Naked Words

Life begins before we inhale that very first breath. It begins when the two humans who create us fall in love and build a life together. Life begins when your mother reads that pregnancy test. We come out crying, screaming, breathing and so very much alive. After that we begin the chapters of our lives when we live carelessly and freely. We run without the fear of scraping those little knees, and even when we do – we do not fear scraping our knees next time. We still run with the same passion. We scream, fight, and love without any boundaries. As children we know little fear. Fear is taught from our parents and the influences around us. Whether it be friends, family, media, or environment we still have that growing fear. We start to fear the monsters under our bed and in our closet. We fear the dark. Then as a preteen/teen we develop the fear of not being liked or being “cool”. As a teen or passing through Highschool we fear rejection and failure. We fear not doing a “good enough” job to build ourselves for the life after Highschool. After Highschool we begin the part of our lives where we have no idea what we are going to do. Nothing prepared us for this. We have so many questions and so many problems. We are scared to check the mail because of the envelopes containing bills we can’t always pay. We over cook that turkey on our first thanksgiving. We cry, we give up, we yell, we fight, we think we just can’t, and we start to give up. But then we laugh, we love, we hug it out, we stand back up, and in the end we keep going. Because our primal instinct is to survive. However, if just surviving is draining you, I am here to remind you to let go and let God. You may not be a believer and that is perfectly fine. If you don’t believe then I want you to believe in letting go and letting it happen. As a Christian I trust that God will pick you up regardless of the situation you are in. Aside from what you believe, I would like for you to relax for a minute. Relax your shoulders. Unclench your jaw, let your tongue fall from the top of your mouth, let go of the tension in your neck, and take a deep breath. Truly take a moment to step back and just look at your life, appreciate everything you are blessed with, and now I want you to take the initiative you have been wanting to go fix the things you want to change. Because darling, it simply does not matter what you are going through. I promise you will make it through and if it goes horribly wrong and everything falls to pieces it’s for a purpose. It may be because the direction you were headed just wasn’t right for you and so everything must fall apart for you to rebuild. I have no idea where your journey will take you. I do not know where you come from. I am not familiar with the ground you walk on. I don’t know you at all, but I know that in 5 years it will all be completely different and your life will be remarkably changed. I pray and hope for every single person who reads this that it be a good change, but it isn’t always what seems good to you in the moment. That doesn’t mean it isn’t what you need. Sometimes in this crazy journey you just have to get through what you’re going through. So sit back and ride the waves. Sometimes we get so caught up in trying to hold every little thing together that we forget to hold ourselves together. What I do know, is that what you want or what you are waiting on will work out. It may or may not happen, but it will work out for the purpose of ending in your overall happiness. Please stop losing yourself in the process. I know you may feel like you are being pulled in 1,000 different directions and you are sitting there looking in the mirror wondering if you’ll make it. And you will. I know it’s so easy to say “oh it will be all good in the end”, but the truth is that it is so much harder than that and it may not instantly get better. You may go through the most heart wrenching moment you have ever had. You may lose hope. You may get so close to the edge that the wind could push you over. You may cry so hard you can’t see. You may lose people. But I am here to tell you that there is no mountain that could stop you. This is your journey. This is your life. Your happiness matters just as much. And whatever is holding you down will lift if you keep pushing. This journey costs blood, sweat, and tears. I can guarantee you will pay all three. So laugh your way through it and smile until the pain is gone and you can smile for real. Try your best to let it all go. But don’t get so caught up in acting happy all the time. Cry. Let it all go. Scream and just lose it for a moment. It is okay to release just remember to gather yourself after. Because the ultimate thing about this life is that the crying, the screaming, the anger, the sadness, and the hopelessness means just as much as the happiness, the laughter, and the love. Life is filled with passion, heartache, and everything above. Don’t deny yourself the feeling of truly living solely because your journey isn’t going in the right direction at the moment. Let go and let God. Continue your journey with the fiery passion you came into this world with and persevere as hard as you can. I believe in you.

Sometimes I sit back and I think about the life that I once had. I think about the endless nights of staying up, while being scared that if I fell asleep I would wake up to a man holding me down. I think about how tired I was the next morning, but I always gathered enough strength to spend hours hitchhiking until I couldn’t walk anymore or I found a bridge that looked decent enough to spend the night. I think about how many times I barely escaped death. I think about how unsafe I felt and how scared I was. The cold nights. The long days. The snow, the rain, the scorched pavement, ad the cold hearts. I lived a very lonely and unsafe life. I think about how truly sad I was. I remember thinking that happiness was never going to be within my grasp. I got it into my head that the rest of my life was going to be this miserable and scared life, because one bad thing after another happened and it began to out weigh the good. I stopped imagining the dreams I once had. They seemed nearly impossible and I was tired of getting my hopes up. Even after things went a little right and I got somewhat pulled out of the type of life I was living….I wasn’t happy. It’s crazy how one person can remind you of why you dreamt in the first place. It’s crazy how someone can put way all of the years of abuse and unsafe feelings. It’s crazy how the two right arms can make you feel safe and secure. It’s crazy how happy you make me. I guess at some point you turned into my dream. Thank you.

