Free words / misc. SUBMISSIONS

1.

we hang pictures on the wall and plant sunflowers in the garden and buy new shower curtains and bedspreads and vases for the sunflowers we pick and paste on countertops and we fake our phone conversations and delete our emails and forget we even receive actual mail and we take our dogs for long walks and short walks and we sometimes don't walk our dogs at all because we're too tired or too fixated on something else and we make babies and take them to the bus stop and the movies and the park and on family vacations and throw them birthday parties and cook them meals and teach them how to play soccer and the piano and what it means to be polite and how to chew with their mouths closed and about what music to listen to and what books to read and then we watch them drive off in their hand-me-down car to their first year of college and we get fat and we drink wine, sometimes before 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and we buy a pack of cigarettes that we occasionally pull out and then place one in our mouths (but, never light) and we sleep in and we stay up and we stress out and we unwind and we cheat (both others and ourselves) and we move on and we never forget a thing and we forget everything.
and, without warning, lacking both trial and error, suddenly...yet, not all of a sudden...one day, on, let’s say, maybe the third sunday in June, we look up.
there is the garden. with the sunflowers, and it's a different house, a different place, a different state.
we missed it all.
we wake up.
we remember.
crawling on to rooftops at four in the morning, our parent's bottle of bourbon sitting between our legs, the sky looking so loud, so animated, the stars seeming to be brighter than the rest of space, dancing in all directions.
and we pause, lost in the only wonder that both freezes and burns and takes a life form in us all, buried beneath the years of denial: is this all just dark versus light, is this all just a question, just a thought, just a fleeting glimpse of a moment that, somehow, makes us.
present. real. universal. understood.
beginnings. endings. together. alone.
makes us alive.
the sun rises, then sets.
rises, then sets.
we fall backward, forward,
and then still.
still.
we forget again.

2.

My problem is the moment- I've always been told this is where I'm supposed to live. And so I have. I've done what I've wanted with that. I've hit snooze and gone out and stayed in and smoked too much and left hair dye in too long and worn the only clothes I could find and had the hardest, greatest laughs and gotten lost and driven drunk and eaten too much and not eaten at all and overslept and kissed the wrong boy and befriended the person and taken the last piece of gum and apologized when I'm not even sorry and forgotten to tie my shoes and broken the wrong heart and let myself down and given up and kept fighting when I wished so hard to be able to give up. And I've given up, almost as many times as I've given in. But, the thing is, that all these moments of being "present" have only broken me, have only done damages I can't fix in a lifetime; I've only found myself wishing I had just been a dreamer with big ideas who didn't think I was able to have anything I wanted if I just remained present. The present is a lie. It's not real. Reality exists in the mind and nowhere else. What's real is what you already know, and what you hope you're capable of knowing soon, if ever at all. Reality exists in the mind and nowhere else. I can only hope to live long enough to rebel against that.

3.

nothing i do will bring you back. so, this is freedom: being ineffectual. but, that’s what freedom really is all along. it’s there for you to have, but nobody ever takes it. maybe it’s because they are afraid or maybe it’s because they don’t know how it feels to love without being confined by it. i like to think that we loved each other so much it confined us; we couldn’t let go of the things that meant nothing just as we couldn’t grab a hold to the things that meant everything. and it was because of this that we couldn’t keep up... with one another, and with what really mattered.
regardless of whether or not that was the way things were, i am sorry about everything. i’m not writing this to put forgiveness into your heart, but to put it into mine. i want to forgive you, so that i can always keep you as one of the best things that has ever happened to me. because I know, even before hindsight eyes set in, that you are one of the best things that has ever happened to me. and I am taking that with me always.

4.

Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path. No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded. Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find, in passion, the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything. Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it – which of these two attitudes is the least destructive? I don’t think I will ever know.

5.

We make messes to avoid other messes we make
Sleeping in and sneaking out and never
feeling autumn and never feeling anything at all
Dinner and drinks and glass that breaks on the way through and words and notes and remembering to sing along
Running and jumping and hiding and realizing, hands to ankles and knees to chest, throwing up and laughing and crying
All at once, or maybe dying
Life is tricky, but most of all of it’s fleeting
Every moment is here and it’s now and it’s happening and then it’s gone and magnified and seems significantly devastating or significantly mesmerizing