Days go by now,
and you're not in them

Close your eyes, and open:
You see blurred colors, and hear a whispered prayer.
I know that voice. That voice is home.

Close your eyes, and open:
You are running through the grass, climbing up trees,
catching ice cream dribbles with your tongue.

Close your eyes, and open:
Standing with your feet in a warm lake,
hundreds of little catfish nibbling at your feet.

Close your eyes, and open:
Your mother is crying, walking back to the car where you sit,
wrapped in a blanket, in the middle of the night.

Close your eyes, and open:
First kiss. Prom. Graduation.
This is anticlimactic.

Close your eyes, and open:
You have jumped off a really high cliff into the ocean,
"That was a dumb decision," you think, right before you smack the water.

Close your eyes, and open:
A man is breaking down in the empty train station in Italy,
his girlfriend stands by him.

Close your eyes, and open:
Hopping from crumbling stone, to stone,
crawling through a bush, you are atop an old castle.

Close your eyes, and open:
You have just failed your math class for the second time.
When will you get it together?

Close your eyes, and open:
You look in the mirror and see an adult.
When did this happen?

Close your eyes, and open:
You wake up that morning crying,
because you know better than that.

Close your eyes, and open:
You remind yourself why you exist.
You wait, hope, and pray for it to sink it.

Standing on a beach,
there are four of us.
A strange conglomeration of people,
from different aspects of my life.
How did we all end up here?

We stand apart,
all facing the ocean.
A wave begins to swell, to build,
but we don't move.
Can we move?

Here we brace ourselves to die,
in the giant wave that is churning upwards.
My heart beats fast,
"This is it," I tell myself.
Is this how I will die?

And then I'm running,
across the sand, and up the stairs.
I look back and my friends do not follow,
"Run!" I scream.
Why aren't they running?

I don't know if they ever ended up running,
or if they were crushed by the wave.
So many stairs.

Scream,
I can still hear your scream in my mind, because in this moment, you had lost it—utterly, and completely this was your rock bottom, one whose depths I may never understand.

Screams,
I still hear her screams every so often, echoing like war cries through our sunny suburban life. They are the battle scars she carries from protecting me from you, and you from yourself—they call it “posttraumatic stress,” but I call being a mother.

Silence,
I don’t scream because I can’t scream. I still can’t seem to figure out what exactly happened there. I was a little girl living half in a mystical, magical, make-believe world, where dreams and reality intermingle into a confusion of memories, or lack thereof.

One knows it is a chaotic world in which we live,
when we say we are blessed
to have basic human rights


(i.e. water, shelter, clean clothes, education, medicine, freedom from prejudice, love, etc)

Prayers to
the rain pitter-pattering on our shoulders,
the brief constancy of our heartbeats,
the fog strolling down the hills,
the wind whisking our words into smallness,
the wide spaces in the sky,
the hawk  cutting the air with her wings,
the grass swaying in the wind, drooping under the weight of raindrops,
the breaths of ourselves and each other.

Prayers to
the feeling of imperfection, distraction
and mistakes;
and the feeling of wholeness, forgiveness
and renewal.

Prayers to You.

I'm not big with romance.
But I get the feeling
that for some reason,
it's going to be harder than I thought it was,
getting over you.

Maybe it's because you thought that my independence,
my wild hair and ***** and sharp edges
were my most endearing qualities.

Maybe it's because your hands
are so big
that I've got no problem imagining them
holding my heart.

Maybe it's because the idea of you
comforts me
and brings me back down from the busyness
holding my mind.

...and even though it's obvious that you're still figuring yourself out,
and you have the hardest time trying to figure me out,
you've figured me out.
I'm not nearly as complicated as I'd like to think.

You've got this sturdiness about your soul,
that makes me want to lean into it and just be.
Like you could wrap your arms around me,
and, simply, that would be fine.

So, where are you?
Because the funny thing is,
we can't hold a conversation,
or maintain eye contact.
You're immature and rash,
and so am I.

All we ever do is argue,
vocal sparring, as it were,
never breaking the layer
into deeper conversation.

But I miss the way I'd catch you,
giving me this look
of confused admiration,
of bewilderment,
of exasperation,
of happiness.  

Do you miss the chance we had,
as much as I do?