Peaks as barren as plucked pelicans and peacocks,
but as beautiful as the feathers taken from them, were beacons in the night for those in search for a world of dreams in which to create a new reality. From them I heard laughter jiggle and echo, hefty and deep in the stomachs of the only people truly living, it seemed. I was escaping a lonely, wintery existence into a shared haven in the mountains where the only directions that existed were North and outwards.

I sat with the old and no matter how aged I'd become, I was still among the young. I heard their grey and bearded stories that had only ever been touched before by nostalgia and that glowed warm with the same tenderness I felt for my own memories. I felt within me sparks lighting fires and burning with the inner realization that I have my own storms and stories to look forward to, that have yet to surprise me and envelope me and change me. Despite any number of years, I could still spy a child full of awe and newness within the smile-lined eyes of those who had surely and would surely out-live me.
But if I took nothing from their stories, I held within my heart the rawest piece of advice: I allowed the mountains and the wilderness to guide me forward through their ever-wise and correcting cycles and opened my eyes much wider to the grander of the world around me.

I recall being tucked in under sheets of snow
And dozing off with aches from icy bums bruised on hidden rocks beneath supposedly cushioned pillows of powder.
I recall climbing high up onto roofs and the tops of waterfalls out of confident impulse and curiosity for a different view of the world...a new perspective.
I recall the same men and boys inspiring me, teaching me, beating me, and becoming less than what I would become; I then sought out those who saw me as an equal but were indeed much better than I. They helped me to know the importance of being challenged and being humble.
I recall the sheer joy and anxiousness that came with the winter breeze leading up the mountains, where everything had a different tint or filter depending on the company you shared the moments with.
I recall following pure instinct and having full trust in intuition, hoping only to make this life my own and to inspire in the process.
I recall being told to trust no one, and rebelling because I treasured a secret friendship with a stranger more than cautiousness.
I recall surfing on rocks, snow, grass, rain, roofs, people, anything but the ocean.
I recall forgetting to look for love because I had too much in my own heart to care all that much what I received.
I recall getting older and maintaining innocence despite many's attempts at peeling at my corners.
I recall reaching adulthood legally and becoming a child illegally, embracing the breaking of that law for the rest of my life to come.
I recall making my own home, and being let into the world, and flourishing in that freedom.

Determination grabs me by the neck and kisses
firmly
flaming and passionate
Angst wakes me up on a the most ideal of winter morning
My eyes crusted sandwiches
and circled in black by stress n responsibility
And my heart ticks louder than the grandfather clock
Alarms ringing loudly with hope for a ragged, rushing dream to be fulfilled
My childish thoughts tug at my toes to pull me from bed
Though I feel as old as the mountains
In action there is only youth and enthusiasm growing from the top of my head
I have a place to be and it is a headspace shared with the adventurers and impossible, magnificent souls that have an addiction to the adrenaline they smoke from life's pipe.
When I wake from this life, I'll have to tell you my stories
But for now, let me live it.

The many who separately and personally christened themselves
Kings of New York
and Kings of summer
      and Queens of nothing except for England, and jadedness, and hearts.
wear crowns made of whichever substance seems most characteristic
made of paint or graffiti or blood or trap rap
made from a mix of loneliness, Kool-aid powder, and youthful idealism.
New York is allowed to be ruled by the masses,
New York is royalty to itself
I can call myself a King
when I dangle my feet and swing rhythms out of ashy windows
and demand that your pessimism shut the hell up..
But most kings get their heads cut off.
I can call myself Honorary Royalty.
Because when I leave the pigeons and the pigeon-toed
and I leave the Kingdom's bubblegum streets and romp no longer,
I stop feeling cramped by superfluous freedom and
I appreciate the bars of my bed and my self-inflicted prisons..
Inner struggle and whatnot.
I appreciate them tripping me and trapping me and ******* on my face
Because of them, New York's air tastes a lot cleaner
Especially when coming from the exhale of your exhausted but prevailing breath as it sighs one last pun about seafood into our clammy embrace.

