Three Months into Eighteen.

Sometimes people need other people, and that’s okay. Sometimes I forget about you, and them, and how you all love me, and how I love you, and how we love each other. Sometimes I let the little things get to me—sometimes I don’t understand whether the little things are actually big things—and sometimes the little big things hurt so much that I often cry myself to sleep. Sometimes I need someone to come up to me and tell me that I am wonderful. That in a thousand, brilliant ways, I am wonderful. Sometimes I want to tell other people that are genuinely wonderful, that they are wonderful in a thousand brilliant ways. Sometimes we need people to tell us the good things about us, because sometimes—a lot of the time we don’t see them. And its nice to see people who see good things in you, that you don’t really see. Sometimes we always feel as though we are in the wrong, sometimes I –you—we feel insufficient and worthless and not-enough for our own race—and sometimes we feel that we don’t belong to it at all—and sometimes we remember that we haven’t really actually figured ourselves out yet. Sometimes we realize that we have changed and that maybe our past relationships changed maybe we still love our old friendships but things are different now. And sometimes we feel so wrong and insecure and retarded and small, that we need to bend our backs to hide our faces from the world that hurts us so much. Sometimes even, we get hurt, by the people who are actually supposed to heal us. And sometimes we lose those people and we push them away, and it hurts, but freedom has never tasted so sweet, and we become light.

And other times we learn how to make sense out of the matters that feel so small and so big at the same time. We learn how it is okay to feel whatever it is that you are feeling, and to never be ashamed of your own emotions, or of your own self. Or that you don’t have to explain yourself. That the life you lead is your sole property and all your views and strangeness and slightly-colored-out-of-the-lines personality is perfect if it makes you alive.

People

I want to write about people. Which is funny. And weird. And sort of senseless, maybe, but that’s what I want to do. I want to always write about people. I want to write about the way they fall in love, the way their eyes can be read, the way they fall and then get up and then fall again, just to get right back up—and it’s so wonderful. So incredibly wonderful and amazing, that they take their own species for granted—and they cant see how great they can be.

I believe in humanity. I believe in our art and our science and the way we sing and cry and believe and create and destroy—and live. We are marvelous. With everything that we are, we were born to be elaborate, and colored slightly outside of the lines. We’re not really the ground or the sky, but we are everything in between.

Just give us chance.

Stop making us feel like our reality can be so small that it can be bottled up.

Lets stop making us feel like our reality can be so small that it can be bottled up.

Why I Picked English Literature as a Major

To be completely and utterly frank, I do not have a logical reason as to why I picked English Literature as my major—I really don’t. But I do have a list of matters that made me feel like I should probably major in English Literature and their senseless, probably—and weird. But yes. Here it goes.

I picked English Literature as my major, because words are so beautiful, and undermined, and powerful—and when they come together, they create something so incredibly beyond this entire universe. And I’m one of the naïve little kids who cant seem to let go of the little big things, so I chose English Literature as a major.

I also secretly want to be an author, I want to be fearless like them. I want to allow the universe to dwell inside of my core, and read me. See me as I am. I want to be able to share not a piece of me—but me as a whole. Because, see, the thing about authors is that their immortal. They’re there, even after their dead, still alive in between black and white text—and I so desperately want to be so brave, like them. Quietly.  I want to be able to touch others, without touching them; I want to influence change; I want to run inside of their minds—and God, I sound like a psychopath, but that doesn’t matter, because they all were!

Maybe they weren’t proud, and maybe they didn’t know it, but their the roots that ground our trees, and we’re only standing because of them—and I want to be a part of that army.

See I’m eighteen, and maybe ill regret it when I’m 28, but for now, all I know is that Science and Math and Business and Media and politics, all of these are the basis of our survival, but the poetry and the novels and the plays—they give us reason to need to survive; they’re the humanity’s gigantic driving force; because goddammit, as sinful as this may sound, there is no party without music; no memorable movie without a beautiful plot; no excellent politician without a quote or two advocating world peace. This may sound like it may not have anything to do with literature, but without poetry, there would have been no music; without plays, there would have been no movies; and without figurative language and wordplay, there would have been no politician.

These are really horrible examples, but hell, they made the world go round.  

Poems on My Skin

I died the day I let them write

Their poetry on my flesh,
 with my own blood.

And when I told them they were wrong,

They looked at me like
I couldn’t understand my own skin,
and they said “How could we be?”

I let them write their heavy poetry

On my flesh with my own blood
And I died

I am a puppet, with its soul

Somewhere in the heavens,

Looking down at what it had
left behind, and thinking

“Well what a beautiful mess--
I let them steal its humanity."

I let them steal my humanity,

But I will get it back.

I don’t know how, but I will rise

Again.

See, I may not know how to write poetry,

And I don’t think I can,

But this is more than a poem—

No, this is a message to the Them:

I will write poetry on my own flesh,

And it will be in gold.

It will be my own gold.

Rise

My dream is to write an anthem to my youth. In it, I’ll glorify our messes; I’ll sing to the kids who dream; I’ll write it all for the generation who was taught to falter, but didn’t.

For so long we’ve been repeatedly told that we cannot be anything beyond our simple boundaries, and we’ve lived sort of religiously with the idea that we are not made for greatness, and that we cannot be it. And, frankly, it’s pretty exhausting. To continually hear that we are lazy and selfish, when—if we tried—we could be unstoppable. We could—We are made of cosmos; we might envelope into ourselves, when we are not ourselves, but when we are ourselves, we are the sun.

We need to stop teaching these kids—us—our generation—that conformity is the only way to success; That the media is our only means to understanding our entirety; That in order to be wonderful, we must fit into a mold that we cannot fit into, and I’ve said this a hundred thousand times already.

So shut up, and rise.  

Strictly Human.

They hate me because I have never been ashamed of the sins that I have made. If I ever decide to be ashamed of them, then on that day, I lose my humanity. But because I am Human— and strictly human— I choose to carry my flaws on my hands and on my face. Here I am. With all my scars and my mistakes. Take what you want, and hate what you resent, but spare me the judgements: You are just as human as I am; Just as disgustingly humane, and beautifully faulted.