Maybe across the world or right next to me, but I know that we are meant to be.
You are a picture of beauty and everything I envision.
You have a brain beyond your years, and feet in your shoes, so you can go any direction you choose.
You know which path is right and wrong, and you choose whichever one suits you.
We will travel together far and wide, across the country and across the sky, to see the great monuments, people, and things and become closer than we could ever think.
Photo Credit: rlv.zcache.com
Off to Paris, Japan, Rome, and possibly Wyoming where the buffalo roam. Then let’s jet set to Milan to see fashion week and back to Berlin to have a great feast.
I want to see the world with you beside me and live my life like never before.
We can be like the people in magazines, and never look back.
But we can only travel these places, and go these ways if we live the rest of our days… together.
Dear Unknown, for letting me take a load off of my heart and mind, and be selfish.
School, for forcing me to wake up and do something with my time and dig deeper.
The color gray, for being happy, sad, and beautiful.
Snacks and study breaks, which go hand in hand.
The bruises I earned.
The days that I feel productive.
The days that I feel okay with myself.
The days that I feel happy.
There is so much I could put down, but for now this is what I’ll share. There is too much in life that I take for granted, there is too much that I don’t thank you for. So this is my big “thank you” for the things and people in my life that don’t hear it enough.
When we were kids, we spent the entire summer in the pool.
We would bounce around in the water for hours on end, using our feet to push off the sides so many times that we would get blisters on our toes. By the time we got out, pruned and sunburnt, our feet would be bleeding from scraping them on the concrete so much. But we didn’t care. Mom called it pool toe.
I remember how we used to eat breakfast as fast as we could, and then we would play rock-paper-scissors to see who got to jump in first. We swam from morning until night, only pausing for a lunch break of watermelon and pretzels.
Photo credit: Resources2.news.com
Your hands always shriveled up faster than mine did. You used to tell me it meant we were turning into fish, and I was convinced it was true. You also swam faster than I did, but sometimes, if I was lucky, you’d let me win some of our races.
Whenever there was a breeze it would get too cold in the water. To warm up we’d haul ourselves out of the pool and lay with our stomachs down on the concrete deck, like lizards on rocks.
I remember my tangled, sun bleached hair, and the smell of the special shampoo Mom made me use that prevented it from turning green from the chlorine. I remember family commenting on how bloodshot my eyes were, but I wasn’t bothered. I didn’t mind if my eyes were a little bit red and sore, so long as I could avoid the inconvenience of strapping on goggles.
We had changing lights for when we swam at night. I would stand on the diving board, staring down into the water below. The green water meant there were alligators lurking; so I obviously couldn’t jump in, for danger of being eaten. Blue meant sharks, so once again there were some risks. But when the water was pink, it was clear of all man-eating creatures, so it meant I was free to dive in.
When we were kids, we thought days like those would last forever.
I miss it. When we didn’t care if our fingers were shriveled up like prunes, or if our noses were bright red and peeling, or if we had pool toe.
the flowers start wilting,
their petals falling into the dry, crackling dirt.
the resilient weeds start sprouting,
entangling their way around the stems of the dying blooms.
that old rose bush that you prized is now riddled with thorns.
i tried to pluck one,
send you a picture of it,
but my fingers got cut up and started bleeding
and i knew it wasn’t worth the trouble.
the single flower wouldn’t bring you back,
why try so hard to make it bloom again?
why keep it in a vase that glistens during the 3 pm glow of the sun?
why stare at it, remembering the day we planted the damn rose bush?
no, i’ll stick to bandaging up my hand,
ridding it of the metallic red,
dripping down my palm,
almost staining my pants.
i’ll stick to staring out my kitchen window at the garden, once blooming,
now only a couple of rotten, lonesome plants.
I miss waking up early on Saturday mornings to watch my favorite cartoons.
Now I struggle to wake myself up, even in the afternoon.
I miss wearing zebra print leggings under neon pink skirts and Hannah Montana shirts to top it off.
Now the worries about people judging the dirt at the bottom of my shoes to the fabric of my cardigan consume me to the point of anxiety.
I miss being excited about Christmas. I miss waking up early and running out of my bedroom in my pajamas to sit around the Christmas tree and open gifts. I miss making cookies for a Santa I once believed in.
Now I know his existence was a mere tale.
Now Christmas itself is a mere tale to me.
Photo Credit: Pinterest
I miss believing. I miss believing in fairies and elves, and having adults feed me those tales to keep my imagination strong.
