Life, as it presents itself, is pretty straightforward.
School-work-family-grandkids-retirement.
It's all laid out for us like clothes on the bed when we are kids:
"This is how your life is going to be."
And we watch Disney and see all these people that have adventures And lives that aren't normal by any stretch of the word
And somehow we're expected to still have normal expectations of how
Our lives are going to play out.
Well, I'm sorry, world, but I have a longing to be better.
It's a cookie dough mix made out of both 1. Longing for recognition,
2. Wanting genuine friends,
And 3. Wanting to be valuable to someone.
Its a want to be wanted,
Like the characters in TV shows that get kidnapped and told
"You have a specific skillset that we need"
By a man in a black suit with a grave expression.
Wouldn't that just feel great? Like FINALLY
Someone thinks that I'm important, necessary, talented, special,
DIFFERENT.
It's my greatest fear, the fear of living
9-to-5
Going to work, day after day,
Sliding the project in the inbox, leaving to grab a drink and watch some Netflix alone before bed, then
Doing it all again.
Even if I wasn't alone, if I had family
Wouldn't that get dreary? Like,
Take the kids to school, go to work, pick them up, go home.
Day after day until they grow up and are gone and I retire and then What?
What was the whole point?
I need something bigger//something transcendent
I need a purpose or a goal or a mission
I need someone to tell me, okay, we need you because ___
And then I need to feel the thrill of the moment, the thrill of doing Something I'm inherently good at.
Is it just me or
Am I the only one dissatisfied with life as it presents itself?

have you ever sat and thought about how everything is nothing
and how nothing is really everything
how nothing matters, really, and nothing you say to someone is really
exactly perfect for that moment
because later on, you're just going to go back and think
"saying this would have been better"
and relationships, love, hate
that's not anything either
because it all ends and who is there to read the story afterward
and if there was a story, who would stand to read the heartbreak?
thinking about thinking
thinking about thoughts
about how everything is actually tiny little cells
sparking their tiny existence as if to get something else's attention
but they are too tiny to notice
we can't see the trees for the forest
and really, i wish all that i was was just the tiny invisible cells
so i could drift through matter without being noticed
just drifting along sidewalks and across streets
drifting through existence without a glance from a human
because then i would not feel so acutely conscious
of the stares of others at my broken, huddled, hurting heart
and the hearts around campus that i love
hurting too, because my love could not stand theirs.
it hurts so much, parted without knowing why
and simultaneously knowing it was for the best.
why must anyone have to leave someone they love
just because rationally they know that's not the one for them?
rationalization trumps emotion if you want to continue living
because we all know emotions ****
so we give in to what we know we have to do:
break ourselves, break the other person
and live broken and apart and bleeding all over the concrete ground
wishing for invisibility and refuge.

I am a depressed little rain cloud
My life moves in slow motion
My dad is a bipolar manic storm
His life moves in fast forward.

How does that happen? A fast-forward man
Marries a normal woman
Gives birth to a slow motion daughter.
Eventually as life goes on and on
The normal woman starts moving slower
And slower
Until she too is going in slow motion
And sometimes, her and me,
We even live life in reverse,
Entrapped in the whirling motion of our past that
Pulls us ever backwards to live out the moving pictures
That replay in our minds way too many times.

Our life is a videotape
And if my mom and I rewind
And my dad is on fast-forward
How can we ever end up actually going anywhere?
We're one of those old videos that end up discarded
With a mile of black tape fluttering forgotten against the
Cement ground of this old, old basement called Time.

I walk down sugar-coated streets,
stumbling over rumor weeds poking up through the cracks
and fearing the whispers that I think I hear.

I watch the candy people walking around,
******* each other dry one way or another
like leeches with sweet teeth.

They make sour faces,
like ******* lime soda through a Sour Punch Straw,
but they keep *******, because there’s nothing else to do in Candyland.

I have to look really hard to find the sweet people.
The gummy ones, the melt in your mouth chocolate ones.
Sometimes I find them half-eaten and discarded like office lollipops
and sometimes they’re melting under everyone’s Red Hot gaze.

Sometimes I only find wrappers
and I get so angry that I think I might melt myself.
Because these people have been eaten.

******, nibbled, gulped down
like nothing more than a quick Kiss that means nothing.
But no matter how small they were, they still mattered.

They mattered to someone,
but now they’re just slick remnants on cellophane or foil.
And what hurts even more is that I couldn’t save them.

I’m not Princess Bubblegum,
I can’t protect a candy kingdom.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t try.

Sometimes I wish you understood me
Not like, hey, agree with me and let me do my own thing
But like, really understood me
How broken I am.
I'm so broken.
I can't tell you how scared you would be
How fast and far you would run
If you truly had an inkling,
A tip of the iceberg,
Of the manic depression that I experience every day
Alone,
And how much it shocks me
And how much I realize, again,
I am so. Messed. Up.
It's weird, being a nursing student
And knowing clinically EXACTLY
What is wrong with you and why
But you've hidden it from the world so long
Locked it up inside and thrown away the key
So that no one you know could possibly open
And look inside, and understand
And still love you for the sunbeams that you hold your hands open to
In your daily search for warmth,
Curling up in the shade of a tree like a cat
Just hoping for hope.

So many damaged people
Why are we so hurt
Ruined
Rained on?
We joke about dark, crude things
So we feel better
But it makes us feel worse about ourselves-
Guilty
*****
Unloved-
Because really all of this is a pleading,
A cry of the soul
For love.
See me
Do you know who I am?
No,
Because I wear a mask.
Like an XBOX avatar
You see the me that I put on
But not my soul.
Now we see through dark glass
Then, face to face.
See my mien,
See me,
And I'll be appreciated and loved
Or abandoned.