I feel like I've had more to say
As a six year old back in the day
You gave me blank pages
Untold stories I mastered
Full of feeling and captivating ones mind
Compare to that I'm rather a waking disaster
A child's every word has power
Each thought makes for ground breaking material
But now I'm not sure why
I pull back
Haven't seen any ink fly for some time
Will this be my imagination's burial?

I was a little girl yesterday morning,
With a flash of red hair and a gap-toothed grin
Laughing and playing on the swing at my favorite park.
I was a confused pre-teen that afternoon,
Scraping her knees on jagged insults
Holding in tears for secret bathroom visits
Where she would push her fingers
Into her throat and
Pray on her knees that her lunch would
Reappear like a magic trick.
I was a scared teenager by evening,
Kissing girls and running away from
The demons in my head with voices
That sounded like my mother’s.
By midnight I was on the floor shaking,
Back to twenty, back to who I am now
Wishing those past me’s would understand that I needed
Something more.
Yet this morning I sat up in my bed and greeted the sun with a
Flash of red hair and a close-gapped grin
And I am here now,
Here remembering, being present and
Knowing who I was
Ten years ago twelve years ago fifteen years ago five minutes ago
Is exactly who I needed to be,
Doing exactly what I needed to do.
Scraping my knees and elbows
And pushing my finger down my throat
And feeling ugly all the time,
That’s not what I needed but it’s
Who I was Who I couldn’t stop being because I
Didn’t know how. In my mind,
I am not
That little girl, that preteen, that teenager I am me.
I am
Bumping and bruising and
Breaking, sometimes, along the way but this
Is where I stand.
And those past selves stand
Hand-in-hand somewhere along
The equator of my brain
Like paper dolls unfolded
Through my history.

Your memory descends
upon me, as morning mist.
Then I wake.

sorry about that thing I said that made you cry. I didn't mean it that way. We went camping once and you wore your baby blue shirt for five days. Everything was okay then.

The violet sky stood bashful against the dimming horizon. Stark trees sprang from the ground, flourishing in dots midst the blushing stars.

Street lights flicker on, reminding me of how mom didn't have to yell for me to come home, the lights whispered it to me, carried in the caressing breeze.

I'm reminded in the spring, of the day me and my friend ran into the pelting rain and jumped through puddles, soaking our bodies in high pitched laughter and impending colds.

I'm always reminded in the summer months, how everyone including myself, preferred water from the hose over water from the tap. Or how we'd run rampant through the field behind my house, screaming against the heat.

The broken sidewalk reminds me of the time when we all thought we were cool for trying to smoke cigarettes we stole from our parents.

I fell in love with patches of clovers more than that of a boy's selfish smile. I was more in love with the act of collecting lady bugs as pets rather than holding a hand pushed into mud.

I preferred shallow swimming pools over the small voice of a boy asking me if i had other friends like them. Or how the beam of the sun was better than the beam of a slender, pale face with blue eyes.

Blind and innocent children, we fell in love with things we could touch or splash in. We fell in love with the beautiful colors and characters in our favorite Saturday morning cartoons. When we weren't playing cops and robbers, we were lost in a world of SEGA and Super Nintendo 64. We were infatuated with a world that never altered, but our vision cleared of.

We were saturated in a time where our only big worry was making sure we got our recess time. And when the smog cleared we realized our biggest worry was making our parents proud.
And it seems that it should be the other way. We should be proud of the kid our parents raised.
But ultimately, the monsters under our beds became the demons in our heads.
And the kid your parents raised
slowly became the kid you wish your parents never had.

There won't be a day in my life where i wish i could fall in love with the sound of an ice cream truck, or the animals at the end of my bed again.