the next twelve months

dear peter, i've never seen the sky more beautiful. i want to soar off this porch and glide into the horizon, evaporate into thin air, right where the blue meets the pink, right where you and i were once born. there's only a few hours left of the last twelve months. i haven't seen your face once, barely heard your voice, but i've loved you without hesitation through the falling snow, and the emerging summer, the blazing sun and the wild waves, and the devastating heartbreaks. i've loved you through all of this, i'll love you through all that is yet to happen. tonight you're a world away, but to me you are much closer than any of the people who are sat right by me here at the table. i wish you were here, or i wish i was there. i look at the heart shaped tree in my garden and i imagine that that's what my heart looks like. i am starved for you. my fingers are barely feeling. i wonder how the next twelve months will play with us, whether they will bring us together, or tear us further apart, but i pray that they will let us meet. i wish you everything. blinding beauty and sadness that teaches you how to love stronger, inspiring skylines and waves made of wise whispers. love, and snow, and raindrops, and breaking speed limits just to turn the breeze into the wind, so the letters your heart writes to those you love are sent faster. i know that i may not be the one you choose, and i know that we cannot choose who we love, but i also know that my heart will protect you forever. my fingers bleed for you, and all my words ache for your eyes. i write love letters to you even in my sleep. you're the reason i'm still breathing. you're the straw that doesn't kill me. i listen to the radio downstairs and to me those words are empty. the lyrics all profess a new year that will be happy and great but i never understood how twelve months that never happened can be glorified. i don't know why i've always found windowsills so comforting. i crawl up on them as if i were a cat and i stare into the sky, making out the distant lights as stars, and i blow wishes into the night. i wish the whole world was a metaphor, so i could find it endlessly beautiful and revealing, so it could feed me everyday, so i wouldn't be so afraid to live. i love feeling hidden, i love protecting myself from the outside world with curtains, or darkness, or closed doors, so i can dream. dreaming feeds me so much more than living does. i wear a promise on my finger, i believe that in a way it keeps you always by my heart, where i can guard you when you're sleeping. dear peter, i don't know what the next twelve months will bring, but i only hope they bring me to you. dear peter, please know that you are the most beautiful boy i have ever known, and that to me your every breathe is a story in itself. dear peter, may the next twelve months guard you with their wings.

The heart

the heart, it steers everything into motion. it sets of the most unbelievable triggers, it awakens. it tells me stories about love, about loss, about the chance of a future. its the most vital part of us, i really do believe in its existence. i believe there is so much beauty inside us, its buried right under your skin, and sometimes, in your weakest moment , it shines. i am not one to preach about romance, or God, or even the good and the bad inside us, but i believe in emotion. and i believe people are most beautiful when at their most vulnerable. they show something real, they involuntarily share something with you, their secrets. i believe that life is meant to be lived with the heart. i believe that the brain is there to remind us to be smart, but only when at our weakest. it isn't about being careful, or about setting up safety nets before you leap. it's about leaping without a single thought in your head, it's about letting yourself crash, about letting something destroy you. it's about letting everything in, letting love in, whether it be to a boy, or a girl, or even a passion, about not being afraid to break into pieces. it's about physically wanting someone, about the traces of your breath near your neck in cold weather, about glances at people you're too afraid to fall for, but fall for anyway. i think there's so much to life that so many people miss, it's like they live, and never figure out why. but whether it rises you to the moon, or whether it takes you down to dragon caves, just remember, rock bottom is a beautiful place to start.

The epiphany

It suddenly hit me, what if nothing that I write is actually remarkable?

Fireflies

I suddenly just realized how much i'd like you to read my words. maybe thats the real bridge between us. my words reveal the real me, they're what i live with. and yet you've never built that ship to understand them. to you i really am i foreigner. I'm like this strange artifact you don't quite understand. i seem so distant, so out of touch with reality, and it frustrates you because you don't understand where all the passion goes. you don't see that canvas where i spill my words out. maybe thats been our problem all along. you don't know me, but only because you can't. only because i write words in a foreign language, and you wish i spoke in yours. i don't know why this is how i found a connection to writing, i don't know why my own language never spoke to me as loudly as this one, but this one taught me how to love, and how to fall too, it taught me all the emotions and all the facts. i was bound from then on. you don't chose them, they chose you. your words come and find you, and then they take you away. you're like a prisoner trapped on a journey, they don't let go of you, you have to follow them, you have to trust them to take you wherever they lead. that's such a beautiful image. they hold your hand, they tell you that it's alright, that you'll understand soon, that you're not really meant for this world, that you're not cut out for it, you're here for a different purpose. you have to translate life into words, you have to remind people how to feel. the day my words found me i was bound, i was in love, i was safe. i knew i could trust them. they spoke to me in a language i understood. i became a fairy, not belonging to this world but crafting my own. i used fireflies as light and made out footsteps into the jungle. now i was home.

Why don't you know me?

Isn't this what it's all about? Talking to your parents and actually feeling better about yourself from the conversations? Because when I talk to him, I feel more loved. He tells me that I'm pretty, he says if you weren't my daughter I would have fallen in love with you right now, he tells me I've lost weight, he tells me that it'll be okay, he reminds me that after all college years are the best of your life, and he encourages me to keep going. He's being my dad.

But when I talk to you, I feel destroyed. I love you, mum, I really do, but I feel like you're destroying me. I wish I could explain it but your words stab me right in the heart, and they haunt me, and they have put me off food forever. Your words have bred this monster inside of me. And I don't want to hold you responsible for this, because you're not, it's all my doing. But why don't you know me? Like really know me, like a parent is supposed to know their kid? You're meant to feel me, you're meant to see past every silence, past every lie. You don't though, you believe that I'm a pathological liar yet you can never tell the lies apart from the truth. It's bittersweet really, you believe my lies and you refute my truths.

