When I was little, I used to pick all of the petals off the flowers in the backyard and scatter them on the grass, on the dirt, on rocks, in the pool, on the play set, and anywhere else you could imagine thinking it would make everything look more beautiful and colorful, but little did I know that I was killing the flowers in the process. I didn't realize I was doing the same to myself until I couldn't give the best parts of me to people because they were already gone. I gave pieces of myself to everyone I ever cared about and those pieces of me died after I couldn't get them back. Don't pluck your petals and leave yourself with a stem. You're so much more than that.




B.S.

two days
before we loaded the car
with what seemed like the entirety
of my heart and belongings
to move me across the state to attend college,
my baby brother found me on the kitchen floor,
crying
about the microwave.

well,
not just the microwave.
he found me in a crumpled up heap,
sobbing that this day
would be the last i had
to microwave things
in
this
particular
microwave.

i couldn’t justify my lament then.
my dad chalked it up to ***,
my brother called me a drama queen,
and my mom told me i needed to eat less microwaveable things.
but i think i might’ve figured it out now.

five months later.

y’see, i grew up an ARMY brat.
attended five different elementary schools,
two separate middle schools,
one high school,
and two colleges.
i was never good at saying goodbye,
but i’m a pro at walking away.

i found out quickly
that while the faces and names
of my friends and classmates
change from state to state,
the character tropes
stay basically the same.
people and places become such replaceable things.

i worry,
a lot,
about being a replaceable thing.

there are talented people in this world.
people that can divine the past and future
from coffee grounds and tea leaves.
but can anyone here tell me what kinds of awful things my footsteps say about me?
there are boot marks,
with my name on them,
in places i know i should never have been.
and clumps of dirt stuck to my heels
that have been with me longer than some friends have.

i sat on the floor last night
while my love explained physics to me.
he told me
that gravity is a constant force,
and of course,
the earth’s gravity affects each and every one of us.

but our individual gravity affects the earth as well.
according to newton’s third law,
the earth pulls of me
with the same force that i pull on the earth.
my mass disrupts space time.*
carl sagan once told me
through the clarifying prism of the television screen,
that we are all stardust,
collapsed suns
and black matter.
we belong to no place.
i belong to no place.

i belong to no place.

i don’t cry about the microwave anymore,
i don’t waste my tears on saying goodbye.
i know that every thing and every one has their time,
and sometimes that time is brief.
it’s a hard pill to swallow,
ultimately my favorite self descriptor is ‘infallible’.
but somedays, i fall
just to stand up and see:

the sun *still rises,
the earth still turns,
the microwave still makes bomb-*** chicken nuggets,

and i am still here.

Why do you take beautiful things
and turn them into instruments
of sadness?