I can't be a babysitter, I can be wondering and watching and wondering and watching, always. Keeping my lantern lit, waiting for the right moment, waiting waiting waiting. But it just costs too much.

A boy called me a diamond. Told me I was beautiful. Told me I was worth anything, everything.

Why am I waiting for you to see I'm alive?

holding on, letting go

It's easy to let go when there's nothing left to hold on to but those invisible threads are still intertwining everything, always. When you turn your back to walk away and they keep you anchored to where you are, to what things are.

I can't stop this little heart from breaking,
even when I thought there was nothing left.

Part II

Flying at night is so completely different. There is no welcoming white blankets or vast blue calm staring back. Instead it's life. Millions of twinkling lives of every color and this is what it must be like to be living a life. Turning lights on and turning lights of. But it takes so much more and yet here they all are doing it.

As we pass other planes in the sky and the cockpits buzz their hellos like bikers on roads, I wonder about all the animals tucked neatly in rows: are they coming or going? are they leaving or staying? are they trying? are they liars?

thirty-two thousand feet

It gives a whole new sensation to the term 'head in the clouds.' Knowing that everything below is dreary and problematic and so utterly complicated yet here we are: Flight # 1903, flying above the barrier that at least right now is keeping the sun from touching down. It's a new kind of great divide. A real distance between us that someone, some time was paid to measure. That family and friends can track as it grows. It's so easy to forget, especially in these treacherous times, that a sky could be so blue. The clouds are a thick solid entity all their own, today an arctic sea and the ripples and wrinkles and dents further the images of glaciers in my mind. I'm ready to dive in, I'm not afraid of the depths or of what may lay ahead, below or behind. There is no icy chill, only an inviting softness that could lull me straight to sleep. All I see out these tiny oval windows is a bed of freshly picked cotton balls, stretched and folded, beneath the same perfect sky we'd nap together under late in to the days of our summers when nothing was so permanent. The birds and humming mowers and clicks of sprinklers were enough of a lullaby to convince us that all was well. We could rest easy and the world would continue as she always had and when we'd wake nothing would need fixing.

I could stay in this inbetween and watch this cloudy sea and feel this calm and I could sleep here. I could smile when the flight attendants give me more plane shaped cracker bags than I could ever eat and when the proud and wrinkled man next to me slips me his, just in case, for later. And when he says a warm congratulations I can say thank you and be thankful and wonder at their kindness which comes so easily. I am comforted to think as many have said, this too shall pass. I'm not branded with an instigation to hate. I can share a genuine smile when he offers me his economy sized bag of m&ms, which he's chosen to pair with a small plastic cup of chardonay. I can understand how we hold so tightly to our pains and our afflictors, how easily we can let our hearts be weighed and dragging along. But what I've finally understood is how we let go.

Even still it's amazing how we can let go but others may still hold fast and refuse to lighten their grip and that's what creates the pits.

And I can't help but feeling like I'm running away, like I should have been stronger and I should've been able to stay.

someone's going home alone again tonight

I know it's not false hope because I know it's trying for the sake of saying I've tried. Not because I really think I am influencing any outcomes. In my mind it's already happened, it's all already been figured, it's just a matter of filling the required time to qualify for a moving up ceremony. We should be familiar with this by now. There is no rushing.

Que sera sera.

Waiting for the words to come out.
Waiting for the time to pass.

Waiting for the sun to penetrate this cocoon I've spun, this coffin I've sealed.
Waiting for you to make the first move, to jump in head first with your eyes closed and your heart open.

Sometimes we have to fish and sometimes we have to dive and dig and wrestle.
Sometimes time moves slowly and we can't stand it but time knows just how long we need.
Sometimes we have to break our own bones and bruise our own skin to realize,
we've been waiting on ourselves.

So much time has passed, so many things have passed us by. Chances, smiles, memories good and bad.
Well it's time to make that move, enough processing, enough wondering and never knowing.
I've stepped out of my underground lair once or twice and now I don't think I can ever go back.