Sunflowers.

My sister and I are very close. Although she is half of my age, she seems just as street smart and sassy as an 18 year old. Sometimes I'm amazed by the childish innocence she has, jealous of it almost. She is so sweet and simple. Everything in her mind has a solution, and when I am struggling with a problem she will tell me the solution without all of the social norms we all grow to accept.

I feel that I have done right by my sister(s and brother) in her life, and I suppose I feel this way because I did everything I could to teach her and love her her entire life. But my biggest regret is something I never had power to change. My beautiful baby girl met a boy I was dating, and loved him because I did. Then, after playing in the playground with him and drawing him pictures, I realized she had developed her own relationship with him that had nothing to do with me.

She loved him like a big brother, a love that was separate of my love for him. I thought it was beautiful... until I saw that our relationship as a couple was failing and the poor nine year old (at this point eight) was trapped in something socially uncomfortable and painful. As we broke up, and I cried and wallowed, my sister did too.

She asked every day where he was. And I had to explain to her why he wouldn't be coming around anymore. She didn't understand why he and I couldn't be friends, because, after all, we had been in love. Her innocent thinking provided the simple solution "call him and say sorry" but there was nothing I could say or do to convince her that it didn't matter what I said.

When her and I were driving and I got lost, she would say "Call Uriah and ask for directions," and I would start crying. She wrote him notes and asked me to give them to him for months, asked me to have him call her, asked for emails. I never gave him her letters, I didn't want to cause him more pain than needed, and he never emailed or called. Although she didn't understand it, she let it go as I began to shut it out and move on the best I could.

Last weekend, since my ex and I had been texting some, I bought my little sister a present of tickets to his concert. I drove her downtown, I watched them put the wristband on her, and watched her nearly shake with the anticipation of seeing him after nearly ten months of nothingness from him. I was feeling sick, dreading almost the behavior I knew I would have once I saw him. No looking, no talking, no emotion. Or else every text, every attempt at communication and "fixing" myself were down the drain.

When she saw him she sprinted across the room and hugged his middle, screaming "RIIIAAAAH" as she did so, and I smiled. Was it bad that I brought her? was it harmful? But she was so happy. She stood by him, occasionally running to me and dancing waiting for him to take the stage. When it was his turn she ran to him and said good luck and then found a spot in the very front. I took a seat on a stool to the back. She danced and looked up in awe, excitement flowing over all her little features.

Until, that is, she turned around and saw the look on my face as the second song he started singing rang around the room. It was "my" song. The one he wrote for me, but it was still his. He wrote it, so I don't know why I was so astonished at hearing it. She bit her lip and ran to me, patting my hand and saying "Don't cry hail." I didn't even know I looked like I was about to cry.

I smiled and looked up to see him looking at me as he sang. Of course, it all went through my head in one blurry i-want-to-run-away kind of motion, but I smiled every time my sister looked at me. I didn't say a word until she was done hugging him and saying her goodbyes, no doubt telling him to call her sometime.

I wish him and I were like nine year olds, and making up already so we can go back to playdates on the jungle gym and coloring book pictures. But I know better, and unfortunately I know there is no sheilding my sister from knowing the same, harsh truth one day.

Second Chances

This is a poem I wrote while sitting in The Flying M coffee house downtown, boise. It has something to do with everything I keep locked up in my head... and I wish there was more I could do to make it vocal rather than typing it here. But this is a release, so enjoy...


There he was walking out the door
Out of my life
Out of my mind with the anger and loss I just let him go
on his way and on and on I replay
What happened and how it could have been done
Better, will I be better soon?

I'm asking that metaphysical god for some kind of answer
to the questions posed as prayers
to the thoughts I think I want to think less about today
For a solution to the pain
for a pain that goes without him and is unrelated to the past
Will it ever really end
or is every end a second chance?

When I sit here on this faded out sectional I can split it up
and think about one little thing at one little time
letting him absorb into my pores, letting him fall back out of good graces
losing him without any of that so called grace myself
he did say I was a bad ex, the worst of them all because I actually
gave a damn,
gave him my best,
gave it all up when he left
and now nothing is enough for me, wishing I could say nothing is enough
for either of us but no, he did the walking so....