It was hard to see that

God placed you into my life for good reasoning

I’m thankful for you noticing me.

I’m thankful for our love and all the shit you taught me.

I’m thankful for our ending,

I was broken- indescribably.

I’ve faulted myself for loving too hard, for too long.

Today I applaud myself.

In a generation where falling in love is conditional

and frowned upon,

I’ve spilled my soul.

I’ve let you see my naked, and sometimes ugly, truth.

This morning I finally saw my silver lining –

Crazy how it used to be you.

We all spend our entire lives looking for something more. We have nothing to start with. Some have families and school but what else? We finally get a job and in our free time we dream of the job we WILL have one day. With that job we finally get a car and then we sit in the front seat scrolling through pictures of our dream car and the one we WANT to have some day. That car gets us places like work, school, and maybe a night out on the weekends. We go to doctor appointments, meetings, and our siblings or families kid’s events. We finally get an apartment or a place to stay and every single day we walk in and start dreaming of owning a house that we WILL have…. before long. We sleep there and we meet people who come in and out of our lives. We start relationships. Then we start to dream of the perfect spouse we WANT to have for the rest of our miserable lives. We get a better job which leads to a better car and a better living arrangement. Then, guess what? We start to dream of the better things we WILL have someday and all of the things we WANT. It starts to get monotonous and predictable. We always want the things we don’t have and we begin to lose any focus on the things sitting in our hands. This is the beginning of being unhappy. Once you start to lose sight of what you do have, you lose it. And once again you restart this cycle of “I want this instead” or “this isn’t good enough”. How long will it take you before you realize that what you have IS enough? That you are lucky to have the things and people you have in your life. You wish to go on exotic trips and see crazy things. But guess what? 60 years from now you will talk about the “good times” and most of those stories will be the silly things your friend did at a gas station or the time you went swimming and got all muddy all of those years ago. Little do you know that those good times are right now. Nobody ever knows it’s the “good times” until it’s too late and they lose it. So do yourself a favor… sit back, take a deep breath, and enjoy where you are. Don’t worry about tomorrow or the alarm clock that will be banging at your unconscious door soon. Stay up late, take that other drink, mess up your makeup, ruin those expensive clothes, and do the things that make you happy without letting materialistic things stand in your way. Stop focusing on all of the things that WILL be and what you WANT someday. Think about where you are now and think about what you have. Build from there and  continue to go up. You are going to have fun along the way. I mean after all , these are the good days.

