Sometimes I get sentences stuck in my head like song lyrics.
Like how when I turned fifteen, I grabbed my independence from the shelf where it was kept and strung it around my neck like jewelry.
Shortly thereafter I started to be slowly strangled by it, but I didn’t think to take it off and now it’s too late.
On the worst days words fail. My throat locks up and my tongue disposes of the key.
But sometimes the days are good ones.
On good days I can imagine my way into better tomorrows
I can jump and gravity lets go
I feel all at once a rush of life flowing through my veins and wonder how my body can possibly contain all this living.
High off serotonin pills and hope
I stare up up up at the night sky and am struck with the realization of just how small and big I can be at the exact same time.
Jolted into reality.
Stringing words together like music
Ballads of grief, too intense for articulation
On good days I am flooded with the certainty that somehow or other it will all work out.
Because how could centuries of literature and poetry be wrong?
I’ve spent a life turning to fictional people and strangers for advice.
On good days, I ask questions.
Like what if the earth is warming and people are suffering and some adults behave like toddlers and strip children of liberty and humans of dignity and yet still we can survive it?
What if none it really matters anyway means that all of it matters immensely and so we should live and live and live and care and care and care.
And maybe, just maybe, the extraordinary are ordinary or maybe nobody’s ordinary is too normal to be unextraordinary?
On good days I hate people but am bowled over with reverence for humanity.
On good days I stay awake because I might hate living but I’m obsessed with being alive.