Remembrance

I read it in a book once.

I heard it in this song I hate on the radio.

I hear it in the way Mr. Nelson says, "Hipster,"

And in the way you touched my back with your fingertips,

Like you were excavating a cave with fire.  

I saw it once when I made a name for myself, 

Not in terms of success,

But in terms of, "Unless You Want To Use Your Real Name."

Which I didn't.  

I didn't want to put the face to the name,

Because I don't like what I see. 

Step away and shine the flashlight on my face.  

I am never what anyone expects,

I am what everyone gets.  

What if you shut the flashlight off?

Just until May?

Until they call my name at graduation 

And you realize it isn't Simran Stone.  

I met Simi in a dreary, foreign place

With trash littering the streets and the sky

The color of ash.  

It wasn't until she told me to never forget, 

To remember her and this place

That I found out her name meant 

"The Act of Remembrance" in Hindi. 

Simran.  Simran.  Simran.  

She's real, but she isn't me.  

I take you want to know who I am?

I am the same girl who was in love in October.  

I am the same girl who thought that she was fat in sixth grade.

I am the same girl who has had writer's block for five days

Straight and is unsure if she will post this or not. 

I am the same girl who went to India 

And never always wants to go back.  

I am you. 

You are me.  

Because if we don't see soul in one another, 

We don't see each other as souls.  

I've seen soul in what you've written, 

in what you've seen.  

The question seems to be,

Have you seen mine?

Hung out to dry in the wind with 

Clothesline pins and developing film, 

With the name Gentry White stitched lightly onto the corner of every sheet?

Simran and I in India.

Loopholes

I am made up of positives.
Of negatives and legislation and laws and lectures.
I am made up completely of particles that no one has a name for,
because even the person who dubbed them has no idea what they are.
We're all pretenders.
That's why we have this.
This name that we hide behind like it will remove all the features from our face like dry erase and reform them into something even more misplaced.
We're afraid.
We see beneath the floor something that makes up the thing that scares us most.  It comes from the mouths of our tormentors and the minds of our friends.  Because no matter how much you mean to them, friendship is only as strong as you let it be.  And you never let anything be. 

They always see and they always agree that the worst of your faults is way passed plenty.

It is a necessary evil, this name.  To write about pains in blue ink that leaves stains and hinders our brains what we use to feel sane.  

Sanity in the form of writing.  Because the world is nothing but a crumbled up piece of paper that you wrote your heart onto, thin lines and thick lines intersecting with names and with dates.  The world is nothing when you write, because it doesn't matter. When you write, you're the protagonist and the world is the struggle, trying to steer you into reduction and bleeding through truth life calls vivacious reading and grades matched 'exceeding' while your hearts sits sidelined like a child just pleading.  Let me go.  Let me play.  Because.

This life is a game.  It gives loopholes the blame, something we cannot tame, just one thing we have named.  

Writing.

Thinker of Thinking Thoughts

I think all day long and into the night.  My dreams terrify me.  My stepmom pretends to be a Dream 

Interpreter.  We call her the DreamWeaver.

  

I thought up a sentence, regarding a has-been love.  "You can't be 'in' anything if it is only one sided.

So when I said 'I'm in love with you', I must not have meant it."  

I thought of the dirt that once was a tree I climbed.  A god of the land decided that paper green was

better than shrubbery green.  There goes my childhood, in a blink of a tractors wheel.

I thought of how I want a world of a novel, much different, much more painful than the one I am

 living because it has a something-like love in it.

I thought of the way that I am and how I'm not sure I'm ok with all the past colored on my face like

too much makeup.  

I thought of the way that pressing the keys on a keyboard was a little similar to that of gunshots.

Words are damage too.

I thought that maybe there was something wrong with me, but when they asked me what, 

 I replied, "I don't know." 

I know that was a lie.  

  

 

