When I was a child, I learned fairly quickly that, "Because everyone else is doing it," Was the worst possible excuse Individualism was sewn into us like tattoos We fed off of originality like ******* But we were never that wild I remember my father built us each a swing And gave us a pile of spray paint cans I remember my mother made the cookie dough, but we had to make the cookies The first time I told my father I wanted to move my furniture, he just nodded The first time I told my mother I wanted to stencil, she gave me paint When I started drawing on my walls, they asked me what colours I needed I watched my older sister grow up and dye her hair blue She makes her own jewelry and I make my own tshirts We shout poetry out of the rolled down windows of my Dad's old truck, on the way to get slushies from the gas station We wrote quotes on the back of our hands when we were angry, Shouted when we weren't. The hunger for emotion sometimes turned my dull nails into claws Sometimes we exist in the wind passing through the car Sometimes we can see paint splattered on the tree the swings used to hang from Sometimes we are so drunk on a feeling that we embody it, soaking the thread instead of holding onto it Individuality morphed into impossibility, because We are everything at once Every feeling Every moment, Every bug smashed onto the windshield Every colour of paint we somehow spilled on my ceiling Every stain that I'll never get out of my genes.