i’m typing this
as i’m waiting for you to get back
from the bathroom.
in the starbucks
cozy acoustic music is playing
and your mocha frappucino
half empty
is on the table in front of me.
your lips have touched the lid
and i don’t want to be
that person
but i wonder.
i wonder how it feels
does it know that it’s lucky.
can it tell me its secrets
how does it do that?
get you to open up
and let inside the warmth?
i’m not jealous.
just curious.

you should be back any second now.
you might walk out
back to our cliche little table
and ask me
what i’m doing
what i’m typing so furiously
what i’m so passionate about.
i will want to say you.
i love you
right here right now right time right place
i won’t though

maybe i’ll say
“i forgot to finish this paper
that’s due at 11:59 tonight”
or maybe i’ll say
“i just got an urgent email
about my political science class tomorrow”
or maybe i’ll say
“an old elementary school friend
just sent me a Facebook message
and i need to reply”

or.
or maybe i’ll say
“nothing.
nothing more important than our coffee.”
maybe i’ll just close my laptop
mid-sentence
because it’s true.

nothing is more importa

God, in this day, February 24, 2015, I come to you saying this:
Please save me from myself.
Save me from this darkness I have adjusted to call home.
Save me from the madness in my mind,
From the anxiety that eats me alive when I wake,
With epiphanies of school.

I despise waking every morning from Monday through Friday.
The weekends may be a drag for me.
But the weekdays....
They are the days I loathe most.
The weekdays are a stabbing at the chest.
These days awake the beasts who sleep in my head, in their nest they have made throughout the years, and these monsters do not like to be awoken.
When they awake...
Lights
Camera
Action

Here comes the anxiety,
The stress,
The tears stream down my cheeks like cars down a hilltop in the night.
I feel like Forrest Gump.
Except Forrest Gump had been running miles and miles, for no reason.
He “just felt like running.”
Now me? I have a reason to run.
I am running away from my demons.
I can’t face them, throw a stone at them.
They’re much stronger than that.


The monsters don’t let me sleep.
They keep me awake at night.
Their words are being shoved into my mind,
“So much homework to be done for tomorrow,
You pitiful and witless girl,
When will you learn that you will never be good enough?”
They’re saving me from my nightmares,
Yet placing me into another.

But it’s okay,
This nightmare is only temporary,
Soon, I will escape and enter into oblivion
But for now, I will sleep – maybe like a baby, maybe like a dead man.

God, thank you for allowing those beasts into my dreams,
Turning them into the nightmares I am terrified to encounter every night.
God Almighty, thank you for teaching these demons to swim,
And to be stronger than my dreams.
Oblivion is inevitable and now I will be free…
Thank you.

Amen.

There’s this sudden peace growing in my psyche, the kind I haven’t felt in a long time accompanied by a person. I don’t know if it’s the way you laugh, the structure of your words and sentences, or the cleverness of your sarcasm, but there’s something about you which reflects the tapping of the soft rain against my windowsill in the middle of the night. When those thunderstorms you call nightmares come to destroy my dreams, your words act like a tranquilizer, sedating the anxiety; the fears of living and worry of the afterlife is the war I fight every day of my life, and you’re the only person I want by my side at the battlefield. Even if the people surrounding us are scared of dying or facing their fears, the stillness of my heart remains. There’s something about the tone of your voice at 3 in the morning that puts me at ease; something about the way you get infatuated with shows and songs, or people even, that I adore – oh so much. For a while, my heart has been set on the touch of your skin, feeling the vibrations of your laughter just inches away is my strongest desire. Your sarcasm is amusing to me and I crave hearing it under your breath as those brown (sometimes green) eyes lure me to you. You are what I’d like to call my personal form of *******; the drugs my mother thought were forbidden to speak of. Some say ignorance is bliss, but the unawareness of you is the biggest taboo and the existence of you is the greatest form of ecstasy I know.

