Just Like Me

You say you want someone just like me.
But not me.
Someone whose face is thinner.
Someone whose laugh is more gentle
Someone whose limbs are graceful and lean.

You say you want someone with a heart like mine.
But not mine.
Someone whose heart is more open.
Someone whose heart is less jaded.
Someone whose heart is not so fragile and broken.

You say you want someone with a soul like mine.
But not me.
Someone who sees the light in the world.
Someone who has a plan all figured out.
Someone who can trust and love completely.

You say you want someone just like me.
But not me.
Someone who makes you feel the same things.
But someone different.
Don't lie to you self, or to me, anymore.
You don't want anyone like me.

Excelsior

People are always a little bit surprised when they find out how deep my obsession with the Marvel Cinematic Universe runs.
When I was a senior in high school, they made us watch The Avengers is the auditorium on a test day and I was so angry because I never imagined I would enjoy it.  I left school that day telling my parents we needed to rent the movie so we could all watch it together.  It started a fascination in me that still grows to this day.  I stay up to watch midnight premiers (looking at you Infinity Wars) and I buy Mjolnir earrings and dog tag necklaces with Cap’s shield engraved on the back.  I have a shirt that says “I would date you but you’re not Sebastian Stan.”  I’m in deep y’all.
With the passing of Stan Lee, I’ve been thinking about what draws me in so much and I came up with a few things.

1. Storytelling/Writing
Guys, the storytelling in the MCU is insane and complex and so incredibly beautiful that I can’t even explain it.  Tiny details that you miss the first two (or twelve) times you watch one movie become the sole plot of a movie a few years later.  (I’m just saying, we got the Infinity Gauntlet in Age of Ultron y’all)  And the writing is genius.  They’ve got you laughing through your tears.  The tiniest lines that you miss at first are the gems of the whole show. “Please be a secret door, please be a secret door.  Yay!”  Hawkeye’s dry sarcasm about the fact that he literally fights aliens with a bow and arrow.  You can literally say one word to a Marvel fan and get us going for an hour talking in snippets of script that make sense to us.  Pointbreak.  Strongest Avenger.  Shawarma.  Budapest.  As a writer, I appreciate the character arcs and the storytelling all on its own.  I think they give us such complex characters who break their stereotypes, sometimes boldly and sometimes in more subtle ways, but they grow so much and we get to see all of that.

2. The Characters
I think every character teaches me something new and I relate to them all at different moments in my life.  I love Cap’s undying loyalty to his country and to his friends, especially Bucky (#victimnotavillain).  Thor learns a massive lesson of humility and becomes truly worth of Mjolnir and becomes such a great and caring leader.  Tony has such a yearning to be a protector and he tries so hard to hide it beneath his genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist façade but he cares so much.  Nat is so strong despite feeling like a monster.  Clint is literally just trying to live his life but he stands up for his friend when they need him.  The way Loki's smile falls in the elevator when Thor tells him he can finally be rid of him.  I could go on and tell you how Wanda fights for a better world through her pain, or how Vision tries so hard to have the human experience, but the MCU is so big these days it would take me an hour.  And if you stop me in a coffee shop and ask me about it, I’ll probably spend an hour telling you how much I love them all.  Even Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk (though not at the same level I love everyone else at).

3. The Action
The same way I like watching football, and football movies, and war movies, I genuinely just love a good fight scene.  Bucky on the motorcycle in Civil War…iconic.  The “she’s not alone” scene of Infinity wars.  Nat using Cap and his shield as a spring board in Avengers.  Cap and his shield in all fights.  Thor and Mjolnir.  Tony stepping seamlessly out of the suit.  Spidey learning to adjust to his suit and deactivate instant kill.  I just love the adrenaline and the choreography of fight scenes.  It’s like dance, it’s an art and a sport all at once.

Excelsior means ever upwards and that’s where the MCU has always been headed.  Stan Lee leaves a legacy bigger than a cameo, he leaves us three phases of greatness, each building on and surpassing the ones before it.

Excelsior.

One and Someone Else

One has broken edges like me.
Like all the ones before him.
Broken edges bathed in alcohol and unbelief.
And if he picks me up, I can't hurt him any more than he'll hurt me.
The pain will be mutual and it will sting like the whiskey he takes to numb it all.

Someone else is whole.
The right choice.
A better choice.
But if he gets too close I'll hurt him, even if I don't want to.
He'll pick me up and then drop me when I cut his hands and I'll break again.
I can't survive another break.

I'm not the girl I used to be.
I'm too hopeful for one.
Too broken and guarded and cynical.
Too messy for someone else.
And nothing fits in my chest the way it used to.
Nothing feels right the way it used to.
And I no longer know who I am.