I miss dancing around the room like no one was watching. I miss dancing to music that actually had a meaning.
Now, all I hear is deafening dubstep and meaningless, degrading rap. Now all I see is grinding.
I missed when I could sing at the top of my lungs, and no one would say I was bad even though we all knew I was.
I miss when the most dramatic thing at school was two seven year olds holding hands under a desk, not finding out drugs were killing your best friends.
I miss being young. When I’d see celebrities on big screens and wish to be like them one day. Now I know who they really are, all their messed up scandals and drunken photos taken by paparazzi.
I guess what I miss most is being a child. I don’t miss my childhood, but I miss when I was young. When I wasn’t stressed about school, when the biggest worry of my life was if Miley was going to get with Jesse or Jake, and when I could always be happy.
I used to think we were, but I also used to think that you told me everything. I thought you trusted me. It wasn’t until recently that I found out I was wrong.
I’ve always been aware of just how different we are but that never mattered to me. I would do just about anything to relate to you. The older I get the more I understand that we are different people.
Your friends are nothing like my friends and for the past four years it seems like you would rather be with them than with me whenever possible. Why do you choose to be close with certain people, why do you try so hard to be like them?
Sometimes I feel like we’re making progress, and then the next day I feel like you’re more distant than ever.
I want you to care about me. I want you to like me. And I know that you do, but you show it so rarely that I almost always forget.
So when you do little things like not inviting me places or blocking me on social media – things that normally wouldn’t bother me coming from people I don’t care about – it feels like betrayal.
Even when you are so unkind and when you act like you don’t care, I always forgive you. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to forgive, but I want you to accept me so badly that I pretend not to be bothered.
Sometimes I think you don’t have very good judgement and it scares me. I worry that you don’t take care of yourself. I worry about you more than you know.
When you let me in it means the world. When you shut me out it makes me feel like I don’t matter. And you don’t even realize it.
Maybe it will be better when we’re older. Maybe I’ll just have to accept that we’re different people, that we have different goals and different views. Maybe I just care more than you do, maybe I shouldn’t care so much.
Actually, I probably give some of the worst advice I’ve ever heard.
But, one thing that I’m probably even worse at is managing stress, and, more importantly, giving people advice about it. Because, in all actuality, I have no idea how to manage it and I don’t think anyone really does.
Stress comes in all shapes and sizes. It can be as little as that paper you know you should have enough time to write for your English class, yet you psych yourself out because, after all, it is a big chunk of your grade. And stress can be as big as….. well anything. It can take over your life and control you if you let it.
Photo Credit: anxietyuk.org
For me, one of my larger stresses I refer to as competition stress. This comes with all sports competitions, no matter the magnitude of it. It’s the pressure and the anxiety sitting on your shoulders like a bird watching its pray from way above so the pray can’t see them.
Lastly, the big stress, the whole shebang, is what I call the stalker stress; this is the type that even if you kick, scream, run, and hide it’ll find you somehow. It is the type of stress that resembles a person you don’t want to get to know, and one that you hope doesn’t know you. It is the boogie man hiding under you bed when you’re little and the clown hiding behind your door. It’s the reason that you hate walking alone in the dark because you don’t exactly know what you’re scared of at this point, you just know you’re scared.
But, I’ve learned one thing, and if people do ask me about stress this is the only true piece of advice I can give: it’s hard to manage stress, but it’s even harder not to be scared of it. So once you manage how to not be scared of the inevitable, life becomes easier, I don’t exactly know how, it just does.
P.S. I don’t want you to go on thinking that I have it all figured out, because I don’t. I’m so far away from it, but I’m managing, and will continue to until I can stop stressing about the little things and go on living life. But that will be a while, because it’s difficult and stressful.
I often wonder how people write autobiographies. That wonderment often boils down to my curiosity of how life plays out. How does one go about living a life interesting enough to write about?
Photo Credit: diannedawson.com
What is it to live a life full of intrigue and well meaning? I haven’t lived that much of life but there are so many people my age or within margin that have already lived such extraordinary lives. I feel like I’m playing a game of catch up with a future I can’t even see.
How do I live an extraordinary life worth marking down in the books? How do I reach a point where I feel confident enough to write it myself?
I often wonder how people write autobiographies; do remarkable lives just happen or are they fought for? Am I fighting hard enough? Am I fighting for one at all? What does it take for a life to be incredible?
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