Laugh the loudest
Live the longest
Be the loneliest
Write odes and letters to yourself
Instructions on how not to be who you're afraid of becoming
Be the bravest
Boast the most
Avoid the nightmares you fear you are living.

Imagine your interventricular sulcus
                       getting thinner
Your left wall has slowed its myocardial rhythm,
The chordae tendenae no longer close
                        any valves
There is the backflow of blood and
                         suddenly
The muscular left side, the part of you
                        you thought strongest
Has prolapsed.
Diagnosis in: Death by a broken heart.

Look at it until it doesn't hurt anymore.
Look at smiling faces you don’t know.
Didn't you know the story ended
Long before you were through?
Close the book.
The chapter’s done.
And yet I can’t turn the page.
I’m not done.

I want to be captured just as I am right now
My worries and trials show in my face where before there was only the sweet depth of young hope
The path I have to walk, with its forks marked Mother and Therapist and Citizen of the World loom before me, their pebbly grounds flat
If you look carefully, you see their convergence in the two furrows above my eyebrows
Where is the sepia portrait of me?  Everyone has one
That is how I know my mother’s unfamiliarity with married life
It was written in the way she stood next to my father in their honeymoon photo, a bride not yet used to her own body
That is how I know my great-uncle enjoyed bedding his shrill wife
The lines of their bodies compliant in the picnic photo.
Whoever took those photos knew what they were capturing; the intent was there to solidify that moment, in bitterness, in wondernment, as evidence
It was proof they knew the subjects, the characters whose stories bubbled beneath veneers.
Who’s going to take my picture?

Such ordinary lives
Such ordinary paths
The Sandlers and Bullocks are all such you’s and me’s
Ordinary kisses with ordinary loves
Ordinary divorces from ordinary unloveds
Ordinary kids setting up ordinary traps
For ordinary folks who moved ordinarily too fast
Through their ordinary youths to get to their ordinary futures.

Eventually Truth comes to you in a fit of sparkling tears
Because it cuts you in a hundred different ways and
Oh!  It’s never how you expect it, but
Don’t be afraid of your mistakes
A hundred times failed means one lasting Victory.

Speak while there is still time
Don’t worry if your words aren’t grand or noble
Because we as people all come to realize we’re not always grand or noble.
That’s why we watch movies about cheating housewives and men gone mad
Evil villains and girls who have it all and are still sad.
Speak now before you lose your inner child
He’s the one who sees the Truth of the world, the one who wonders All things and understands the Bonds He made are forever
Only you as a child understands forever
How you can forever love someone, how forever you can care.
When there is no more time and our glasses are full
There are no countless bubbles in our champagne, no concept of Forevermore.