No, I'm not going to admit to anything
I'll say I dont want to talk and you'll believe me and go on with that fake idea that
I'm so fucking happy, because I've been playing my part
like a good girl, like the one I used to be before he completed
me, the me that is dead and gone
clinging to the coffee mug I will throw into the dish bin in moments
leaving her just like they all do
in this second rate fogged over memory
the places mean nothing without him, and so I go to try to keep them
trying to keep him

So I stopped playing games with god
I let him win and take it all
waiting on my happy ending
waiting on the waiter to ask me if I need something else with his eyes from across
the endless expanses of a nearly closed cofee house
this is the end,
another end
but endings are second chances...

at least until we end our lives

Love is Friendship on Fire...

If love is supposed to be a friendship set on fire, then why is it so much harder to have a frienship after being in love? Is it because we're all soggy and covered in the water we used to put out our fire, and secretly we just want to go home and dry off instead of standing there getting water droplets on the floor?

It's kind of awkward. I know I've only been in love once, at least I assume it was love because it was the only time I felt the way I did, and there I was sitting on the sofa looking at him drinking coffee with the muscles in my face becoming numb from the forced smile I have pasted on my lips. We don't have anything to say, and I feel like everytime I make a jump to speak it has something to do with our relationship in some way, and he can't look at me, and I want to scream. WHAT HAPPENED!? Yet, in some sick way, my heart is racing a million miles an hour at the fact that he even showed up and is attempting to put in the effort to be my friend.

Friends are good. I keep assuring myself his being there is great, because now I can gain closure and he can be in this little tiny spot in my life even just for a two hour coffee meeting with friends. That's better than the six months of ignoring each other unless it was to bicker or beg. I texted him, thinking he wouldn't respond because he never does, and yet he says he'll join me for coffee. I spend the next twenty minutes having turret like symptoms as I crane my head around to look out the weindow in five second intervals.

I'm waiting to see him, because I know that I will recognise him a mile away. At least, I think I will. He couldnt have changed that much, right? My friends around me are laughing in that forced awkward kind of way because they worry for my sanity as I bounce up and down and try to determine the right way to place my hands so I look casual. Ah, the intricate nature of a dead relationship! I see him, like I knew I would, wearing his flannel and ripped jeans. He walks in a bouncy, almost feminine way and I can't help but to let out a huge sigh and look wide-eyed at the girl next to me.

He's texting, which I know to either be a defense mechanism or destraction. Maybe he was regretting this, maybe he was afraid, I can't really say. I look away the closer he comes, and pretend to occupy myself with my own phone. He walks in and does this grimace type face, walks straight to the counter and orders. I wonder what he was thinking.

When he comes to sit, he forces himself between two people, one being a stranger and the other our old mutual friend, instead of taking the huge empty space next to me. Like I have the plague or something, but that's fine because I can look at him and hear him and that's better than I've had in the last six months so I honestly don't care where he chose to sit. I'm reminding myself to be cool, because it's not that I intended to trick him into coming as some ex-girlfriend drama or anything but god he's beautiful. I distract myself by saying one quick 'hi' to him and then turning away to carry on a very thin and polite conversation with my other friends.

He doesn't say a word, like he's just waiting for this mistake to end so he can go back to his life. But eventually he warms up, he starts to make jokes and make fun and have conversations. But not with me. He can't even look at me. At some point everyone except him and I are gone and I smile at him and he kind of forces a smile and looks at a spot above my shoulder. Why he can't look at me, I don't know. We all have our defenses. But I talk, in an almost too happy way, about the things he might care about or might not.

I tell him about my sister, she loved him so much that I think it was a bad idea to bring her up because he looked like I had stuck a fork in his arm. I never thought about it from his point of view, but he has to be hurting too. Maybe he functions better, but there was a huge part for me to play in his life just as much as there was for him in mine. We broke each other, to a degree, but I wasn't thinking. When he's around, I felt alive. And not alive because I was fueled by sadness but happy, and anxious, feeling this adrenaline rush because he was there in front of me.

