Maybe the grossest thing I've ever written.

Disney taught me about love when I was a little girl
Fairy tales with fairy tale endings
I knew what I wanted
I was hopeless
I sighed and dreamed
I believed in romance

But as I slipped out of my teens,
I decided that the rules had changed
I told my best friend that I believed
But not in me
I didn't call it cynicism

I grew into who I wanted to be
Not without scrapes and bruises along the way
But I decided to love me on my own
And I did
And I didn't need anyone else

And then I moved
And I changed again
And I keep thinking about who I was before
and before that

In todays world of screens and auto-correct
Nothing beats that feeling when your crush is crushing back
I'm not the little girl expecting sunsets and roses
But I do belive in me
And in us.

A Story from the Road

They were out of Arlington before anyone knew that they were gone. They had passed out early the night before, exhausted from a day of touring the monuments. No one stirred as they packed their bags and grabbed Snacks, they were used to being unnoticed. Their aunt hadn't driven in years, not since an almost fatal collision scared her into taking the bus permanently. It could be years before she noticed that her car was missing from the garage down the street.

   He took the first driving shift because he was older by 5 minuets. She was happy to sleep through the border into the next state. The post card with the picture of the San Antonio river walk was on the dashboard, it had been sent a year ago. "Love Dad," had been almost entirely smudged away by her thumb. She liked to trace the curves to see if any of them mirrored the lines of her own writing.

"What if he's not there anymore?" She asked again.

"It's as good a place to start as any," he said. "Put your seatbelt on, you know we can't get pulled over."

The sun was only just beginning to light the sky. Their aunts alarm broke into the relative darkness and she reached out to postpone her day for another five minuets. 

words

I can’t find my journal

Can’t find my vehicle for getting words to ink

So this will have to suffice

But see how even on screen I skip to the next line

Expecting the page to end

To meet the edge

What does that say?

That tapping and typing will do in a pinch

But I breathe words to life on blue and parchment

rather than blinking black on indifferent white light

There is a lot that I want today

I want to learn to be stronger

I want to do the hard things that will make me better

I want to stop hesitating

I want to burn bright in actions not just words

I wish I could write my future the way I write the lives of my characters

I want to live poetry so I don’t have to write it.

This is not a poem.

Sometimes I feel as though I am living in a whirlwind.

But the wind is stirred by everyone else but me

You are joining your lives with others

You are creating new lives

I am moving slowly while you all orbit around me

I could step into the circle, but I hesitate every time I see an opening

No, not yet.

Next time.

Maybe.

The only wrong choice is to not choose.

I can put the words in ink on my skin

I can say them in the mirror to myself

I can write them to you.

But it’s easier to find excuses to put them off

And go search for a lost object instead.

For Country

This is piece I wrote today in class after hearing about a friend who just passed away.
I didn't know him very well, but he was an amazing writer and had a contagiously bright personality.


BY the time I got the news, it was too late, and it's not like I could have done anything anyway, but once you were alive and present and once you were laughing and making us laugh and once you loved your mommas jumbalaya and warm summer nights in the South...but now you can't love anything or anyone because someone ended you with a knife I imagine the neon glow of a blinking sign on a cold hard concrete they made you fade away like the night breeze cools the rice that you used to chase with an already cool beer and I know that I couldn't have stopped them but  all you have now is the earth above and the earth below and all I have now is the pen and the words to write it

Just an object

From a distance, it is  utterly ordinary. Thin and still. One color, maybe three at the most. On its own, useless, not even heavy enough to hold a piece of paper in place against the threat of an agitating breeze. But placed in my hand, or your hand, it is a tool.
It is the tool.
On skin, on paper, on my favorite pair of jeans from high school, the ones covered in slogans and doodles.
Manipulated by human fingers, clutched in frantic sweaty palms. Or calmly sweeping back and fourth. Suddenly words and scrawls are painted across a surface that was once empty.
The pen brings life to the lifeless. As it warms between our thumb and pointer finger. As it rests against knuckle and middle finger. We use it and bring it to life as the words breath life into the page.
Ink flows, words appear, and the pen has a purpose.
Divine and beautiful or angry and erratic.
The words may be terms of endearment or expressions of hate.
The pen is Switzerland. The pen is neutral.
The pen doesn't give a shit of you love or loath.
The pen moves or dries up.
Or leaks and drips and forms little bubbles of blue/black spit across the page as you work.
The pen has a job to do. The pen never stays still for long.
When the words are in motion, so is the pen.

Me Writing about Myself

Having faith in yourself can be terrifying.
Saying YES to yourself feels so scary
I went through and deleted story fragments from here today
Not because I don't want to share with you, but because I want to share with the world

Because.

I have decided to trust myself,
to hope with a heavy amount of realism
that someday
someone
will want to publish words that I have strung together
That means that they can't be sitting here waiting

Just like I can't sit here waiting.

For me,
this act of hope is bravery.
It is part of a series of things that I am doing for myself
In an effort to become someone that I enjoy being
Someone I believe in.

I am staying quiet and listening more
I have gotten rid of the word hate, erased it from my every day vocabulary
I am forcing myself to take deeper breaths
concentrating on the action
waiting for it to become habitual.

I am taking care of myself
Not because I am all that I've got
I have a lot of people
and they deserve the best version of me
And so do I.

Breaking the silence with silence

I have restricted myself to written language today
I havent spoken a single word since I woke up

And it's been wonderful.

The most noise I made was when I ran the dishwasher.
Which is actually considerably loud.

I've spent the day thinking,
drinking coffee, staying warm, and doing this

Staying quiet is a thing that I'm doing just for me.
I'm being selfish and keeping myself to myself
And it's making a little grin stick to the corner of my lips

I'm thinking about all the sounds we make every day
Noises for each other to announce our presence in a room
To remind each other that we are here
To say "you're funny"
or
"I think I'm funny"


It's so nice to just
shhhh
to announce nothing
to no one
for just a little while