How can you not see that you get to choose?
What- too drained by the never-ending news feed, too blinded by the electronic glare, too mired to glance above the stumbling blocks strewn across the way?
Your internal and external worlds aren’t meant to be made of only the material.
Consumption and awareness are not two of the same.

You pause before you lie to yourself.
“I’m done caring. I’ve cared too much.”
It wouldn’t hurt if you were done. The issue isn’t of too much, but of what.
You’ve invested yourself in a delusion, breeding only empty rewards.
Look beyond.

The color display of bent light in a raindrop, the warmth of touch passing between you and the one at your side, the nothing to something infinity of our universe-
It’s all breathtaking, it’s all beautiful, it’s all heart-rending, it’s all-consuming.
It’s all connected to, from you.

No one will ever again experience the world as you.
Life’s not about figuring out who you want to be.
It’s just about
being.

I was a believer
Long after the other girls got interested in parties and boys

I would sit on my heels on the floor of the school library
And stare at the musty shelves of stories, searching for my next fantasy

I was a true believer
It seemed strange to me that while all of these characters, my friends,
kept finding magic in their worlds
mine was devoid and empty
I kept wondering, Why not me?

I was sure the magic was just hiding from me
Waiting for the right time to show itself
Waiting until I was ready to become the heroine
Every windy night, every walk into the woods,
I would think
This time, it will come for me
But it never did

I had a book on forest faeries and how to find them
After waiting and waiting all of those years
Clinging to my last hope, I decided I would give the magic one more chance
I went out to my back yard
To the perfect faery tree, with all the knots and holes in its trunk
And deep red berries stirring gently with the warm breeze
I stood under it, hands clasped, eyes closed
And waited one last time
Please I begged Please

And that was the day I stopped believing

From then on, I was determined to be a rationalist
An evidence-only type of girl
I switched to kneeling before the science fiction shelves
Followed the inventions of today's great tech scape
It was magic in its own sort of way

But my metaphoric heart has never quite given up on the romance of true magic
It loves it in a tragic, primal sort of way
It wants to make my life into a hero journey of fate and destiny
It wants there to be something more to this world
A something mysterious, a something beautiful
All my head and heart seem to do is contradict

A long time ago, I used to be a believer
But ever since I decided to give up on magic
It seems that magic has refused to set me free.

I'm dancing barefoot, bridges fall
My bones tear my skin apart, I feel them digging through
So easily they stab through my flesh
I wish I could rip myself out of my head, crush the voice box of my mind
hand death to that choking awareness
With just as little effort

I think then I would be happy

Happiness without thought may be bliss, it's also death, See the bridge falls down, and it topples on top of you, but you never knew it was there, it's death, it's death, it's death, So take your pick, madness or bliss, either way
*It's death for you in the end

Swirling sea of blue, purple and green
Strange how those colors always come back to haunt me

It is a curse
Graciously bestowed from a myth above
A beautiful voice breaks the silence
Ringing madness and a tint of despair
A blissful call to the depths of the sea
A one-way ticket to live forever in beauty

Too beautiful for category
Winged creatures
Not to fly, but to take the flight from others' wings

Sing the elders hiss at me Sing louder

I stop
But we're hurting them! I cry

They stare at me, horrified
Drag me by clipped wings to the altar
Pronounce my charge
Zeus, she will not sing

He muses
A siren who refuses to sing
What a curiosity
He looks me up and down, distastefully amused
As if I'm a favorite toy of his that he accidentally broke

Release her he says with a wave of his hand
The elders gasp
Should she not be destroyed? A chorus of their gravelly voices ask

Zeus glares at them
Of course she should
But she'll do that to herself
Imagine, knowing you have so much power, just by opening your mouth and never being able to use it
She will break. She will drive herself mad or she will sing
And that will be the end of that

He smiles at me
Goodbye now he waves one hand
And they throw me out to the humans
Who are just as ready to mock my strange looks and past
As to take me in

I will go mad for them still
I will not use my words for evil, for unintended harm
I must not sing
**I must not sing

Sometimes the writer inside puts too much faith in the words themselves,
their black and white march in file,
It forgets that adventure cannot be held to contract
and stories have a way of becoming more than just what's on the page

where there is a war, there is a story
and it is a twisted one, the way all real stories are
one I've yet to figure out

Counterintuitive,
the Mad Hatter was good and the Queen was bad
but Alice chose neither
to leave them all behind
to go back to the endless grey of growing up

I couldn't imagine a choice more wrong
than the choice to escape before she'd even tried to
understand Wonderland

Alice, dear, you can't outrun your own head
It is time to choose sides
Make an alliance,
It is time to stay and fight.

How can I dream of living forever and want to **** myself all at the same time?

There's flowers by my bed

One red
A rose for my mother
A token of appreciation
For the car rides, the dinner times, the silly dances, the fights
That somehow slipped itself back into my room
A return of sentiment, I guess
A petal falls, it's edges turned brittle and hard, slightly torn
Worn
A rose like my mother, this is

Three blue
White carnations with dye inside
In their peak of bloom but there's die inside
Two are the same, but the middle one is small
They are
One for her, one for you and one for me
Blue for water, blue for sadness,
and blue for the winter season that never came to be
The lean towards each other, those three
Sisters

There are white dotted flowers, of which I don't know the names
Like all of those I've yet to meet

There are flowers by my bed
There are flowers in my head
In my life and my death,
it will be the flowers that mark my way.

To the people who have anchored me to the shore and kept me from drowning in the pull of life's undertow:

**Thank you.

empty today,
unable to focus on the daily things,
because the world hurts so much.
I can usually hide from this pain,
but this -
this wanton destruction of life -
it will scar,
and i will never be rid of it.

but if i could be rid of it,
would i be able to take action,
or lulled back into my cave of complacency?

Fall in love.
Memorise their face.
Their personality.
But pay close attention to their eyes.
If you love them their eyes will be perfect. The eyes never change.

I remember her eyes.
I remember how they glimmer when she's passionate about something.

I remember her eyes, with the most beautiful shade of blue, that would be more at home on a Caribbean beach.
Blue, like a cloudless sky, so relaxing, so enticing, so magical...

Her pupils, surrounded by a hazel chocolate ring.
Just bright enough to contrast her pupils and the perfect break for the sea of magical blue.

Her eyes, that when she was sad,
dulled,
made the day colder, made my heart sink. Makes my heart sink.
But when she was happy, they shone, shone like the brightest stars, made the day warmer, and made my heart race, chase, duck and dive.

Her eyes, that I'll never get to see again, not the same way. Because I lost them.
We were not meant to be "more than close friends"

Yet I remember when she used to obsess over me, and her eyes would glow like the purest gems and the chocolate ring would shine like polished gold. And now....

Now they don't....  They don't do for him what they used to for me...
My eyes when I see her glow, well up, and flood.

Because I lost her. The one pure thing. I lost her. Her eyes will never again save me.
And I can't save myself....