I wish we had stayed a family. There's nothing I want more than that. Nothing.

A leap of faith

I'm sat in the most beautiful park on a cold winter morning. There are pigeons around me, resting in the grass and then flying off somewhere, far and beautiful I imagine. I wish I could feel life more. Like, really feel it. You know what I mean? I don't want to miss a moment of this, I want to be painfully aware of everything.
My fingers are frozen but I keep writing. Writing is my form of living. This past few months have been a lot about self-discovery. I found myself in a beautiful foreign city, and I realized that that doesn't make life any easier. You still have to find yourself, you still need to figure it all out. I know that my world has to somehow shape around words. They are the whole foundation of my sanity. I cannot conceive of a world where I can't come to the park one winter morning and write about the rose petals, or the rain drops, or the wind blowing in my face and telling me secrets.
I believe in life only when I write about it. Do you believe in me?
Because this is a giant leap that I'm taking. I think I'm ready to take it though. I'm ready to accept that I was born merely for this, to immortalize a fleeting moment. But you'll be disappointed, I know this. And I can't help but think that partly this is all my fault, I fed you lies for so many years, I created another me, a strong girl you could be proud of, and now that I'm ready to reveal my real self, you won't believe it. I never wanted to be strong, I just wanted to be real. And if fragile is what makes real, then I'll be fragile.
I'll be fragile. Will you still love me in the morning?

All for you

I wish I could say I remember the day I met you. How I remember how your red hair shined in the sun that day. How your smile was still the most radiant part of you. How your eyes shined and sent me a secret through the sunlight. I wish I could remember the most important day of my life.
I don’t. I don’t because we were two six year olds brought together by fate. Even then, I knew that I would never find someone as fascinating as you. Even then you were the best part of my day. Even then the world was always fun around you. Even then I loved you, exactly for who you were, a beautiful red headed boy, with the kindest heart and the greatest ideas.
Today you are all those things, and even more. Today I look at you, and a life without you terrifies me. I listen to you and I know that I will never want to listen to someone as much.
Your kindness doesn’t show but it’s the best part of you.
There is nothing I want more than to walk down the aisle towards you one day, knowing that I’m marrying my best friend. That I won the battle against the world, I found love and I caught it, and hid it deep in my heart with the key in yours. There is nothing I want more than to look in your eyes one day and saying that I do, seeing your shining awe, your constant look of mischief. There is nothing I want more than living a life with you.
You make me believe in all the world has to offer. In all the feelings that I’ve only read about, in all the ways life can be lived.

(Your past and my future are interconnected. One day you brought me to an ocean, and the waves brought me Peter Pan. For that I will be eternally grateful.)

My beautiful life

This brings out the best in me, but you would never understand that, mum. You don’t understand anything that exists outside your box of morals and rules. You love order, and things being followed by a well thought out plan. You like things happening your way, and you like being able to control everything. Maybe that’s why we’ve found it hard to get along ever since I was thirteen. You see, I believe in beauty above everything. It doesn’t have to be neat, or careful, or even correct. I want real, tragic, fragile, wild beauty. I want everything, I want to live a life and know that I’ve really done it all. That I felt life through every fiber of my being, that I’ve been to hell and back, and that I would go again. That’s what I want. I want to live a beautiful life.

We were driving in the car

We were driving in the car, I was ten. My mother was angry at us, and as always whenever she wanted to teach us a lesson, she’d tell us stories about our father. You know he never even showed on your birthday, V, she said. He spent the night before with a prostitute, and showed up at home drunk and wearing another woman’s lipstick on his skin. He showed up on your birthday morning drunk, and went to bed. Our plans to go to the mall that day and buy you your perfect present, a playhouse, fell through. I headed out alone and bought something else, I don’t remember. I found a woman’s telephone number in his pocket.

That story still haunts me today. As we drove in the car that day my world fell apart. I knew it then, my dad never cared about me, and on my 6^th birthday, he betrayed me. That day was supposed to be the best of my life, I was supposed to remember it with him in the picture.

Instead, ever since I was 5, I don’t remember you ever being in the picture.

I never quite could remember that day the same way again.

Hippies

I feel like in another world we would be two hippies travelling the world. People would often wonder, how are they okay with that? How are they okay as strays?, and we would always wonder, how are they okay with chains? How are they okay to not be free? We’d travel around the world together, you and me, happy and innocent, beautiful and funny. In an ideal world we’d be made hippies, free to be in love.  Doomed nights and no one waiting for us in the morning.

Her heart ached for fragility

I’ve realized that all these years, I’ve tried to feed an illusion. The strong girl was never more than a deception created by a girl who thought she needed to be strong. She didn’t know herself, and so she assumed that wanting to be strong is what everybody wanted, to be independent and wild, never asking for help.  She decided to be just that and she was wrong. As her illusion grew and she became the wise old sorcerer people came to for help and support, she began to crave beauty. She desired nothing more but to be a helpless fairy, always in awe of protection. She needed to be small and tiny, her heart ached for fragility.

A little girl

I want to be an angel. I want to dream about unicorns and wake up to cups of hot chocolate. I want to skip around in big cosy sweaters and slippers laughing about the most silly things. I want to wear pony tails and draw hearts on my wrists. I want to blow bubbles and take funny pictures. I want to be kissed on the forehead and spun around the rooms. I want to be loved like a little girl.