So many people, places, things I feel anchored to pushing and pulling and weighing each for its own benefit, the fulfillment of its own agenda. Things I've wanted to keep have been torn from me and everything I'd kill to shed remains bound. Sometimes it seems a reasonable task to keep on, mostly I find myself lacking; repeating every sentiment positive or negative, living in shifts like the ocean's tides. Maybe we all operate this way, but it seems others get further along on their paths and I somehow remain, sore and bruised and growing a quiet rage, harboring a gentle hatred that I've not learned to use for anyone's advantage. It remains pure and private as a memento of everything that's broken and all the negative spaces waiting to be filled.

I need the ocean, she fills the holes in me. She clears out the cobwebs, she pushes and pulls and my blood responds and reacts and everything in me tingles and sways. She enters each of my senses and establishes a common rhythm all throughout, brings me back together when I've drifted and come apart. She's refreshing and light but I come away full and calm. I need the ocean.

What things are within my reach to change or alter? Learn to focus my energies on that. So much of me is spent despairing and reaching for things I know I can't grasp, all of that me can surely be put to better use. I'm maybe not ready to reach for the sun, but I think I can at least take my eyes off the dirt.

Slow and steady. Stop trying to race, sit back, breathe. There are lessons hidden all throughout, at every phase. The transitions always tear me up, as I find myself adapting to one trick you begin something new. It gets impossible to tell which way is up, which direction will carry me home.

Make lists, document, make improvements: there's always room in here. Open myself at least to myself and be honest and don't stop moving, even if it's terrible.

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.