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

                

MoRpHiNe

I should sleep.  

The more my mind runs around, chasing its tail in circles, the more I cry. 

There isn't Morphine for this kind of pain. 

There isn't Prozac or Zoloft for this kind of sadness.  

There aren't enough hospitals for all those infected. 

This is an epidemic.  

There is a list of the dying, 

and a list of those who want to.  

There is something bleeding internally in each of us, 

but only some choose to act. 

And for some reason, 

Lone Peak reacts a substantial amount. 

What is in the air?

Is it an airborne illness we are 

all going to catch at one point?   

Is it something we get if we eat the 

cafeteria food and like it?  

It must be something, 

because I can't believe that it is nothing.  

For him, 

I can't believe that he was nothing.  

Because he wasn't.  

I roll my tongue around, 

and contemplate the tears that run

and burn into my face. 

I hope they stay there for everyone

to see, because on the 25th, 

we lost someone that I could have made smile.

That I could have joked with at Zupas.  

My mother told me that 

I can't let it affect me.  

That is like telling God 

to stop the rain.

  

And boy did it rain on the day after.

The day after tomorrow, 

everyone will go back to what they were

before he died.  

They forgot the next day.  

I cursed myself for smiling once,

but I know he wouldn't want that. 

But Death is the one being,

I am most scared to face, 

but think of more often then God. 

Does that make you worry for me? 

All of us should have worried for Bryce.

For Hunter. 

For Logan, although we resolved.  

For Terik. 

I talked to someone dear

just last night.  

"Simran, we have to change this

for the future Lone Peak kids."  

No one will survive this disease,

if things remain the same. 

So, for Death's sake.

Alter your state of mind.

Wake up to a stormy day and

see that God is crying too 

because He knows we all are. 

But this isn't about God, and we 

know that.  

This is about the Morphine

and how we need to find

quite the unique supply

for those who come after us.  

Because they will come 

with heavy minds and sterile hearts 

that contract diseases more easily

than we could have ever dreamt.  

Dear Death,

Don't let them die. 

 

 

To the ones who wish for Death to come.

Find your Morphine.

Can't, No, Won't, No, Wait, No, More

"If we wait 

 until we're ready, 

we will be waiting
 for the rest 

of our lives."  

Lemony Snicket

Yellow-Brick-Road

(<---Turn on Yellow Brick Road by Angus and Julia Stone)
They are in the ruin of a city, overcome with the heat of twenty thousands searing hearts and souls.  Battered bodies laid to rest on a street of con and a bed of crete.  Gray blankets of ash encompassing the shells of what used to be. 

 They are in the hands of men, red Swastikas stitched on their cuffs with the blood of a homosexual.  Of a Jew.  They are airborne, from the filthy hand of War into the pane of glass that dear Johann has repaired six times over, only to shatter seventh. 

 They are a town in Missouri known for a black man and a gun.  They are the dialysis, analysis and paralysis of a situation, the kind that calls for riots.  Eyes stinging from a green tinted something-like gas and ears shot and bleeding from a noise that sounds almost like Grief has ripped off his mask and wailed loudly; loud enough even for the policemen to hear.

 They are torn out of my childhood home.  Replaced by stones that were meant to look rustic but instead, making it seem like a cheap, wannabe replica of Roman architecture.  They are in the backyard where my father rose a swing-set and how we evoked one another, as children, to fly.  The kind of flying where you either land, or let your legs buckle under you like they were made of rubber. 

 They are the belief that nothing is constant.  Nothing is solid.  Even though they are their own discontented version of something that people find to be durable, they are never enough.  Stability and durability, apparently and transparently, there are too many aspects of a redbrownyellowgray brick.

They make my dad’s eyesight fade and maneuver objects to see the same way a trombone player plays a tune.  Farther, closer, closer, farther.  They make teenage hearing low and adults perceiving high, hence the reason they ask us to turn down the music all the time.  They are in everything.  In the heart you had when you were Cinderella for Halloween in third grade.  In your sister’s old journals that you found two years ago and read on occasion to feel good about yourself.  They are in the past, because you see, my dear old friend; the past is the only thing that is concrete.  And I lost my mind long ago.

        

shecantbreathe

It glowers slightly on the corner of the table, the sunlight slanting just enough to ignite the bottle of caramel colored liquid.  The liquid tips to the corner as the door opens and shuts.
She had been in her car, her friends laughing about something Jonathan said on Valentine's Day.  She smiled and laughed and if it had been caught on camera, it would have seemed genuine.  The kind of smile that if you would have taken a second, closer look, you would have seen a mirror of inexplicable  sadness.  A facade.
Inside of the door, she stills and lets the door slam shut behind her.  No.  Dear God, not again.  Bottles line the floor and the countertops.  Take one breath.  But she can't.  She can't breathe.  She can't breath.  Shecantbreathshecantbreathshecantbreath.  She rushes too fast to the cabinet on the opposite side of the room, knocking the bottle on the table over in the process.  She slams open the cabinets, the wood cringing and snapping at the hinges as she rummages crazily through the kitchenware.  She finds the water bottle, the coffee canteen.  She finds the prescriptions, almost empty. Shecantbreath.
Outside, she sits on the porch, her head in her hands.  The bottle sits by her, the pills just below.  She debates in her head.  She screams in her mind until the blood boils in her ears and threatens to drain.  In a moment of insanity, she grasps the bottle, kicks the pills away and storms to the center of the street.  The sun is setting on the worst day of her life.
It seems almost slow motion.  She raises the bottle over her head and smashes it to the ground with the force of a broken heart.  The glass shards spin up and slice her shins, one catches her cheek but shecantbreatheshecantbreatheshecantbreathe.
Inside her room she wonders.  She wonders and breathes and cries the cry of only one who has seen life destroyed.  Oh, and not just her own.
She lays on her bed, her dark hair flows behind her like a hurricane.  She tosses and turns and stands.  She grabs something from atop her nightstand and walks furiously to her mirror.  Uncapping the red lipstick she keeps for when she feels the urge to look apart from her mother, she scrawls words madly on the pane of glass and shecantbreatheshecantbreatheshecantbreathe.
"You destroyed me.  Left alone.  Drunk.  Why."
The words look like blood to her, the kind that isn't pulled involuntarily.
She turns to her room and hates it.  Hates her.  Hates me.  She wrenches the pillows and blankets from her already unmade bed and sobs until her chest heaves and shecantbreatheshecantbreatheshecantbreathe.  Sitting in the center of her bed, she can't feel her skin.  She doesn't want it.  She claws and rips at her clothes, her chest, her hair.  She smears her makeup and melts it into tears.  No more.
She jumps into her car and drives without a destination.  She slams her fist against the steering wheel and hopes that the world can see which the opposite of what she usually wants.  The night has grown darker than she is used to but shecantbreathshecantbreatheshecantbreathe.  She winds the slopes to the lights she remembers made her feel better.  The lights look like the world, but only coming from the breath she can see in front of her face.  It looks like happiness, but the kind only some people believe in.  It looks nice, just like she wanted.  But shecantbreatheshecantbreatheshecantbreathe.
Home again.  She doesn't want to be.  Remove the makeup.  Remove the skin.  Remove the emotions.  Sit on the now completely made up bed, the newly washed mirror and smile.  Because that's what they expect you to do.        

O.U.T.B.R.E.A.K