simplicity

I'm glad to be where I am today, as hard as it's been picking up the pieces and moving forward at less than a snail's pace, I'm not stuck where I've been. Even with everything the way it is, even with the impending gray clouds of a storm always looming near by, I feel lighter, especially today. I can realize and admit mistakes, I'm not embarrassed to say what I shouldn't have done. It's an adult maneuver, to say I'm sorry for my part and to hope you will finally realize yours and that we can both continue on to something glorious, something real, something worth anything to get to and to keep. I will always wish that for you, I can't stop wanting everything for everyone, deserved or earned or gifted or stolen, I can't distinguish. I have a little girl heart, its desires remain through every trial, no matter the whats or the whos: a place to be, to feel in every bone that I belong where I am; my own tiny niche to hide and stretch in like a shady retreat in a desert. To be a part of a well oiled machine of a family, strong, in sync with itself, all its parts working together for the advancement of the whole, supporting and carrying and pushing and pulling, whatever it takes without end until the thing is done, until it's run the course. Accomplishing the sum of all the individual desires, learning and growing and shrinking and doing all the things we people must do, but never alone in suffering or joy.

It's so hard to see anything other than the whole, my focus is frozen on the big picture, every small thing seems insignificant. Through everything I try and every choice made on every new day almost nothing comes to an end. I see my desires realized in my dreams, I wake in the same cell, bound and exhausted from struggling to fly in my sleep. I cry out and what returns is naught save my own echoing despair, distant and somehow foreign to myself. As if I'd grown apart from me, like the limbs of a budding tree forking and choosing two separate paths, fighting to be free of themselves, gaining nothing, getting nowhere.

Why can't I shake this?

I hope it's clear, my days of being swayed have expired. The girl I was, her bad parts are realized and dissected and cast off night after night, I could never forget. Her good parts seem hazy and dreamlike, part of some distant fairy tale I'm trying to actualize. Her reality has been cold and hard and the damage done has been unceasing, full of wounds she thought might never heal. She's heard tales of distant wars and the will to fight on, to defeat death or die trying. She wants to live, I'm only now re-learning how to let her.

Living like a wilted brown leaf, detached, unsure and alone, riding the wind in an endless series of wasted motions. No clear courses or paths, no destinations, no control. If leafs could feel would they feel that void: what was missing, what they'd lost? Would they be accepting, would they view the bigger picture? Could they grasp the endless cycles of life and death, up and down, this way and that? Or would it all end in questions, why? what now? Would they realize their value? That their purpose extended beyond living and being lush and glowing green; to dying and decomposing to aide in the life of something bigger than they?

And how can it be that contemplating lends to tears and not understanding?

do or die

With each new day more of myself gets displaced. We race against opposing forces to put the pieces back in some sensible order but it's tiresome work. Laboring in a haze, down curiously winding roads leading to dead ends, full of locked doors. But it's time, I'm almost ready. It has to be full force, arms raised, guns blazing.