To Who I Am Becoming...

I don't know how long I have laid here. Time is not counted the way it is in other places, it is counted in  sunrises and sunsets, drops of rain, cloud formations, lady bug steps, and a thousand other ways that are barely noticeable. I once stood tall like the others, reaching to the sky and providing shelter to others and strength to the earth. It has been a long time since I have fallen. I used to be upset about it, feeling the texture softening on one side, being invisible to all those who look up. I had been upset, thinking that I would no longer be able to find my place in the world, a place that mattered to the whole order. I was upset until She came. I had never seen anyone here. I heard stories of people coming to places like mine, but not never this far out, this uninteresting of a place. But, here She was, walking as though she was always meant to come here. As she moved, she touched my friends with kind fingers, making her way to…me. I thought she would pass me by. S

She couldn't always put a name to what she was feeling. Her life was good; happy. By many means of measurement, She had nothing to complain about. She had a good job that might matter to someone with good friends who made everything seem wonderful. She had good friends that were always there for her if she ever called; She didn't, often. She had wonderful family who showed her all of the different ways of being in the world and the joys that could be had. She had all that she needed to live a comfortable life with relative meaning. And yet … She could not help but think that it might not be enough. She looked out her window at the ever darkening sky with lights being lit for those who might be traveling  like a twinkle of possible lives and adventures that could be lived. She could look into softening light like a fortune teller who looks into her crystal ball. She heard the echoes of lives that She could have lived, the people she could have met, the people she could have be

Yesterday I watched two little girls play. They were going on a plane, vacationing, to the Miss Universe Planet. They packed what they needed and another two kids were the flight crew and pilot. They were not playing together but their games happened to connect. I began to wonder, why are they playing this game? Is it that this is what they view adult life to be? Is this what their parents talk about? I wondered about my own playing and so I called my mom. "What games did I play?" "What do you mean? We were never a big game family." I tell her about the children I watched and my wonders about my own life. "When you were that age we lived by the Koreans. You would play guns with them. I remember one day you came running in yelling that the boys were chasing you with guns. I came out; I thought they were going to hit you. You looked at me and said "They have guns! Isn't that great?!" You loved their little AK-47s". My mom tells me about

She often sat on this bench. The wood was old, the paint faded, but it fit here. In this park it was one of the oldest things here but somehow it had survived three high school keg parties, two mayoral renovation campanes, and countless couples breaking up and making up. It had stayed. She liked to sit here were you could only just barley make out the houses from the trees because of how they seemed to have grown together. She liked the open feild which despite the space never seemed to have a lot of sporting events or large gatherings on it. And the trees. She liked the trees because they looked like the bench. They were like old friends who have taken on the likeness of the other and so you can never picture them not existing together. Today was the kind of day She liked most of all. The grass was still green despite the fact that the temperature had started its decent. There were people around but they were sparse and unique like the candy you find when cleaning a child's room

They say that the darkness lies. I don't think that is true. We lie to ourselves. We lie to others. In the darkness there is nothing but you and the lies you tell yourself. I have always liked the darkness because that is where I can decide what lies I need to get through, what I need to survive the party I need to go to, the class I will sit through, the conversations that are of things I have no interest in. In the darkness I decide what I will tell myself to get through. Perhaps they are not lies, just stories. Stories that may be true, already lived, told, past. Stories that are not yet true but have the possibility of becoming true because I am telling them. Stories that will never be true, they are not part of a life that I will ever live but make me happy that they exists. Kneeling by my bed at night, I tell myself these stories. Tonight I imagine a life I do not yet live. The point is not that I sit in darkness lamenting a life I wish I had but to see, with a perfect clar

Words choke my breath strangling the crying child within my breast. The cacophonous sounds of ideas cut my skin with flesh and barbs. In vibrant colors I hide in florescent shadows away from sound and breath. The giver of adopted life has robbed with caring fingers that which she first gave freely. My smiling war-cry dispatched. Why? and how could you; you take what was not yours? Your celestial chimes declare my strength my ringing brilliance. Your singing praise strangles the growing life struggling to be corporeal. My words are missiles zooming, seeking their target. I see you, they see me. I have given myself the currency for peace to co-exist in illusion. Incarceration by my own hammer I have placed you as the warden not seeing the portal to voice and grace. I wait in quicksand sinking then rising holding my freedom. My voice restored, the bankers refund my currency for peace. I am triumphant Silently, silent no more victoriously a