Scene From a Book I'll Never Write

"One day I'm gonna run away from here."

"And then what?"  He didn't bother looking at me which irritated me.  I wanted him react.  To care.  To stop me.

"And then maybe I'll be happy once I'm away from this stupid place."

He shook his head.  "You wont."

"Won't what?  Be happy or run away?"

"Either one.  You won't run away because you're too scared.  Scared to be alone, scared to try something new, scared to move on.  You're scared of everything.  And you won't be happy no matter where you are because it's not the place that's the problem."

For a second, I processed what he'd said.

I wanted to be mad at him.  I wanted to yell in his face and tell him he was wrong about me, that he didn't know a thing.  But a tiny curl of panic ignited and burned beneath my sternum, because maybe he wasn't so wrong after all.

"Watch me."  I said, ignoring the burn of fear and stomping away.  So what if he thought I was scared?  So what if there was more to my pain than the town I was trapped in?  There's more to everything in life, all the time. 
I was going to prove him wrong. 
I would prove them all wrong and never look back.

Sinking Ship

Sometimes "I love you" isn't enough to save a burning ship.
The butterflies aren't worth the tears.
The pressure against your rib cage as your heart tries to beat out of your chest isn't enough to make you stay.
It doesn't matter how he makes you laugh or how he thinks you're pretty when you feel least beautiful.
You rationalize and plan for a compromised future and it's still not enough to make you say it back.
You say "but he's so good" after every "he's not what I want."
You follow every "we don't fit" with "maybe one day he'll change."

Sometimes the one sided conversations in your head are just an excuse to ignore the truth
Sometimes he says I love you and it hits you like a ton of bricks as you realize you have nothing to say.
You choke on the words and the truth and the timing.
You don't work, not even on paper, while your heart stutters and tries to find a way to settle.
You go back and forth about the possibility of "us" and the outcome is always "never."

So tell me why tears still burn your eyes when you think of him?  Why do you still run the problems over and over in your head looking for a loophole?  Why do you keep looking at your future trying to decide what you could live with giving up?

And how do I let go when my heart is holding on like he's the only thing keeping it beating and my head is only half in the fight?

Just Sleep

Once upon a time, I was a girl.  Naive and hopeful, but she was broken long ago.
Once upon a time, I was a warrior.  Fire and steel, but she got tired of eternal battles.
Now, I am a stranger to myself and the world but I don't know how to find my way back to either version of what I was before.
Too broken to be whole, too whole to be broken, I am instead numb.
I feel the painful, picking, tingle of the world around me but I am not part of it.  Not anymore.  Not yet.
I seem trapped in a bubble; seeing but not being seen, listening but hearing nothing, screaming totally silent.
The path behind me is destroyed.  Invisible.  Impassable.
The fire that lit my way has long since burned out.
I am left in the dark, not knowing where to step next.
I spin in dizzying circles of stagnation and an empty, hollow, aching kind of pain.
Everything around me looks hauntingly familiar in a way that knots up terror beneath my sternum and yet, it's not the world I knew.
It's a muffled, fragmented space that no longer has a place for me.
I have no name, no place, no plan to escape.
I feel it should terrify me to my core but it instead inspires in me a bone deep kind of weary.
All it does is make me want to sleep.
Sleep and sleep and sleep until this bubble I'm trapped in pops and the cotton is my ears comes out and the world comes into focus again.
Sleep until the girl I'm meant to be can find me and wake me.
Sleep and sleep and sleep.

Standing Still

Last time I felt this way, it broke me.

He took my hope, my heart, my love, and he crushed it all.

I wasn't sure I was even capable of ever feeling that way again.

But here you are.

My head is spinning and my heart is beating much too loud.

It makes me want to run, to be reckless, to avoid the possibility of a promise.

But I'm trying not to run.

I'm standing still while my skin sets to fire, while anxiety blooms in my chest to choke me.

I'm letting tears burn my eyes as panic squeezes my lungs until there's no air left for me to breathe.

I'm letting fear eat me alive for a chance with you.

I keep thinking if I let it kill me long enough, I'll make it out alive.

But I'm terrified, confused, and exhausted.

I need you to make a move before it's all to much and I run to something I'll regret.

Please, I'll hold still for as long as I can, but you've got to move.

Campus

Walking on campus last night was strange.  I felt this tug in my chest as I rounded the corner and saw the Welcome Center.  And it hit me all at once; that this place healed me in ways I hadn't realized until that moment.  It was like walking into the room where someone saved your life.  It was a turning point, and it didn't feel like coming home so much as it felt like coming back to yourself.