He couldn't once look at me, our eyes only met once or twice by accident and we both looked away. For me it was painful, I know the color of his eyes too well to want to look into them. For him I think it was just awkward. He leaned over and whispered to my friend and showed him a picture of his new girlfriend, thinking I didn't hear so I pretended not to, and it actually didn't hurt. I was glad for him, happy he was happy. That was always the intention for me. I guess seeing him, thinking about being friends at some point, made whatever very visible changes I saw in him seem okay.

People change, as I keep saying, and we both have changed. But when a song came over the radio that was playing in the cafe and I got excited and said "This is my song!" and he smiled sincerely and half whispered "I know!" and hummed along while I sang the words, I realized that what happened is always going to be engraved in our memories. The bits and pieces of each other (like my song or his eye color) will stay with us until god-only knows when, and that makes it real. That makes me feel less crazy. It helped me so much, helped me feel human. And even though I don't believe we will ever be together the way we were in my Once-Upon-A-Time, I am content to say we are working on a reconciliation and friendship.

A friendship that I hope will one day dry itself off from the water used to put out the flames, and blossom into something that is good for both of us.

Time changes

I can't express the importance of saying things out loud. I don't really care if you feel like it needs to be said, sometimes the only way to really get the point across is to use your words. I look back on last summer fondly, and as this summer rapidly aproaches I half-heartedly wish that I could just relive the moments of my last summer. Unfortunately, that's called 'dwelling', and isn't really healthy...
At this time last summer, I was falling for this guy. I had all these friends, good enough grades, and my grandparents were blissfully ignorant of my existance. The boy I met made it alright that I felt like nothing to my family, and with him I felt like I was bullet proof. It was april, but the weather was far warmer and much more sunny. I remember at about this time I was making him a very ugly, uncoordinated hemp bracelet for his birthday... I remember giving it to him in the parking lot at the mall, my face red as he unwrapped the gold paper and beamed at me.
It was all knotted up and the strings were too long and I think I had missed a stitch or two somewhere because it looked really uneven on his small wrist. He put it on right then and there, even though I was embarrassed at it's hideous and unfitting appearance. It was simple in those days to be happy. I was seventeen, I was in love, and everything seemed like a fairy tale. Now I don't think I even believe in love or in fairy tales or any of that. I just live each day doing whatever mundane things I have to until I can go to sleep and wake up again.
I know there are opportunities that will appear as time goes on and all that. I keep being preached at like there will be some sort of revelation one day and everything will go back to being sunshine and rainbows, but I know a little more than I did last year. I've been fortunate enough to take lessons from the time that has passed.
I remember may, talk of graduation and summer plans like everything in the world was at our feet. Like we couldn't fall as long as we walked the road of life hand in hand, ignorance riding on our backs. I guess it's called childhood innocence, and I miss it but at the same time feel a little better knowing I've been made smarter by the destruction of the last part of my innocence. He put a list on myspace of all the things we wanted to do over those three short months of the summer. Things like going to the drive-in movies, buying suspenders, and the emmett cherry festival. Simple things, because things were simple in those days. Now I'm once again looking at May as it comes, and I'm thinking about absolutely nothing. I don't even know what I'm doing or where I'm going. I wish things could have remained simple after he left, but that's one of those lessons I learned from the passing of time.
Nothing lasts forever. Not your first love, not the perfect summer, and not that childhood happiness. Everything changes in time, because nothing about humanity is solid. It's changing constantly. Then of course we progressed into June, July, and August. The summer. Ah, it's rapidly aproaching again. I guess that's why my head is becoming stuck on memories again. The way everything looks shiney in the sun, the way the air tastes the same and the sweat that gathers... All of it is the same, minus him of course.
I honestly don't remember everything that took up my summer. I know I spent almost all day every day with him, and I know we had fun. I believe we spent a lot of time in cars in parking lots, but that's a secret. Some of my memories seem too good to be true, so I'll write them off as dreams and spare any readers the pain of listening to my over romanticised heart.
The point to all of this is that I'm sad. But I'm also smarter. As my favorite song puts it "This time baby, I'll be bullet proof"... I've learned from that, and the year is starting to repeat itself. This time, I plan on being bullet proof. Each moment is a chance to change whatever went wrong in that moment in the past. I'm in april again. I have memories of april's that have passed, and I have hopes for the aprils that have yet to come. I don't worry though, I know that I'm a little better off. I've grown up through change, and time will continue to change me and the people around me. I can only accept it and move on.

