There's a place between forever and a moment, a connecting pivot between all the other wheres from which every matter molecule descends. It is a place we marvel and question and dream, and feels irrevocably natural yet so logically unnatural that there is a quaking in your very bones at that place of reverence.

Stars.

A person can gaze up at them and give them names and tell them stories but the fantastical part is no one ever knows if they are actually listening.

If you close your eyes, you can almost feel their tremendous radiance. The type of glow and beauty that over-arches all. Its fascinating, when you make your sight dark and see them in your irises, how familiar they fee when they are thousands of dead miles away. How warm their touch is when they are surrounded by fatal coldness.

Night is seen as this terrifying conundrum, where darkness brings out the fear of the unknown and the dire. Yet stars, they give a calming eminence to these fears, sliding away the layers of mortality and lifting a soul to a place where for a moment, for forever, they can feel light.

Stars are a wonder to this world. Not because we are so important, but because we are the closest mirror they have. A bright faced world of change and glow in the dark coldness of a quiet universe. We are not singular in our celestial reflections; we are a wonder to each other.

Yet stars are becoming invisible to the human eye. In a bustling city night, the sky is bloated with electric light that brings silence to the darkness, but also to the sky.

The mirrored bodies up above are being blotted by our light, forgetting their beautiful power and our collected memories and leading our humanity into an existence of singularity. The world is more populated than ever, so then why do so many people feel so painfully alone?

They are waiting, the stars, for their earth to come back to them. To shine their light in each bright eye and confess the silent loneliness they hope their humanity shares. In the deepest of their burning heart,s they don't hope for our pain, they never want that.

But they just hope so dearly to not be alone.

So in the silent night, when things are quiet and dangerous, turn off every light and take a step outside to a place where your eyes can open for the first time. Look to the sky, use your boundless power to see the moments in between, and find a star. Open your mouth, whisper the truths you didn't know you were waiting your whole life to speak. Learn the truth that your ancestors forgot when they tried to burn away all the fears of the unknown.

In the starlight, you are never alone.

Frosted lips met rusted leaves,
Surprising both parties at its rightness,
Between the freezing and the warm,
Between the snap and the crunch,
Between Autumn and Holly.

Hearts met in the mix of November,
A tossed salad of a month where both coexist,
They met with eyes of brown and blue,
And to their shock and everything else managed to meet too,
Between Autumn and Holly.

As the eons went by,
They muddled through ice ages, warm fronts,
Surviving only in the holy sanctuary of each others' arms,
And even when their battling storms came,
They came out with hands locked,
Gladiatorial victors of all things wicked their way come,
Possible love strung between them in the month of November,
Between Autumn and Holly.

The world grew below them,
and they did their work exactly as the atmosphere demands them,
They can nearly feel it in their bones when each meteorological tide must come,
It is the way their work happens,
And the way their world, our world turns,
Between Autumn and Holly.

Yet as humankind appeared and grew there was something stirring,
There were mechanisms and smoke clouds and an unbelievable flurry,
A heavy weight of some subversive demon latching itself lightly onto the lovers,
Then deeper,
But they refused to open their eyes; their earth and humanity won't either,
So the demon festered and grew to breathe noxious fire,
Eventually making the air too caustic in their ignorance,
Between Autumn and Holly.

Words could not be spoken after the inevitable occurred,
Autumn's world is near dead from a new, ferocious Holly storm,
A touch of the hand is all each heartbroken season wanted,
But they and the world stayed silent when everything's wrong,
And those fingertips and their vast love and brilliance created this hell,
A silence and death fell onto the possible love that possibly could have been forever,
Between Autumn and Holly.

Silence is their new normal,
Quid pro quo, in a way,
Holly's eyes scream her sorrow and guilt,
Her lips, on the other hand, say nothing,
Instead of their beloved, romantic November,
They now only meet for work,
The world becomes more chaotic and its weather distressed,
And the chasm between them grows larger with each atmospheric catastrophe,
The squalls screaming like their broken hearts,
All created by their ****** brilliant fingertips,
Between Autumn and Holly.

All they have left is staring down at their world and their humanity,
Hoping one day their November, their seasons, their world can be its own again,
It is too late for them to change the tides of the atmosphere,
But across the chasm they both somber and hope one day, some day, something can bridge the divide and:
Calm the atmospheric disaster,
Calm the storms,
Calm the world,
A maybe even fix the possible love that is left,
Between Autumn and Holly.

