We all grew into our ears and our teeth
Our opinions and our feet
Our clothes and chubby cheeks
We grew out of our music tastes
And other peoples mouths
Learned what it was like to love and be loved
Learned what hate looks like
What scars on hearts instead of arms looked like
We grew out our colored hair
And washed career dreams like astronaut and superhero
Down the drain
With someone else's sweat
Got used to sleeping in someone else's bed
Burned our memories of them
We grew into our faces
And out of our blind faith
We lead more then we follow
We fall in love with the concept of tomorrow
We learn the ability to bully instead of being bullied
And finally learn to rise above it all
We learned where we come from cannot change
But we can
We learned the city isn't always beautiful
That there are problems and trauma in silence
That sometimes the most peaceful thing you can do is scream until it makes sense to you

This assignment is the worst.
Let me tell you how I spent the past few days contemplating whether or not I had ever truly loved.
Let me tell you how I tried to spin strangers into metaphors-
Likening their veins to spiderwebs and eyes to oceans and cringing at the sound of a language I had abused into making meaning out of things that didn't really matter.
Now I know you said, "love doesn't have to be romantic."
It can be platonic like Batman and Robin or bordering animosity like Doofenshmirtz and Perry the Platypus, but I know that's not what people want to hear,
And as a person who lends her ear to the universe and knows that even the Big Bang could dissipate into a whisper amidst all this noise, I wanted to be worth listening to.
I wanted to tell a great love story, but I cannot even begin to fathom what it means to open up your heart wholly and freely-
To tell the castle guards to pull down the drawbridge and cross over to the other side.
The weather must be nice out there.
Perhaps the sun is so warm it could kiss your skin, and the wind so full of life it could carry you away if you let it.
If you let it breathe it could bring you to your knees, and isn't that what love is supposed to do?
Send you chasing hurricanes, turn your world upside down, make you question whether or not a God exists because love is a force of nature- good or bad, for better or for worse.
If love is the square root of all feeling, then to feel at all must be to love.
But I am just a girl living in a hollow house trying to fathom the paradox of feeling numb, as the storm rages outside.
Let the raindrops pitter patter on.
Let the clouds rumble.
If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine-
This is the sound of footsteps.
Someone is knocking at the door.
All I need to do
is let them in.