This is a very shortened version of the book introduction (my first oh geez) that I am working on. It's a concept collection based on the moments and people in our life that we often forget or overlook, though these moments create large impact on ourselves as people. We often find ourselves passing hundreds of people who's lives we will never touch. The strangers that allow us in for a short period of time are the people that touch our lives in unimaginable ways.


Do you remember the stranger who you fell in love with on the plane? How your entire life was built in seconds, painted with only the colors in the eyes of a beautiful stranger?
Do you remember the man on the plane that told you everything and listened while your dreams unfurled, so far away from the world that you truly believed in them?
I have always found memory funny. I find the faces of people in the bottoms of bottles or the bass line of an old song. We often forget that their are people who we love so temporarily that we only see flashes of them when our lives are the most human. When we are sitting in a nostalgic playground, or we lay in the dark, believing we can stare at the stars forever.


We are often wrapped up in the idea of someone loving us eternally. Humans are obsessed with the idea of people holding us for the rest of our lives because it is scary to think somebody cannot contain our chaos for more than several minutes. People often overlook the instances in life that are filled with emotion from a stranger.
Our lives are collections.
Collections of so many words that we’ve forgotten and people who’s faces we can’t recall anymore because we’ve only known them briefly. We are all just instances that have led to the person you are today. I hope you have remembered all of the wonderful strangers that have created you. If you don’t, write them down. Keep a collection of the people that you have loved with your all in just a simple moment. Write out your memories and hold them dearly.
These are my strangers.
Maybe it was you. Maybe, to you, I was them. Here’s to you, here's to us, here’s to all the strangers I have ever loved.

I fell apart.
my art isn’t what I want it to be and I found your shirt in the wash.
i’ve been crying into clean laundry and I keep wondering if you’re feeling a heart break this strong.
I know you’re not.
but god can I pray to the universe that there is some sign of your emotion.
you always thought you were like your father
always leaving and cycling back
again
and again.
i will wash your shirt a million times
but memories don’t clean off.
please don’t coat your feelings in steel
why am I writing this?
why is this the way my brain cycles
around and around and around
why am I the over dramatic poet and you the cold hearted artist?
is art and poetry hand in hand?
or are they as different as the sky and the sea
don’t they meet?
but also stretch aimlessly on and on and on.
you be the sky
and I’ll be the sea.
we will always touch
though we stretch on and on and on.
i’ve been crying into clean laundry
and watching it cycle
again and again and again

I am trying to be a poet
but I felt like your poem.
Am I an artist or
am I the remnants of your paint
splattered on my favorite jeans?
Or the beautiful words you gave me
including "I'm sorry"?
I am trying to be a poet
but the words get spit back in the bottle
and stick with strangers who I have told too much to.
Am I a writer
Or am I just gagging on the words you threw at me
when you smashed the plates
and slammed the door?
I am trying to be a poet.
But I am tired.
Isn't
That
Poetry?

*** is realizing how much you need every part of one person, and then giving it to each other.
My body forms under your hands
and I am sculpted in this very moment.
Created by the fire you blow into me.

We sit on the opposite sides of a solid glass wall. I do not see you breathing but rather hear it the way I heard your hands waving goodbye. You haven’t changed. Its been three months and your sly smile still embodies every plan I had for the future except now you are somebody else’s future and I am still struggling to define the word.
You can not hear me from this side of the glass but it doesn’t matter anyway. Every word I’ve ever said to you has already been said. Every word I say to anybody else is a hollowed echo of things I have described to you, highlighted in love.
Although I can not speak, I trace words over the glass. I wanted to give you every poem in the world but words were never enough and no poetry could make somebody like you love me back. But I will give it all to you, here in this moment. My fingers trace the ghosts of words over the slick cold surface. As soon as my hand leaves, the words float up into the air and suffocate the room with all of the metaphors I have tried to give you.
You stare blankly at me etching my loneliness into thin, nonexistent words. And you start to run your fingers over the glass too. You let your emotions spill out in the form of art. You paint canvases of landscapes that you always wanted to see and dreams that you never truly let go. They spill out of you like tears that you once told me you never knew how to spill. I fall in love all over again with the ability you have to paint the future, which I had always found so bleak. In this one moment, my words and your art spin together in a dance that was always too exhausting for you and not enough for me.
Although our fingerprints do not stick, the wall comes alive with all of the nights I had given to you. Moonlight picnics and warm summer days fill my head like a flood that you had pushed me into and I had gladly drowned in. Now, I spend nights pushing back up but the water will never truly let me out. I watch the beach spin out before me with you pulling me in and waves crashing over us. I remember thinking that we were the smallest things on earth, standing before the limitless ocean. We had been brought too each other.
I stop and push my hand to the glass, hoping that you will push your hand to mine. The whole wall will melt and we will fold back into each other. Every night for the last three months were just a countdown to feeling whole again after becoming so broken, but you continue to draw. I stare deeply into you, hoping to find the artist that painted her portrait on my heart. It doesn’t happen. You continue to draw.
I realize now,
that the glass is a one way mirror.
You cannot see me. I am still floating into visions of you that **** up your last words of “I don’t care about you anymore.” I am still the overdramatic poet you had always know me as.
And none of your art was ever for me.

Imagine a chain
flowing from your heart,
hooked to the center of the universe.
Chains are not light, neither are the stars.
And neither is life.
When your chest feels tight,
and you can't carry your heavy heart any longer, believe that you are made of stardust.
The stars are pulling you back home.