Escapes

Once upon a time there was a such thing as "playing outside". It's an elusive form of entertainment our parents, maybe not even that generation, enjoyed. Children these days enjoy the world of WOW, we escape into myspace and frollic on our blogs. We text our friends as opposed to actually speaking to them, and we would be lost in the normal world if electronics vanished.

I ask myself what I would do without my telephone, how I would survive without myspace email and facebook conversations!? How would I know when my friends' birthdays are? How would I see them without folders of all their pictures to look at!? It's such a monsterous thought, I know.

There is a sight called MNI, it's a fan sight for *cough cough* Harry Potter *cough cough* where people such as me, and many other die hard fans, can role play fictional characters in the world created for Harry Potter by JK Rowling. It's been a sight I've been addicted to for a few years now, and unfortunately for a while I got so absorbed in the fictional lives I was leading in my role play games I was more the fake person than real. It was the perfect escape, as socially rejected as RP games are.

And then of course there are books and magazines and television. So instead of actually going out and living life, we can read or watch other people doing it from our living rooms. I am more resigned to thinking that one day we're going to run out of things to invent and children will actually have to go outside to live life, and grown ups too (just for the sake of using the word "grown ups as if the title makes them any different from kids! pfsh)

Right now, I'm typing this up on the one thing that keeps me breathing (my dear computer!), but after I'm going to try to get outside in the real world where it matters.... (: because there is a life to live that I keep missing out on.

Today: I am battling my biggest regret

There are things in this life that I have no power over. As much as I like to play back situations and tell myself I could have done this or that in a better way, thinking about the things does not change the way I executed them. I believe this is called 'regret'. Something I tell people I don't have.

Everything in my head plays from a very one sided, very baised, and extremely critical perspective. I'm over analyzing my memories and ideas and words (words I'm not even sure I really said or not, they all seem so unreal) and tearing them apart.

I guess I've accepted that having regrets is a part of life. I mean, there is always two paths to take, we are constantly making choices and suffering the consequences (or enjoying the rewards) of the choices made. I have made my choices, whether educated or spir of the moment, and I have wound up here. This is my life, I am on the road, I am here. That's all I know for sure. And every day there are choices to make, there are things you have to do and things you're able to walk away from.

The past is something you can not change. Something stuck, and yet it's what I chose to dwell upon. I don't think about tomorrow, and hardly do I plan out today, but I chew up everything that has happened in the last few years until I feel sick. Sick with worrying, sick with pain, sick with myself. And there is no remedy.

I believe that you have to allow yourself to cry, to ask 'why me', to feel the pain- that's how you heal. To me, people who chose to pretend, to play a part expected of them, are the ones setting themselves up for failure. For an explosion. Like Hamlet, I envy the players. They can form tears for a story, and yet I have no real emotion for my own life- I take no action for my own life.

And what's more tragic, I still think that going back and saying 'I'm sorry' or even 'I miss you' will change anything. Meaningless text messages that don't change the events of the past, and don't help to advance the things of presnt day. Especially when I ask for forgiveness and get nothing, no acknowledgment, nothing. Does he even care? People are so fleeting, they fall apart right before my eyes. They come in and out of life, some leaving fingerprints others just leaving...

And he walked away, so that leaves me cleaning up the mess our relationship made. Maybe that's why I dwell, why I wish so desperately I had taken my ideas in my head and turned them into words. I wish I had grown up with him, instead of after he left me (and made me realize I really was too immature for him. But that is the past, that is just one of many regrets I have to deal with.