You are the sun. I am just constellations, so close yet too far to feel your warmth. You are bright and beautiful. I get boring after watching for a while, just there, lost within the darkness. I can’t help but think about you, every moment possible – not in a weird, ****** way – but thoughts of your thumb caressing mine as our fingers interlock; of your tiresome voice at 3am, when you’re slurring your words and your eyelids become heavy. The passion and excitement in your voice as you speak of music and literature. The way your warm arms wrap around my skinny body when I tremble as the cold air blows against my skin, all of that is just amazing to me. You aren’t just average, a generation of the human race, nor are you just a son or a friend. You are a beautiful masterpiece crafted by the hands of God Himself, He is Michelangelo and you are David; you are the most beautiful and perfect combination of atoms, you are my Mona Lisa, my art. The sparkle in your eyes when you speak of life and the meaning to it says it all. I fall into oblivion each time I just imagine your skin against mine; not in a ****** way, but in a sweet and caring way. I love the way you say my name and look into my eyes, as if analyzing my soul, figuring me out. That usually makes me feel uncomfortable, but it’s you… and that makes the difference, the fact that it’s you thinking why I say each and every word I say when I say it.  You are Augustus Waters (without the cancer) and I am Hazel Grace Lancaster (without cancer and not as beautiful). You are ambitious and amusing, whilst I am a cautious bookworm. My room is full of unread books and loose sheets of paper with what seem to be meaningless words scribbled all over. Your room is possibly filled with guitars and old records of your favorite bands and artists from the ‘80’s and ‘90’s and old trophies you now find meaningless.

But I want to know more about you. Even if I could know every possible thing there is to know about you, I will keep observing and I will keep spilling my heart to you, and listening when I have to. I want to know the passion in your voice when you read your favorite book, quote, poem, or even word. I want to know your thoughts at 5am when your eyelids feel like heavyweights. I want to experience seeing you laugh hysterically to the point where your rib cage hurts and you cry from the laughter; when you’ve reached your breaking point and you’re curled up, or on the floor, crying until your heart literally hurts and your chest is looking for release; I want to experience it all, I want to know you and not just a part of you. I want to know all of you. The way you fall asleep, how you are the moment you wake up and how you react when you had a nightmare. The human mind is so beautiful, and out of all minds I could observe, I chose you – not just the mind, but you. What makes your heart race, what gives you goose bumps, everything. You’re my observation and I enjoy it.

I’m so tired of being the one on the ground,
With so many people surrounding me, yet nobody noticing I’m there
And then just stepping all over me, and not even apologizing once they’ve stepped on my insides.
Now I’m internally bleeding.

I'm tired of crying an ocean.
Then when people go to the beach, excited to splash in the water, they don’t.
Because they get scared of the monsters in the water.  

I'm tired of screaming my lungs out for help.
Because whilst I’m pleading for help, everybody hears
Silence.

I'm tired, I'm so tired of nobody listening.
I have cried out too many times:
“Please, I need somebody!”  
And all you do is walk along.

To you this is just writing, a poem, literature.
To me? It's me pouring my sorrow heart out
Hoping, with the last grain of hope in me, that somebody will listen.

I don’t need you to understand what I’m going through.
I don’t need you to understand my pain.
I don’t even need you to say anything in return.

I'm just...
So tired of cutting my arms and legs for other people
And not even getting a thank you or a nod of the head.

I am not asking you to rip your heart out your chest
And replace it with mine,
Because that will never relieve the pain buried into my soul.

I'm just asking and begging
Please just listen,
Just listen…

The unhappiness inside me is getting to my head.
It’s controlling the monsters I’ve been wanting to drown for so long.
They found a loophole and now they’re swimming in my mind.

Some have escaped my mind and are whispering in my ear.
Telling me to let it be.
I don’t want to let it be!
Please, I just want to be free…

I could rip your ears away from your imprudent mind
And pour my heart out until your eardrums can't take it,
And you would just go with your day as if all there ever was
Was silence.

The pain is there,
Even though I smile.
But the beasts do not want that no longer.

I just need somebody
To please just

Listen.

