Meeting Murphy

We sit here waiting for absolution, or something absolute, at least. Our chairs are tipped forward off the edge of the cliff; remember when our mothers would always tell us not to learn forward so much, don’t you know that yet, that one day our chairs would tip, and then, then you’d learn your lesson.

Now our grown up egos are disillusioned and bruised, fallen victim to Murphy and his law. We are asking, what did we do, instead of what could we have done. My little sister asked, “If you had a time machine, would you go into the past or future?” And there was no hesitation. Regrets, they rest, and stay, and take a stronghold.

There are people I see in the 20s who look like and live like they are in their 40s, and I wonder what their mistakes were, before their candles blew out and the wax melted a river. No one grows up and says, today I’ll sit on the crackling cobble with my broken strings and my lonely voice, and I’ll have made it in this world. Nobody wakes up and says, today I’ll ring up a thousand orders for hours on end, and it’ll be everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Maybe they were victims, too, and only this time, Murphy wanted to use them to show the world not to mess with him again.

But look for the girl with ink smudges on her hands. She wakes up every morning and dresses herself in a cloak, no matter the fashion du jour. It is her blanket, and with it, she chases storms from her window because that’s as far as she can go, as close as she can get. It is a suffocating blanket of heavy words, but if there were nothing to hold her down, the wind might blow her right out of the blue of the sky.

We forget, I think, what it feels like to be free. We dive into the depths of our sadness, but our tanks are stones, the weights on our souls. Or maybe, maybe we never felt it because we never leaned far enough to free fall, to trust in wind despite the gravity of the situation. We forgot what it feels like until the first scent of laundry on a warm spring day, or the cold drop of rain against constant blankets of lightning. We forget that there is such thing as resilience, that we have the ability to find light in darkness. But we forget that there is a difference between sacrifice and avoidance: I have forgotten the people there during what I considered the best few moments of my life. I wish it they were with others.

There are contradictions when we deem best or worst, and there is no creating of experiences that can ever best a best, but Murphy, he will make it so easy to worsen a worst.

So this is a fight.

Nobody gave us an armor. We only know to put the pressure where it hurts, and we know exactly how it feels to hurt, and in that one moment, we lose all humanity and we hurt back, just to share the feeling of being hurt to rid it of itself and to find our humanity again. Nobody said it was easy, but who even has the right to deem it so. This, this is a fight with words and heartbeats. We cannot fall, except to ourselves.

09
May

7

#i call this studying for AP english

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

away she’d fly

06
April

16

110

framed

today, on my way out, i caught a reflection of myself, inside a frame, my eyes lining up to the ones staring back, the exact same shape they always have been, in a picture of my seven year old self. like any good mother, mine lined up my school pictures all in a row, to show them how much i’ve grown, but i don’t think she knows the burdens buried behind these brown eyes, these eyes that line up to the ones staring back, the exact same shape as they have always been, crescent topped with no room for mistakes or eyelashes, but everything that falls into these black holes will ride on rods and cones into galaxies of insight, because i crave light.

see on picture day they’d tell you to smile and the only times i really smiled, mom, you told me my mouth curled up too much and nose wrinkled in a little bit and my eyes were squinted too small to see out of, but why would i need to see out of them when you told me there is nothing to see here. i never smiled that way again so as to not let the lines around my mouth wrinkle or the feet around my eyes curl up, and me and mom, we practiced my smile in the mirror. she said, open your eyes. close your mouth. point your chin. tilt your head. fix your hair. and, cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeese!

i could wear one expression. but with that one expression i learned that smiling doesn’t always mean you’re happy just like crying doesn’t always mean you’re sad, and my english teachers told me to find better words than happy or sad, words like “convivial” or “disconsolate” and so i stuck my wrinkled nose into a pages of a thesaurus until they were happy, but i think they made my mother with her i-want-my-daughter-to-be-a-doctor-lawyer-engineer dreams sad when they said, you know, your daughter’s pretty smart, she could be a writer. but mom, you’ll be happy to know i am not a writer. i am an actress. and if i do say so myself, i am pretty darn good because i play the part of your daughter every single day. and i am so sorry for all the days i have had to take an intermission backstage, for myself, and throw in my understudy. i’m so sorry, dear sister, i wanted you to play all the parts i could never have but instead i gave you all the parts i could never face, and when i see your face, dear sister, i see eyes lining up to the ones staring back, the exact same shape mine always have been, and i think every tear i’ve ever wanted to cry have made their way into your eyes, let’s face it, and you’re the only one in this family brave enough to let them fall.