There is a lot on my mind, a lot of things I'd like to say if I were given the chance. But saying the things in my head, the things my past is beating up my throat like word vomit, they wont change anything. He'll still pretend to text when he sees me, he'll still ignore my texts, we'll remain strangers. This is the path I embarked upon with my foolish silence and proud mistakes, so now I have to deal with the consequences.

I have to deal with losing him.

I like to think.

So I'm sitting in Barnes and Nobles a couple nights ago (when I was blissfully unconcerned with my own life). I have my chewed on blue ball-point pen poised over a clean sheet of paper in a notebook I got specifically for this purpose: failing to write...

I always like sitting in a chair back by the gay and lesbian novel section. It's located somewhere in the back, a little removed from the circle of chairs by the window. For some reason I can never bring myself to sit in the old, worn down yet almost too comfortable chairs. I feel like all the poeple busily walking by are looking in, like it's a zoo or something. So I pull a hard backed wooden chair against the wall and pull my legs up allowing myself to stare at the covers of gay romance novels. Thinking, like always.

One thought, a memory of sorts I'm sure I've over romanticised to the point of fantasy, always plays in my head. There's a sort of viel over it now, however, thanks to my effort to block out the painful "good" things that stab at my brain. I'm much too fragile for all that!

When I come back here, I'm hiding from myself and the world. Sticking to a fake persona, pretending like words are going to appear in this nearly empty notebook poised so precariously on my lap. I introduce myself, if asked by a stranger, with a different name. Something from a song, perhaps (lately I've taken to Nonah from a Bowling for Soup song), and I pretend like I'm something much more functional than I am. It's nice to pretend for a second like I'm okay.

On this particular day, I'm watching a couple sitting a bit removed from the rest of the animals in their jungle of battered chairs and books. I always do so discreetly, making sure they hardly notice the little hidden girl in the gay and lesbian section. It's a blonde woman, maybe late 30's, with a boyfriend or husband or lover next to her. He's looking at her, she looking in some anonymous volume I can't remember.

That was what I chose to write about, because it was so vaguly familiar to me. It struck me as odd, that I could almost feel their relationship from my secluded corner. I could feel them taking each other for granted. As I looked on, I discovered the man with the graying hair was not looking at the woman, but out the window. Wishing he was somewhere else, perhaps? He had a book in his lap, like he had thought about pretending to read, but couldn't bring himself to do the dead.

That memory of this very spot comes back to my mind, and I know there's only one avenue to relieve the vile thing. I look at the blank paper and try drawing a flower in the corner for distraction. Fail. I begin my little paragraph how I always do; "We were..." It feels strange, foriegn almost. To use a plural these days is like recieving a treat for doing something good. The past tense, of course, always snatches the reward away.

I write out my memory, getting it all down in a few pages, glancing up occasionally to observe my little couple across the room. This time I meet the womans eyes, and she smiles in a knowing way. I wonder if she ever brought a boyfriend to a secluded corner in a book store, and made a memory there with him. I wonder if she can read my mind, because she looks at the man across from her and leans across the expanse. With a simple gesture, her hand on his knee, and a smile, they engage in conversation. The conversation only people in love can pull off- they exude brilliance, reminicing or maybe just talking. Using the moment to correct their ill thoughts or their acts of unappreciation.

I doubt I inspired this in the woman. But I smiled all the same and wrote it down. Adding it to my fantastically enhanced memory (putting a few empty lines to seperate them). Soon the couple left, soon all the silent men and women drifted away from their spots, to undoubtedly be replaced by new strangers with new books.

Before I even knew what I was doing, my legs itched to wander away as well. I looked once more at the covers of the romance novels we had once laughed about and replaced my hard wooden chair to it's lonely spot amongst it's more relaxing counterparts, and I left. Humans are creatures of habit. I think about it, and realize I sit in this section every time I go to Barnes and Nobles out of wishing for memories to flood me. However depressing they may come, and however false they seem compared to my present day reality.

I read somewhere it's good karma to swtich up your habits. When I went to the bookstore today, I offered myself up to the spectacle of people walking past the big window. I sat in a big comfy chair that felt as if it was swallowing me whole, and I looked at a magazing I wasn't interested in. I even smiled at a strange boy who was perusing the European History section. However much I love to think about the past, and to write and learn from the events of it, I like to think there's something just as astounding to discover in my present day, and my indecisive future.