I drove slowly and looked around, remembering the path I'd gone down when I was there.  A path of healing and growth.  The first friend I made.  The boy who lit the sarcastic spark that had died inside of me too young and saw more in my eyes than anyone else ever had.  We spoke in looks and gestures and so many moments being his friend mended the broken pieces of me.  The first class I took surrounded by people who loved what I loved.  People who laughed at my jokes and listed to my ideas and didn't look down on my plans.  The instantaneous friendships that blossomed into twitter conversations during class and Starbucks runs afterward.  The first room where I made my first real "college friend" that I had more in common with than just our classes.  The friendship circles that became a tradition with strangers who became friends.  Snaps and snorts and national days and workshop anxiety and people who loved me just the way I was.  And then the thing that healed me most: the hallway where five people became friends and planned to skip class with trips to the zoo and sailboat purchases and laughed until the bell rang. 

As I sat in my truck, waiting to go meet my fellow sailor friends, I realized how beautiful it was that I was coming back as alumni to see people who changed my life more than they could ever understand.  I walked onto that campus at nineteen, broken, grieving, drowning, lonely, scared, a ghost of the girl I had been and then it changed me.  Every class and every friend and every day blew a little of the dust off of me.  I walked back onto that campus last night at twenty three, a graduate with a job and a friends who missed me and a place that felt like home.

Shadow Self

"You're different than when we met" he said.

I took a moment to think. 

"I'm not the girl I was back then.  The girl I used to be, I think she's still there deep down inside me.  But she's buried under the rubble.  She's asleep; asleep or knocked out cold from the pain."

"Then who are you now?" He asked.

"Me?  I'm just a shadow of her.  An intangible, darker version cast out into the world by the things that fell on her.  I feel temporary but also like I'm stuck because I don't know how to save her.  I'm not strong enough to pick up the debris and carry her out.  I'm not made of enough substance to really touch her and wake her up."

He didn't have anything to say to that. 
I think it's because he's felt like a shadow-self for much longer than I have.  I think maybe he figured out how to live in that world between worlds.  It's ironic; I used to want to wake him up and now all I want is for him to let me fall asleep.  Then maybe our shadow-selves could find peace.

Left

Things in my life keep breaking me.
A little at a time, the cracks deepen.
I'm holding onto a shattered heart.
People keep pulling on the pieces where they used to live, tearing up my hands.
My first instinct is to hold on tighter and not to let them go.
The stinging in my palms hurts, but I know the loneliness hurts more.
The emptiness they leave behind that rattles me to the bone.
So I hold on tight, and squeeze the shards until blood makes them slick and they finally slip away.
And I am left on the ground, broken and battered.
Hands bloodied and scarred.
Heart missing pieces.
Emptiness crushing in.
Looking at a trail of footprints leaving me alone.

The Consequence of Sitting Out

Have you ever loved something so much, in such a pure and whole way, that you can't even describe why you love it in words?  For me, there are a few things I love that much.  My family.  Going to concerts.  And mission trips.

Recently, I made the decision to sit out on this summer's mission trip.  Last year was...unfortunately not as great as I had hoped for it to be, so I decided that this year I needed a break.  I genuinely thought it was for the best.  I thought I felt a sense of peace and security about missing it.  Until it started this week and I saw how many people I love ended up going.  It broke my heart.  Looking at the videos and pictures all my friends keep posting makes me nauseous.  Literally.  I'm overwhelmed by this sense of longing and regret and missing out.  It's that overwhelming feeling of failure where your nerves crackle and your eyes burn and your breath comes in short, panicked waves.  And all I can think is "I made a huge mistake."  It's that feeling where all your brain can think is that a time machine is the only way to fix this ache in your chest.  A time machine or a do-over, but we don't have those.  We have choices and consequences and right now, I am drowning in the sadness of the consequence of the decision not to go.

At the time, I was up to my eyeballs in feelings.  I was tired and stressed and disappointed from the events of the last trip.  I was dreading situations with people and over analyzing a lot of the things I was dealing with.  And I told myself I wouldn't mind missing it; that one year wasn't the end of the world and there would always be another one.  But here I am, sitting in the floor, wiping away tears, writing to you because it actually doesn't matter how many more there are.  It doesn't matter how well or how poorly the previous trips went.  All that matters is that THIS one, happening NOW, is happening without me and I'm heartbroken.  There are so many lives I'm missing out on touching and so many new friends I haven't met and so many memories that I'm not there to make.  And I hate it.  It hurts so much more than I ever expected it to.  I guess this is one of those "you don't know what ya got till it's gone" situations.  I'm not a fan.