All these years I thought this was a sort of coping mechanism, a sort of way to stop myself from peeling my skin off to try to scream at it to listen. A way to keep me contained.

My words knew better than I.

When I couldn't keep my thoughts straight, my lyrical ramblings were putting away chronicles that would eventually be a bread trail to understand the world inside my head. To understand the little girl locked behind bars and being told she is a Jabberwocky. My little, trapped, fearful, left behind, bipolar girl.

Things seem so much clearer now. I haven't felt so unclouded and intelligent in years, but suddenly the paths in front of me seem so much easier than they used to be. The poisonous fog over my life has lifted and I can see the monster I was stabbing at was truly just me.

I just couldn't see that then.

I have my writing to thank for everything. I have to thank it for everything. It is the one entity in my life that has been constant and loving and keeping me human. Alive, even.

It is the music of my soul, and it amazes me every day how deeply I love it, and it loves me. I wrote an entire piece two years ago about my love for writing and how it has always stayed by me, uncertain of its love for me. Writing loves so many people, and I am just a grain of sand in writing's life. But lately I've been feeling that even a grain of sand can matter so much. I mean, Dickens and King and Miller and Lee were only grains of sand and look how much they did?

It feels stupid and forced of me to get all motivational speech here after the chronicled years of confused sufferings and endless, unsure ramblings. I'm not going to sit here and talk about how I see the light and I know the way suddenly, and my life is fixed.

My life will never be fixed. But in an imperfect world, where  nothing every truly is fixed, it seems the wading through the waters is pleasant when you do what works best for you.

What I will say, though, is that my life is finally, after years of uncertainty, one hundred percent my life, just as it should be.

I'm bipolar, it'll always make my life interesting and different than everyone else's. But if I can try to keep my life overall happy and have writing in it and feel strong and loved and brilliant, and I think for once I'll be fine.

Funny that I think this is the first time I promised that in a poem and truly believed it. Not just the moment, not just next week.

I think from now on, I can be fine.

When I was young,  school was my place. As an awkward oddity I found solace in words and reading.

Wasn't long 'til I was being called brilliant. Those days were some of the few times in my childhood life I felt strong and confident and worth something.

I was sent to an advanced school. I ate books like candy. I had a passion for knowledge and wisdom.

So what happened?

As my head got cloudier, I fell more and more behind. Well, behind for me. I was still an AP kid, so nerdy and there. But I was also quiet and, for AP, pretty average.

I stopped excelling in sciences and math as much as I used to. Everything got so much blurrier around then. As my head got more and more uncontrollable, the less brilliant I became. And the more I hated myself for it.

I could barely take time to feel everything but the raging inferno of emotions that was slowly taking over my life. I had learned to lie too well about it, so well that it was nearly my entire being by the time I finally got to stopping it.

For years I had to accept going from brilliant to average, and I accepted it as just my place. That I excelled in youth but dropped off and being good at writing would be my last, final brilliancy.

Then, nearly a decade after things began to go nuclear,  my head began to cool.

I sometimes fear how clear everything feels, how the touch of my fingertips on my keyboard still feel beautiful but in a less insatiable way. How the sky is blue and everything makes sense and how my mind craves to know more and more.

I am excelling. I am standing in front of classes that I am clearly not as qualified for and doing well. And, by god, the whole beauty of it is that doing well does not correlate to this buzzing going on in the back of my head as if its about to explode. I just feel it. This energy coursing through me that loves to know and remember and learn and do everything in my power to make everything I do wonderful. Its like magic but I know its not, its me. I didn't know "me" could be brilliant anymore. I was nearly certain "me" couldn't. I was a writer, and I was content.

But now there's this thing inside me I haven't felt in years, that has two wide eyes and wants to feel the world. Its curious and strong. I didn't think I was that strong either. I thought I just knew emotions and pretty words.

I sit here, though, and I am brilliant. It feels so arrogant and cocky to say, but I'm me again. I'm the little girl who got lost in the fire, but I thought she burned and died.

Yet as my head finally cools and the ashes fall, she reemerges and she's like some unbelievable phoenix inside my soul.

I thought I had to accept I could never be anything like the brilliant little girl that got swallowed by a monster inside of her. That I had to accept losses like I accepted losing everything I loved in my life for 18 years.

But I don't have to lose everything. I don't have to assume all that is lost is gone.