Musing: People

I find myself observing people in other cars when I drive. I think to myself about their relationships, which song they're singing so enthusiastically, or where they are going. I don't think that I'm ever going to really meet one of those random drivers I entertain myself with at red lights, and that makes me kind of sad. Maybe not sad, but thoughtful anyways.

Every person I pass by, every person I catch staring at me and look away from, I have to wonder if these people are potential "life changers". I have to wonder if that boy staring at me from across the room could be my soul mate if I only gave him the time of day, or if all the girls around me could be great friends. I have to wonder if I'm missing out by not trying to be "friends" with all of these people.

I have come to find that humans are mostly desposable. I lose friends and gain new ones each weak, and I am constantly changing myself. Some people leave marks, some people inspire the change, some don't mean anything. People are like this, important or completely meaningless. I wonder if I'm too wrapped up in my own life to notice the people around me, and if they are to absorbed in their own stuff to notice me? And if I'm missing out on random car trips with the metal head in the car to my right, how can I fix it?

I know that people make a difference on each other. My grandmother who is probably the worst gossip to ever walk the planet, has made me hyper aware of hypocracy and taught me to be careful who you put your trust in. Even the most terrible people out there hold a life lesson. The great people are few and far between. But even then, they come and go. Bringing at their end a change.

Lately I wonder if I have suffered to many of these changes brought on by the loss of people I thought were detrimental to my life. I mean, some of them hardly matter. Like I said, friends come and go. But there are people like my brother, my grandparents, my ex boyfriend... People who make a mark for better or worse, and then remain stuck in my head like a disease. Unlike the people I contemplate at stop signs or stare at in my rear-view mirror, the people I lose leave fingerprints when they walk (or drive) away.

Am I impacting anyone in that way? If so, scary! But I don't think so, and that rings a bit sad. I mean, I liked having the responsibility of another person on my shoulders, and I loved him (and all those other people who stick with me in my head, leaving fingerprints and memories) and it was great. But endings are hard, and it freaks me out to think I've got the potential to do what has been done to me to other people.

Who could be staring at me in their cars, wondering about my life. Random thoughts like "I wonder what her boyfriend's like" then ammending it when they see the bumper sticker on my car (the gay pride flag with DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH written on it) "I wonder what her girlfriend is like", I wonder if they wish they could talk to me, or hear the song I am no doubt head banging to. And if they wonder about me, and I wonder about them, then we're all not doing enough to take the opportunities of meeting the people around us... right?

Like yesterday, I run out of gas on Fairview (a major street where I live), as I am mid turn into a place close to the gas station... I'm about 110 pounds all alone in my car with no gas can and about five bucks to my name. And these big, tattooed and pierced men pull up in a truck and help me... Secretly, I'm scared of them. I'm wishing they looked more... normal? (cliche stupid idea that has been engraved into my mind. Normal looking doesn't mean safe!) but they're strong and they push my car out of the way and have a gas can and help me out. Then ask me out. I say no, I don't date, eyes go right to my bumper sticker. I have to laugh at the way things play out, and how easily convinced humans are of things society tells them "mean something". But it doesn't trouble me, they can join the bandwagon of uncertainty that hangs all around my head these days. I just use it as an excuse to run away from two actually genuine guys, who stopped to help a complete stranger (who was talking like a sailor on the side of the road).

People scare me! And it's great, I think I should be freaked out of relationships with people, I think that'll make me value them when I have forged good ones. Plus, fear is natural. Fear makes me feel alive. Ha, anyways. I just think that the point of this was to encourage random acts of conversation (: people are good... deep, deep, down. I have to just remember that each encounter is a chance for new relationships. For new love, friendship, or maybe even arch enemies like in the comic books? I'm not going to pretend like I understand any of this life, I just wish that I could be passenger on the journey in other people's cars sometimes. I want to be included sometimes instead of looking on from my own isolated vehicle. Life is better lived together.