This Is What Happens When I Write Down The First Thing That Comes To My Head

They'll disappear
just like the ink you bought
for fifty cents when you were eleven.
It will never be as different
as it was then. 
Magicians like liars
they hide the truth
and stick to the roof of your mouth
like peanut butter and force
you to shoulder the sky like Atlas. 
They'll disappear
faster than you can say,
"Dad, come back," and
slower than your sister's
deterioration in the hospital bed.
We are not the words that people think
because words vanish through the years,
15,000 since 1950 and replaced by others
that fill humanity with 'ridiculous' and
'uneducated.'
Cell phones in hand telling you
when God's awake and when it's ok
to buy a lottery ticket. 
Spoiler: You won't win.
Fate plays favorites. 
Music loses tune,
it was the only thing you'll love.
Believe me when I say,
it's as noble a cause as any.
Shut your ears with a riptide,
you can't hear when you're unsure
of which was is up and which is down.
Build the words you know
like a tower in your head. 
Don't let fear of potential
wrong corners and street names
bring you from the brink of
extraordinary flying. 
You'll be unseen in the clouds,
just as you were on the ground
because even though they'll stab you
like Caesar or shoot you down like Gandhi,
there is never anything to see.
So all those bricks and robots and
lovelovelovelovelovelove
means nothing to the waves in Costa Rica.
Means nothing to the hills in Iceland.
Means nothing to the makeup that is
blown off when the wind swirls. 
A flurry of misspelled words.
They'll disappear
like alcohol down and addict's throat
like the words you want to say,
"I love you."
Gone in a moment that you
never remembered as a child
and almost forgotten in the moment
as a 17 year old. 
Because no matter all the words
they use against you,
like an army sent just for the purpose
of making you trip,
words do not exist.

Radio Silence

You never pictured yourself here, did you?

In the midst of an ocean one thousand times bigger than your god could have created and twenty-seven times deeper than your most tear filled conversation.  Covered in chaos like icing on a cake, and I'm not talking about the waves.  I'm talking about the hope of 'any second now'.  

But no matter how many times you'll press that rubber button down on the radio, there won't be a reply.  They can't hear you.  I can't hear you.  There are only the reverberations of static from the mouthpiece, telling you that you are in complete and utter radio silence. 

 81,043,200 seconds of silence.  

1,350,720 minutes.  

22,152 hours.  

134 weeks. 

 938 days.  

2 years, 6 months, 24 days.  

That's how long we've been here.  Drifting on an ocean of 'waiting for something bigger to happen than this pile of algebra homework I have to get done'.  Drifting in this world labeled 'High School' that in the movie versions was way cooler and much more dramatic.  Nearly 3 years of static on the dashboard of our teenager infancy.  I guess you wouldn't consider static silence, but that is only withholding us from the real voice.  The pure, sweet voice that reminds us that we are human.  That 'High School', that floating in this boat of never-ending blue and waves that crash over us again and again, is in fact, not even 26.2 miles close to the Finish Line.  It's only the first print of your shoe on the pavement.  

"Come in, Lone Peak 2015.  I repeat, come in."

"Yes, oh God!  Yes, I am here."  

The ocean is almost drained.  And that boat you drove is rusting away in your backyard, next to the bike your parents bought you when you turned 12.  It is a memory of the time you were stuck in the middle of a place that seemed never ending.  Looking back, you see it differently, don't you?  That time where you went stag to the Homecoming dance your senior year because a boy didn't ask.  Where you decided that football games weren't so bad.  Where you screamed at your dad to lay off your back about your grades, because you know what?  I'm doing just fine.  But knowing you aren't, and later realizing you should have told your dad he was right.  Where you watched your siblings leave, one by one like an Agatha Christie novel, until you were the last one.  But this isn't a murder mystery.  This isn't fiction.  This isn't a book you can let someone else write. 

This is your ocean.  Your story.  The chapter labeled 'Drowning' to some and 'Love' to others, is about to end with the words, "It is never quite like it seems." 

73 days.  Keep pressing the button on your radio, because soon the static will be gone, replaced by the voice you never thought you could love so much saying:

"Congratulations, Lone Peak High School, Class of 2015."  

Equilibrate

Simran, 

I work too hard for this.  

Every day I have to stay inside your chest and watch as you waste my energy on irrelevant quests and frequent burns.  You break me too often for me to even think about pumping the red through you anymore.  But I do, because I love you.  And because this is only just high school.   

I don't want to love you.  I am the only thing that keeps you completely living.  Completely.  Without me, you would be a glimpse into the air underneath the sun.  Without me, you would be nothing but a pile of dust.  I don't want that for you, no matter how much you hurt me.  

I don't know what any of it means.  I don't know why I am with you and not Mary Gilligan that lives four doors down.  It is like when a star is born.  It is born in a single space, a space that it can never leave.  They can't move a particle of their energy.  They can only shine in the darkness, like someone getting to know an astonishing sort of person whom they originally saw as dull.  But stars, just like everything, stop.  Explode.  Cease.  The end.   

So, we don't have much of anything, least of all time.  I guess what I am trying to say is that, I will spend the rest of the ticking we have left, keeping you alive and loving you.  Because it is better to spend time loving you then regretting ever being apart of you and all your beautiful mistakes.  They are beautiful, Simran, they are just long through the years and short through the hours, and they never leave.  That's life, I suppose.  A never-ending stream of consciousness that in season is too much to bear and too precious to give up.  So, I won't give up if you won't.  

Love Until We Stop, 

Cardio