And like a stone I fell.
Nothing quite the same.
Knowing stillness, I paced myself.
Falling fast.
Head first.
The best thing I've known.
It's not so bad.
Falling.
The fear of crashing, crumbling into pieces.
This seems the way to go.
Missing the experience that brought fear to life.
Stubborn.
Like a stone.
These cobwebs thrown to the wind.
Finding each breath more desirable than the next.
A feeling that I've waited for.
Sitting still.
Like a rock.
Afraid to fly.
Until you came along.
Shattered into a million pieces.
The expectation of anything else.
Without need to hide your hand

Sketching surveys of desolate dreams,
purveyors of private property plots,
their impatient greed,
ignoring purple spray paint warnings.

Six feet under, resting next to Grandpa's coffin,
live valuable minerals, their rights forgotten,
a farmer of soy beans, wheat and corn,
oil & gas law to Grandpa was foreign,
but he knew why our creek's current flowed north,
upwards, defying gravity or reason, why these men had come.

One time executive cowboy hats descended on the farm,
in pickup trucks, just purchased from an oil lot in Odessa,
Grandpa took aim and raised his Beretta,
their unfit hats lost to the blast, the only harm.

I was only five, when I saw his lengths of protection,
he took me on hunts for deer, boar, quail, dove,
would always aim his rifle, fire and miss,
blamed it on his eye sight, yet hit bullseyes on paper targets.

It took me 20 years to understand why, with swallowed pride,
he purposely missed killing these animals,
cursing his eyesight instead, winning an Oscar for his humble acts,
was he blinding me from death?

There was no vision impairment, I found out in hindsight,
probably the trauma witnessed, as he died with 20/20 eyesight.

You only live life once, they say.
You only have one mom, one dad, and you only have one first car.
Well, I don’t care.
You only lose your virginity once, have one firstborn, you only have one death, they say.
Well, having *** for the first time is no different from having *** for the second time
Despite both archaic views on biology
And the backwash of a society that values peaking by young adulthood.
Children are neither here nor there,
And I don’t care about death.
Youth has been romanticized to the point of fetishization.
The plethora of coming-of-age novels and films represent this.
We live in a culture obsessed with youth,
It’s connotations,
Innumerable “firsts”,
Peaking by young adulthood.
Is it simply because children and teens are more easy to market to, being a perpetually existing group?
Is it because in a culture with such drastically differing generations, youth provides a connecting wire between them?
Is it because of the amount of people who look back from their mundane lives and fall into nostalgia’s pit?
Or something else?

At the age of 10, I had a conversation with a woman.
I remember asking her what games her many children played.
Did they play as I play?
She told me they enjoyed roleplaying games, and I asked what she meant.
Dress up, she elaborated. Acting, make-believe, telling stories.
I remember telling her that I felt I had wasted my youth, my childhood, and this, as if I had forgotten I was 10.
There was a seriousness to my tone, stoic-like, and a mighty dignification must have kept that woman from chuckling.
That conversation was closer to half my life ago, and I still meet with that same unrelenting sadness every other morning and every other night.
I remember the half-dreaded birthdays that followed, the recent ones the worst.
And every year that passes merely confirms the suspicion that I’ll live with that yearn for the rest of my life regardless of what else happens.
Yearning and I. Whose to say we don’t have 10, 20, 30 more years together?
But it’s nothing to worry over in the end.
I’ve turned into a person who has high-highs and low-lows,
And I’ve found that the highs are worth going down under for every once in a while.

there's a bed-frame with names carved into them
slightly-askew and frail
a heart at the top of every 'i'
all my underwear has blood stains on it
it's a lovesick reminder of everything I can't control
I yearned for my mother to put my hair in braids instead of a ponytail
so I got a friend that could
my hands would sweat as I wrote about her in my diary
the one without a lock
the one that was covered in DIY glue glitter
there was a summer that I wore all pink
my strawberry ice cream melted all over my polo dress and no one could tell the difference
it was my secret, sugar sweet on the lapel
beating heart for all the Lisa Frank I didn't own
a boring folder with all the scary stories I had memorized
until I myself became the ghost girl
sucker punch me in the last bathroom stall
for neither liking leather or lace

You—
Beautiful life-form, or abomination—
Are a culmination,
Agglomeration of a life’s worth of
Experiences thus far.
All of them,
The good and the bad,
Have resulted in you—
And here you stand,
A unique entity of the atomic form,
A breathing, living creature
At the height of the current moment.
You have
The power—
Whether it be to trust fate,
Or to follow your intuitions—
To ultimately
Forge a path of your own.