There was once a girl who had her peers’ approval: skin like silk and her eyes could be compared to a freshly polished wooden floor, her laugh could light up a whole town - the hearts of the broken. This girl’s heart was said to be golden – the kind of gold used to build the streets of Heaven, the kind the kings yearned for; delicate and sweet too, that heart of gold. The way this angel walked wasn’t **** nor was it seducing; the way this Mona Lisa walked: dumbfounding. The way this Mona Lisa walked: beautiful. The way this Mona Lisa walked: full of grace. Grace. She spoke of this word: grace. Grace to this girl was more than just a word, it was a lifestyle. She spoke of the grace of God and God’s grace descending upon His children. This wonderful girl – who spoke of God’s grace – had her peers’ approval, yet not her family’s. This dumbfounding girl, who did not have her family’s approval, started giving up on the grace of God. This girl whose laugh could bring life to the dead souls couldn’t find life in her own, couldn’t light up her own heart not made of gold, but of cheap metal, and it was rusting faster than God’s grace could find her. This graceless girl got tired of waiting for God’s grace to arrive. This graceless girl was yearning for the same gold the kings did. This graceless girl wanted to turn her heart to gold. This graceless girl wanted to touch the golden streets of Heaven. This graceless girl wanted to be one of “His children”. This graceless girl wanted to find the grace of God on her own terms.
Twenty four hours later.
There was once a girl who had her peers’ handkerchiefs and flowers. Her skin of silk was almost colder than her family’s hearts, not made of gold nor metal, but of ice. They would not go to her wedding (if she had one, they said).
She didn’t.
Instead, this girl who had her peers’ flowers in respect laid there exactly like a carcass: dead.

When I was younger, my biggest desire was to travel.
Dreaming of swimming with dolphins in the Amazon River.
Dreaming of floating away to the Niagara Falls.
Dreaming of running all of the United States.
Dreaming bigger dreams than Martin Luther King, Jr could ever.
Maybe even go away in a hot air balloon until boredom struck.
See the highest peaks of the Earth, maybe until I’ve reached the gates of Heaven.
Have brunch with the President of the United States, or with a beggar I come across with on my journeys.
When I was younger, my wishes were beyond my reach
God’s angels seemed closer than my dreams could ever be.
And so, I made contact with one of God’s angels, as I floated on the cloud of my imagination.
This angel had brown eyes; hair fell perfectly every time
Perfection came to this angel without ever trying.
I fell for this angel faster than Lucifer fell from the glory of God, it was so unplanned and perfect.
Unplanned and perfect.
That was this angel’s method to everything in life:
Unplanned. Perfect.
Everything he did was unplanned and perfect.
It was… spontaneous.
He was spontaneous.
He was perfect.
The way he didn’t think about anything too much, and just did everything. Only thinking about things twice – or so it seemed. The way he didn’t have a planning sheet for life, he just wrote whatever came to his mind, like me. Except he didn’t write, he acted upon his thoughts. I literally write everything that comes to mind. But this angel? He acted. The finest actor that ever descended from Heaven.
Now, the perfection of his beauty leaves me speechless every time, making me a mime of some sort. The perfection of his beauty is marvelous, I just don’t know how to put it into words. All I can say is that, with this angel I’ve fallen for, I am somehow satisfied. Somehow, all the dreams I’ve been yearning for so long are brought to life at last.
The words he speaks flow perfectly - I promise you, I could swim in them. The ease of his tone makes me feel like I’m swimming in the Niagara Falls. Oh, and that laugh is so sweet and just as cute as the dolphins in that Amazon River I had wished to swim with.
He makes me feel like I’m running more than just the United States of America. This amazing angel gives me an adrenaline rush… I could run miles and miles. To him. To hug him. To kiss him. To get high off of his touch and feel oblivious.
God sent me the best transportation to the Gates of Heaven.
And this transportation is the most spontaneous and perfect.
This spontaneous piece of perfection is the best adventure, and I’m so ready to have brunch every day with that marvelous angel God sent.

There’s something about the way your words just flow when you speak of what you love that gives me a sense of peace. This is the same kind of peace felt when the Florida wind caresses against my skin on a warm afternoon, and sometimes I like to think your touch is just as gentle and welcoming. Sometimes, convincing myself that your touch is as smooth as the words you use to lure me to you drives away the monster inside seeking what to taunt me with next. Lately, it’s been picking at you, but when you smooth out the bumpy road and just drive, my mind is at peace. The peace growing in this careless mind which I used to call home has a name: Travis; my new home.

