Love. Friendship. Race. Illness. Hate. Eyes. Heartbreak. Everything.
Love? You can't see it but you can feel it. You used to only ever say it to your family that you hardly saw over the holidays. Then you noticed that boys have nice eyes and girls have hands that are only intertwined with their own. Then you hugged, kissed, held and promised to never let go.
Friendship? You've had lots of them. With girls and boys. They've seen you cry because of things you never got. They've seen you first thing in the morning after a sleepover. They leave though. And new friends come, which is great! But you miss the old ones. The ones that cared about you before you had a big house and your parents' alcohol stashed in the cupboards.
Race. Color? What's the difference with the color on your skin than mine? Just a color. We're still human right? We still have two eyes and legs. We are all the same; just separated by a simple tone of skin.
Illness. It keeps you up at night just as much as she used to keep you up. Coughing, sneezing, blood, pain, tears even. From cancer to a simple cold, it hurts. Like when mom and dad would let us stay home from school because she checked our temperature and said "stay in bed" as she got ready for work that morning. Or when you ran the thermometer under hot water when you were 12 and showed it to her and said, "I'm not well" just so you could sleep in because 2 hours of sleep wasn't enough.
Hate. Usually what we feel after an argument or being told something you don't want to hear. When you're told no, you hate it. When you were seven years old you probably claimed you hated your mother for not giving you something you wanted. You hate the muggy smell of the air and the graffiti on the walls in your bathroom stalls at school. You hated him after he told you he didn't love you. You hated your teacher when you didn't get the grade you wanted, either.
Heartbreak. Oh, we all remember those. Where we'd stay up past midnight, miserable over the ones we thought would stay. When you had to watch them leave your driveway in the car you kissed them in a million times. When you look at your hands and remember what it was like, holding their neck as they kissed you. You think you've lost it all. You think it's the end of the world.
Well the truth is; these things aren't really everything.