The same old cruelty that ran in the veins of the cavemen is steady in him, his wisdom in vain. He has become acutely worse, torturing with metal tools instead of wooden ones, brainwashing with television instead of word of mouth, colonizing with guns instead of swords. What use is knowledge in the hands of a dominator? It becomes just another weapon, words to razors sentences to spears. Do not waste intellect on brutes, they will wound you deeper because they will know where it hurts.

I adored living as a shell of myself. I held echoes in my chest where my heart used to be, and laughed in tickles as the words of others caroused my rib bones. Nothing at all was serious, nothing mattered the littlest bit to me. Until someone I knew recognized me. A girl I went to elementary school with, with sharp blue eyes and now dyed brown hair; she used to be blonde. I used to be too. Everything feather heavy caught weight on me, my skin was saddlebags, my heart beat for the first time in eight long years. It was a rapid hurried thing my heartbeat, like it had just woken up from a bad dream. The girl, well, a woman now, ogled at me with a sort of cold consternation—she looked sorry for me. My hair sort of tangled, my outfit worn since last night must’ve been so starkly different from the neat hand-raised-in-the-air-eager-to-answer-a-question girl that used to sit next to her in Mrs. Jones class. It hit me then that something did still matter to me, not present me, but to my childhood self. Little me was still alive, she still cared about what Jasmine thought of us. She used to cheat off of our math quizzes for god’s sake and she’s sorry for me? How could I ever be something I’m not in peace when there are lingering living memories trooping about, forcing me to remember who I was, and acknowledge what I’ve become. I adored living as a shell of myself. Nothing hurt so badly as it does now that I don’t anymore.