There’s something about your eyes; profound, delicate, confidential; they describe you. Just by the gaze of your brown/green eyes, your personality is revealed. And it’s that confidentiality in your stare, and the delicacy in your gaze that gives me security.

I can’t wait for the day that it’s no longer the way you observe people, but the way you hold me that gives me that sense of security. Where it’s no longer the way you talk, but that “Florida wind” impression you give off when your breath strokes against my skin that gives me that same sense of peace. When I’m home and I can rest and hear the music of your heartbeat putting me to sleep. I can’t wait for that day, when I can just put those demons to the side and breathe to the rhythm of the music. Because with your peace and security orbiting my mind, I can finally rest again.

Independence is our cry,
pride is our name.
We are all separated by countries and oceans,
but our mindset is one and the same.

The concept of change, we fear;
the idea of an altered lifestyle haunts us,
but the awareness that our home is binding our thoughts
remains as our threshold away from the darkness.

You board the plane, begin to set sail, put on your best shoes and run
away from the chaos, breaking the chains, stating your name to be free.
Your heart is racing as the grasp of new land is just miles within your reach
the only words your mind can make up in that moment are “¡Libre soy alfin!”

The moment is just minutes away now, you can almost feel la tierra
El momento is almost here and you just want to chant “¡LIBERTAD!”
But you can’t. You’re not there yet, only growing more eager.
You’re impatient now; what happened to the claridad?

What happened to that clarity in your mind when you were so sure of what you wanted?
It has been replaced by the fear of not being enough.
It has been replaced by the fear of getting sent back to that confinement you once called home.
Now you realize this new life will be tough.

You step foot en la tierra libre,
the anxiety gets to your bones.
Thoughts race through your mind
there’s disbelief that this is your new home.

The sensation of wandering on clouds,
sleepwalking your life away is overwhelming;
your eyes now resemble that oceanic pathway
whilst los abrazos de abuela you are yearning

The concept of change we fear;
the idea of an altered lifestyle haunts us,
and the awareness that our family is still stitched at the lips
has become our allure back into the darkness.

But independence is our cry,
pride is our name.
Precincts may separate us,
yet our mindset remains one and the same:
¡Que viva la libertad!

12pm. Time is still, and just as the day begins, the anxiety seems to creep into my psyche. I don’t understand why, but my eyes are suddenly attached to the clock, watching every passing second go by in that dreadful time machine. The seconds hand is ticking away, life passing me by, and all I can do is stare at that hand on that clock mocking me. My best friend is standing beside me. She just got her phone taken away from our fifth grade teacher, but all I can do is stare at that clock across the room. To my friends this was a fun Wednesday afternoon at school full of board games and empty journals. But this could easily be labeled as the worst Wednesday of my life, full of emptiness and countless of journals with pages based on a twelve year old girl, a girl I once was, pouring my heart out.
Seconds, minutes, hours go by. Before I could even prepare myself its 3:05. My mother isn’t there to pick me up, but a family friend. The car ride: silent, awkward, full of still energy. My friend is sent up to her room, and I didn’t understand why. I thought maybe it was my fault for playing too rough, but then I understood. I understood the stares and the silence. I finally understood the stillness in the air, and the endless glances at the clock. At last, I understood why my heart had sunk in my chest when time stood still at 12pm. I understood why even though my mind was detached from agendas for so long before, my heart had become one with time in that moment. But I laughed, denying how well I understood being only 12 years old.
Five minutes later. The door opens and I see a mother. My mother, I suppose, but the light had been drained from her eyes, and her stare was dead. My mother, who learned to live for others, died along with her father at 12pm. Her soul was as attached to her father as my heart was to that dreadful clock on that Wednesday afternoon, and just as my heart sunk, her soul sunk into the depths of the earth alongside my grandfather, a man I once knew. A man who stopped my world at 12pm.