I am reading, and I am learning, and I am growing. There is this new growth in the old, weathered forests of my consciousness. It didn't have to resign to its ways, it can be anything. I can be anything.

Because finally, after years of forgetting, I am brilliant.

About that soon?





Nevermind

Funny how a poor choice in words has become a part of my reality. I have a new medicine to treat this for now too, don't worry.

There's a madness in having to learn who you are without the monster. I felt ever alone and painful when it was breaking down my door. But now without it, some days its hard to tell what my toes look like. I can't even explain the reason I fixate on toes, and how they look at feel. Perhaps because they are the only thing that keep me on the ground.

I got so good at understanding monsters and demons. Its hard to look in the mirror and understand the human that was behind the yellow eyes and ****** nails.

I feel an emptiness at night. I dunno if its because my head isn't screaming or if its because no one's here with me. Everything's just so **** blurry. I don't know as much as I wish I did.

I think I know who I am. I know the words keep me grounded and they are what's closest to my heart. But past that? it gets hard. Past the words its like I'm not I'm a person. I'm just anthropomorphic fingers across a keyboard, stringing a story together. Possibly even mine.

My eyes are so blurry.

I want to figure out this human I reside in better. I don't know her nearly as well as I should. I know the demons that possess her, but when we sit alone at a table the words that keep her sane and the monsters that keep her not are the only things that tie us together. Its hard to carry a conversation when both of those are too far out of reach.

Should I manage my time better for my writing? I already feel like I plan everything more than I should.

Should I try new things? It already feels like I have far more on my plate than I can handle.\

Should I keep forward, hoping this will pass? God knows letting things pass almost killed everything once before.

I said it too well. I don't feel grounded. Just drifting. I need to feel stable and on the ground, instead of in this floating plane of uncertainty. It feels so unknown and unsafe and makes a sick feeling overtake my stomach. It attacks best while I'm alone, while its nice, while my mind has less to distract itself from what's happening.

I want to feel right again.

I guess I just feel very left right now, and not in a great way.

Soon enough I'll be home. Well, full home. I've got 75% of it. Now just need the last bit left to feel like there's an anchor to the mortal plane.

Hunting for the human within can be a little disorienting. I just need my human, with his loving hands, to give me a tie back to the world. I've been without him far too long already.

I'm somewhere around here. Just need a little more help to find her.

Soon.

The weight of the wait is a wear that I hate to wear.

Gives great alliteration, though.

I'm so ready for all the things only a tiptoe away, but I can't have them. Nine days, I repeat religiously in my head, like a prayer from my own personal bipolar bible to keep my head on straight.

I can have everything in nine days.

Its a madness and a sort of vibration of my slumbering monster, old and weak but still ever-present, to be so close but yet so far. All my dreams are literally at my fingertips yet I cannot touch them. Not my friends, not my family, not my love, not my blue. All the things that are things of greatness are stuck at the end of this pole dangling far away and I am no good at balancing. All I get to do is stare and wait.

He's less than that ever-looming 2,000 miles away.

The blue is 30 edits and a read-through away from being possibly a completed manuscript.

The loves of my life are so close and ******* Christ I want them so bad but...

The work needs to be done. The class needs to be done. The appointments need to be done. The dishes need to be done. The unpacking needs to be done.

Their is a sense of comfort in the whole thing, that everything is so **** close, that the longest weight of my life is almost over.

I need this. I need my fingers banging against a keyboard, and I need the man I love most banging against me. Yes, I said it. Banging. So what if its gratuitous, its been over four months. I deserve the things that make me happiest. I have learned how to be alone,  I have proven my ability to be a strong individual able to take care of her ******* self.

Now, stubborn world, give me back what is mine.

The blue can come back into focus next week, and he will come not long after. Their will be a quelling of the weary weight that I have been waiting to shed.

The summer has been hard. Good on me, I toughened up quite a bit, but hard nonetheless. I know its been a little ******* everyone. But the two things I love are adamant and strong, as am I, and we'll find each other again. Just was an annoying but necessary hiatus.

My mind can breathe in its home again, on the page and keyboard, and my body can be held in the arms of the most fantastic man I've ever met. The weight of my impatience and excitably and anxiousness is heavy, but it made my body and mind so strong my adamant nature is ready to take on the world, with partner in crime and writing in hand.

I got this, no matter the weight.