sometimes when i am trapped inside my own mind and feel like i’m drowning in the taste of air,
suddenly i am eight years old years, bobbing up and down in my wimpy life jacket my legs unsupported
and there is still a chip on my shoulder a mile wide.
sometimes i am still the five year old who balled her eyes out when her parents accidentally forgot and were late picking her up from preschool,
sometimes i am still sixteen years old and in love with you sometimes i am a person i never thought i’d manage to grow into, sometimes i am a person i’ve yet to become.
i am juxtaposition of a thousand different versions of myself. i am equally the eight year old girl still afraid of the water
as i am the almost-adult you so naively believed to be fearless, my self-assurance a really good halloween costume.
i am a newborn at the same time as i am frail ninety year old grandmother.
i am brave and i am terrified and i am naive and i am jaded and i am clean and i am ruined;
i am a blank slate and i have been scribbled all over, my skin is smooth and untouched my skin has laughter lines and stretch marks.
i am the creator and i am the destroyer, i am everything and
nothing at all.
i am the ocean and i am the desert.
my lungs are failing as i’m breathing fine, and i can see the end and the beginning in equal clarity.
sometimes i’m too old for my skin, weary like i’ve lived a thousand lives already
and sometimes i am four years old with my knees hugged to my chest.
sometimes we are two and sometimes we are twenty, sometimes we were nine and sometimes we are ninety.
we are young and dumb and reckless at the same time as we are old and wise and careful.
sometimes my father is still a gap-toothed five year old and my mother is still a tired old woman
with shaking hands, and my brother is still an angry teenager with a bad hair cut.
we are existing simultaneously and growing up is just getting really good at pretending
that you’ve got your **** all figured out when you still feel like a lonely middle-schooler without a date to the mixer,
alone in the middle to gymnasium floor.
but that’s the thing, isn’t it? when you are cut open, when you are bleeding, when you have gaping holes in your nervous system
your flesh heals over it scars, brand new.
we are bleeding and we we are healed, we are ******* up
and we are doing just fine.
title quote by the incomparable george watsky in "tiny glowing screens part 2"