I come from a place somewhat far away from you,
Where the sky is bountiful and framed with elevated rock
And every girl of a certain social standing has been stabbed in the nose at least once
Where the when’s are dubbed by days you’ve yet to shower
Or how many rocks you’ve jumped from into raunchy radical pools of the drip drip of glacier waters, when which I swam in I felt cleaner than you did when bathing in the blasphemous bath water that will have you buried.
Far away from here, where commonplace drugs are not always used only as cushions to soften life’s blows and then throw you back into a spiral of rehabilitation,
but where I know people who use them as a part of a search, part of a curiosity about pushing the limitations of the mind deliberately, seeking a new perspective, initiating change.
Where a person is not a person but an infinity of ideas combined into the imagination and
kindness is not an effort nor a chore but a habitual benefit to both parties
where I was taught to forget the meaning of a label, because it is limiting
I denounce the generalized title 'hippy' because of lack of identification.
I am participating in the act of growth and presence. Doing me.
Where I think with genuine elation and association to the happiness I have found and collected from the bottoms of riverbeds and the insides of my parental unit’s palms.
Palm oil, lip balm, ****** brand names, brandy is a **** name, cow utters, chopstick to pizza, pizza to chopstick, sore ******* from nibbles of baby teeth, and degrading nostalgia.
I denounce my obsession with nostalgia.
Where the fields are wider than the waists of the fat men that sit on porches drinking pint after pint of the local dark ales,
no matter how cool they may seem, they are just senile.
Where I made juice. where I sold juice. where I had the juice. where juice was naturally acidic. where juice was not in a box. where juice was inside a lemon. where juice became a different concept than it used to be.
Where there are fifty people I don’t know, conozco the rest of them, but that number is getting bigger as people are being born and I am not a midwife.
Where I only ever actually hated this one kid, Chase, who was in my 5th grade class,
I loved everyone always, i still do. I want to apologize to Chase for being a total *****.
Where I’m not a kamikaze as much as you think I am, just another breeze among the bigger clouds.
Where there is a culture of a different time or place and I think I made it all up. I could be wrong but I don’t know if you’ll have anyone who says the same things about it as I do .
I come from a place where I conform to the culture kindly consciously willingly but I am not dedicated to it.

My age is just the continuity of my words that trail down the page, never ending with complicated and falsely-applied metaphors about going home and being young. My age is just the words that drip constantly from my lips and from my limbs, never developing a valid thesis to argue and swathed in vagueness. My age is not much else. My age seems to be everything but anything that really has any substance or purpose. My age has never been a defining characteristic to me but to everyone else that is all they know me by. I have alluded to my many experiences always exaggerating their length, purposely never correcting those who assumed that I was telling the truth. Were I not to have been reminded annually of my physical growth instead of my mental then I would surely have grown much more.

My independence is a self-diagnosed mental illness that is the root of my ego. I cannot begin to list the variability of how necessary others are to my existence. Sometimes I still need a mother or a father. Sometimes I still need you, but do not spoil me with anything but my freedom and your love. I would like to be spoiled, but in spoiling me you must tell me to scream in rebellion at you. Spoil me with freedom to pursue what you may think silly. Spoil me with a lack of a leash to let me continue imagining my independence. But please do not let my imagined independence be contagious. Understand that I am no more independent from you than my cells are from mitochondria, all of which you have given to me. The breath in my lungs that allows my yells to echo in the canyons and the lungs that hold it belong to you, and there is gratefulness to you that I fear is ineffable. But the thoughts in my head belong to me and I cannot apologize for this, but I can say that I will give you my feelings of unconditional love, those are yours. You gave me those at birth and I will return them like borrowed sweaters. My emotions, my strife, my capability to learn and grow and reach the tops of literal and hypothetical mountains: I owe these things to you. The farther my distance from your doorstep and more people I have seen give themselves, I have never seen one give as much as you without expectation for reward. There is a world established and grown purely from the lines on your fingertips. Each thought in your head that you trivialized was responsible for the creation of millions of lives to come. Even if your saliva tastes bitter from years of ******* on the pits of the regrets you have swallowed, do not forget that you have grown flowers in your stomach from nothing but stomach acid. You are capable of everything. You are ineffable, I do not fear this. To describe my mother would be to see the eye of the storm wink at my destructive worries. To describe my mother would be to describe the universe taking the shape of bird whose clipped wings could not stop its flight. Impossible. I have a bone to pick with language, it cannot capture the most important things…But, Mother, I will not pick your bones. Your lips may be chapped and your eyes may be tired, but your legs are still capable of dancing. Let the rhythm move your aching bones and grow happier as you grow older. It should not be any other way.