I guess my point in all of this is I learned a lesson this week, and it wasn't fun.  I learned that if you let people and things cloud your judgement, you miss out on important opportunities.  I learned that I've got to make decisions based on what my heart tells me, and not the imaginary world my anxiety conjures from the shadows of my fear.  Take a lesson from me, and don't let the world get in the way of the things you love.

Growing Pains

I was a child when we met, but now I am older.
You are still children, and I'm sorry for that, but I have changed.
You drag me down, demanding and competing and whispering; like skeletal hands pulling me back into the grave.
I answer to no one, to myself perhaps, certainly not to you.
I find my own way, and it does not belong to you, and you do not belong here.
Along the way, somewhere, our paths split apart and now you're blaming me for leaving.
You kicked me out, abandoned me, and then questioned why I left.

It's different now, with different people.  Not with you at all.
They listen, understand, and care.  But nothing I do invalidates them.
We are allowed, you see, to succeed together without one taking away from the other.
This is real, this is age, this is growing.
And I like it so much better here than where I began.
It hurts to grow like this; to become a different sort of person than who I was before, but it's pain that indicates a better future.
Stagnation is death in this life, and at last, I am growing while leaving you behind.

When I'm With You

I like me better when I'm with you.

The panic doesn't eat at my lungs and my heart when I sit beside you.  Or maybe it does.  Maybe it's just easier because I know the same feeling is eating you up too.  Maybe it's not that you make me feel better, but that we drown together in the fear and it's not so devastatingly lonely.

I like me better when I'm with you.

The laughs come easy and the words that bubble out of my mouth don't feel so out of place when I'm saying them to you.  I don't feel separated from my body and my life when I'm with you.  In fact, I'm terrifyingly alive and present.

I like me better when I'm with you.

You take me serious when I plan to escape.  You listen and you plan to go with me.  You don't let the world feel lonely, and you don't make me take it on alone.  You indulge my crazy fantasy futures and you build yourself a place in all of them beside me.

I like me better when I'm with you.

I like existing in a world where you understand my shorthand and you share my obsession.  I just wish I was with you now.

Suburban Sand Dunes

The sun sets and sight takes over. 
Houses are shrouded in darkness. 
Peaks of roofs touch the sky, suburban sand dunes. 
Dark windows blend into the black and make me think of far away places and of home at the same time. 
Distance, far from here, that I could find with you and homes that you and I could choose. 
All of this beneath a moon that looks down on us in different cities and smiles as we close our eyes to fall asleep, thinking of each other.

Voices In My Head

There are voices in my head all the time. 

Some of them are kind.  Voices of parents and teachers and loved ones telling me I’m beautiful and smart and worth every good thing I have and more.  Voices that encourage and strengthen and commend. 

Some of them are my own, constantly repeating things that have happened to me.  Blissful things and terrifying things and devastating things.  Things I wish had happened, things I wish someone had said to me, things I wish I’d said. 

There are voices from my friends, telling me that I matter and they care about me.  Promising to stick around.  There are voices from some of those same people tearing me down and belittling me and ripping me apart with their words.  There are voices and words spoken when they thought me out of earshot. 

There are voices of characters I’ve created, telling me their stories and urging me to change their fates.  Challenging me and pushing boundaries and melding old ideas with new. 

And then there are the voices that don’t belong to a body, the voices that my head itself makes up.  Voices that have no foundation in reality.  Voices that my sick mind has made up just to torture me.  Voices that call me worthless and awkward and useless.  Voices that tell me to read into conversations and see that I’m not welcome.  Voices that tell me that I’ve made too many mistakes to turn back now, and that nothing I can do will ever be enough for anyone.  Voices that tell me I imagined every friendship I ever had.  Voices that tell me no one wanted me to begin with and that I am an imposition on the people around me.  There are voices in my head that pull me down with no prompting from the world, and I can only fight them with so much.  I tell them to stop.  I push them out.  I scream for them to end.  I sob and rock and cry until I gag, begging these voices made up in my mind to stop hurting me, to stop telling me the lies.  Because they are lies, that much I know.  But something about them is so real.  Something about them is so hard to fight.  I fight them every day with varying degrees of success.  I can tell them to stop and they listen, sometimes.  Sometimes, it’s a compromise and I drive around the parking lot but they’re still too loud to let me go inside because they tell me I have no place in there.  But sometimes, it’s been a rough day, and the sun sets, and the voices come on so strong and so hard and so loud that all I can do is succumb to their words and drown in the waves of tears that wash over the edges of my eyes and choke out pleading words until I dissolve into sleep.