They teach you as a kid that love is about fancy dates and flowers. The Cinderella always gets her prince, the unfortunate love stories always have a happy ending, and love always pushes through. Maybe in some versions of reality that is the case , but not always. Most of the time the Cinderella finds a new prince or vise versa, the unfortunate stay unfortunate, and love seems to fail a lot. I hate how frequently I use the word maybe. It seems so indefinite, and honestly you could say “maybe” at just about anything and there is a slight chance it could happen. There are billions of possibilities. But going along with this cliché that I dislike; maybe love isn’t always what the songs on the radio blare about or the movies make it seem. After a while, and after you’ve been hurt enough times, you begin to get tired of the pain you feel right after you love. Because with love comes loss, with loss brings pain. I guess I always believed I would have that “happy ending” (if those even exist).   I’m joking; I know every ending can’t end tragically. But if you really think about it, all in all,  if you let yourself fully open to someone it gives room for them to hurt you. When I say “fully open” I mean the type of love you can only give one person at a time. The type of love where they know everything about you and they are the ones you will be most vulnerable to. Yes you can love friends and yes you can love family. Along with being able to love them you can also get hurt by them. Because here’s the deal; the closer you get to someone the more likely you are to see all of their little flaws and quirks. Most likely there will come a point when that flaw gets the best of them. Here you are left with a decision: do you wait it out, or do you leave? I wish I had known love was so difficult and this choice is always the hardest because ultimately we all ask ourselves this at some point, “is this what I want”. There will be people who say no to wanting you and many times you do it to other people. We cry, we grieve their absence, we pick ourselves up, and eventually we move on to the next flirt that leads to something bigger. With that being said, in the game of love there are always exceptions. I’m not sure if everyone experiences it at some point, or not. Either way, some people get the very good end and they find their “One” pretty quickly, some go through silly relationships that grow them as people without destroying their want for any other type of love until they find the “One”, and then there is the group who have experience an amazing love so great they were convinced it could never end. At least one of these are bound to happen to everyone whether they see it or not, and sometimes it is more than just one. However, I kind of want to talk about the last group I mentioned. I know it sounds great to have found a love so rare, but it doesn’t always last. Love is so so so complicated and there are millions of things that can go wrong or happen to two people to cause them to fall out of love. Unfortunately, sometimes one fall out and the other falls in. They fall into this sort of bubble where they just don’t feel like they will ever reach their full happiness level. Depressing, right? They try, try, and try to love after that, but never seem to really be able to love someone fully again. Out of all of the three groups I hope whoever reads this fit into the first two. The third group isn’t all bad because the love those people find is a one in a million type of thing. Maybe (here I go with the maybe thing again) they find that love and it last forever. I hope you’re that group too. I’m not quite sure which group I’m in yet. I probably wont know until I’m 80 and looking backwards wishing I could twist the clock back for real. Who really knows? No one. So I guess my advice to you is to be careful where you lay your full heart. Pick the right ones but love every person like they are your fairytale ending, because maybe they are. If they aren’t keep searching. I beg you though, do not lose yourself in the process. Don’t forget that it WILL be okay. Those sad ending I talked about- they happen. And that’s why I said be careful. However, the chance of you finding true love are very good odds. Be the happiest you can be until someone who really is right for you comes along. In the books and stories they always miraculously fall in love with not troubles. That, I will tell you, is one thing they are definitely wrong about. Love takes sacrifice, it takes loss, and it takes being strong. But love gives. Love gives you courage, strength, passion, the will to do what makes you happy, and mostly it gives you life. So , no, the fairy tales aren’t realty accurate, but if they were we would have a hard time believing in the one thing that keeps many people going. But love can be real, and if you are in that third group- keep going. I’m rooting for you. I’ve been there. It isn’t a fun place to be, but I promise it will eventually fade. You were just too real for them at the time. So enough with comparing your life to the books, the movies, the songs, and the stories. Start writing your own instead. 

We talked and talked for hours

about the places that we’ve been

And the places you’d wish to be

We went through our favorites

Our secrets and our hates

But before we ran out of topics

You asked me

About what exactly was my “thing”

I said I was a writer

then across your sweet look I saw something scheming in your glance

you had wished to live forever

and now i was your chance

you clawed your way inside me

shot jet black ink in through my veins

made sure i would write of you

until i drove myself insane

you longed to be the hero

like in the books you used to read

remembered as the kind of the man

that everbody needs

it was to late when you noticed

the one mistake that you had made

that a warrior might fight with arrows

but the pen’s a writers blade

and you cant just tear my world up

and then expect a loving rhyme

you used your words as sharpened weapons

and now i will use mine

i trapped you in ink handcuffs

locked behind my written bars

and now you’ll finally live forever

as the monster that you are.

Do you ever have that moment ? That moment when in just one tiny instant you miss somewhere , some one , something. And that tiny instant triggers a reaction of memories leading to thoughts about the simplest touch, the simplest smell, the simplest look, and even the tiniest memory of the feeling. The way your feet felt heavy against the floor. The look of the person’s eyes. Whether they sparkle or fade. The way a person’s voice crackles when the talk or the smoothness of their sentences. The way your breath quickened or slowed. The smell of fresh trees and spring in your nostrils. Maybe it’s the smell of cinnamon and the fall of leaves that triggers you. But either way you remember. It’s like every single day you’ve spent after that day you spent a day not remembering that single memory but in this second, this time just right now, you just want to go back. You can remember every detail of every moment. The way your eyes begun to sting and your throat went dry as you screaming to bring them back to life. The feeling of the day when you saw someone who looked like that person. Saw a ray of sunlight shining through the trees in a park that reminded you of the time you were driving down an old dirt rode and there were patches of sunlight all over. But now , when you drive the only spot of sunlight you seem to notice is the one against the leather of the seat next to you but it’s not the sunlight you notice , it’s the fact that it’s empty. Maybe it’s the feeling of an empty bed. Because you know that in the perfect life they’d be beside you. The smell of the restaurant where you used to laugh and talk at can send you into a spiral of memories. It’s crazy , isn’t it? How vivid your memories of certain times can be and how dearly you can miss them.