who did we think we were going to grow up to be? this little girl, with eyes lining up to the ones staring back, the exact same shape they always have been, she, she always wanted to be a mother but she never knew if there was gonna be a man who would love her, and maybe she still doesn’t know that. you taught me to never trust a man. i learned that, i learned not to smash the mirrors when i was cut by broken glass.

we, we are the girls who read in the corner, and in the hidden nook between her dresser and her bed, she writes everything she left unsaid, and when her mom finally calls her out of her head and back into the world, she puts on that smile, the same one in the frame, lining up to the one staring back, and she plasters the plastic faces that let her face the world, for in this world we are one of the girls who so desperately needed to know that we are the protagonists of our own stories, and even though sharing your secrets doesn’t mean you get to be saved from them, but there must, there must be a way to save ourselves, so this, this is for the girls who were told that they could do anything, know anything, and be anything they wanted to be and took that to mean they had to do everything, know everything, and be everything if they wanted to be loved.

now i have frames of my own to close in on the world, to hide behind and know that not everything can be frozen in a photograph. i crave light, and you know, mom was right, at some point this mouth will close and these eyes will open up to everything that is beautiful in this world, like the wrinkles of a old woman after years and years of laughter, and when i’m finally there, i’ll look back on my seven year old self; when life has finally deemed me a storyteller, i’ll tell her everything that i know now, that it’s okay to cry and be happy at the same time, that you’re allowed to smile and be sad at the same time, that it’s beautiful, even, that there is room for mistakes, mascara for eyelashes, and that even the color brown can be bright, for when, today, on my way out, when i caught a reflection of myself inside a frame, i smiled back, and left.

"We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out."

- Winston Churchill

19
March

2

As seen where we are in NYC!

14
March

5

Via: rachelsmithyeah

Has it ever been so loud it’s silent?

When you have to keep quieting all the drafts in your folder, piled up, waiting to be alive, protesting to be heard with the crowd of broken fragments written on post it notes, you give in. I was never one to stick to promises anyway, and especially not ones to myself.

People are always going to see me as that girl who gets things done. You only hear my “professional” voice or my “writing” voice. I lose the in-between, the authenticity. I just want to be a friend. I do think about how different people feel about these words. How I feel about seeing them after they’ve read me inside-out. But I’m not going to hold myself to an unreachable standard of quality to write a blog post. Life is simpler than that. It’s simple.

We spend all of life finding that perfect balance, only to throw it off, just for fun. A year ago, almost to the date, I cut my hair. And I still don’t know if I left the best parts of me behind.

There’s too much heartbreak in this world to hold. I always talk about peace, finding peace in God. Always telling the girls, God will give you peace. But I’ve never taken it, never accepted it because I crave noise in my life in order to drown out the sirens. I want to know what it’s like to trust freely again. To trust freely, and to let myself be loved again. So I am waiting upon the Lord.

Honestly, I’m learning to let it go. I wish I could explain what’s been happening, but I can only mold words so far. But here. Has it ever been so loud it’s silent? Have you ever feared for a split second that you would never rise above water again? The more you shine a light into a fog, the more it deflects back at you. I sowed the seeds of expectation. And it rained for days and days and would not stop.

But the skies are whispering to you. To live. Here comes college and life and careers and marriages and families and age and …. tell me it’s worth it. Did I stop writing to try and find “happiness”? How silly of me. But could I have? Will I ever?

I am hanging on a thread, but I am not a pendulum. My life is a poem, but I can only rhyme so far. There are few verbs more beautiful than love, but here is one: stay. I am here to stay.