Fighting for A New Reality

 

I am a hopeless romantic in the truest sense of the phrase.

I believe in happily ever after. I believe in true love. I believe in love at first sight.

 I believe in forever. And no matter how ridiculous it sounds, I believe in the Hollywood moments that spice up real life.

 I believe in chasing someone down at the airport to tell them you love them. I believe that a love once found is never truly lost. I believe in shutting a girl up with an insane kiss. I believe in those gut wrenchingly beautiful, romantic, passionate, heartfelt moments. I believe in saying I love you a thousand times over in a day. I believe in running to each other in the torrential down pouring rain.

You can call me crazy, or disillusioned, or delusional. You can call me whatever you want. But I believe that love like that can exist. It can be more than just Hollywood's idea of love and it can be a reality. It doesn't have to be a movie or a Nicholas Sparks book. It can be real.

What if guys fought for girls like Noah fought for Allie in The Notebook? What if a young couple fell deeply, madly, passionately in love in their teens like Gus and Hazel in The Fault in Our Stars? What if we consciously made an effort to live the way those characters do? What if we gave it all up for someone we loved and we didn't let them get away? What if we chased people down on the freeway with a dead love fern in the front of a motorcycle? (How to lose a guy in ten days *cough*) We wonder why some people are so fixated on having a romance like in a movie but why shouldn't we be? Should big grand gestures of love only exist on the big screen or pressed between the pages of a book? Why not shout it out at the top of your lungs? Why not kiss in the rain? Why not get all swept up in one another? Why not make it reality?

I believe it can be because I think it should be more than a script. It should be a commonality. It should be normal and typical and magical and completely real.

Love like that exists, we just have to have the courage to show it.

Finding You

You're far away.

I can't count the distance in miles or hours or any measure known to man.

It will be years before I see your face again, but not before I see you.

I see you in pictures.

I see you in dreams.

I see you in memories that I replay over and over again in my head.

I see you a lot, but I find you more.

I find you in the sun rays peaking through the clouds.

I find you in the tall white birds that perch in the shallow water.

I find you in my mannerisms.

I find you in my heart.

I find you in the perfume that you used to wear.

I find your guidance in things we've long ago discussed.

I find you in the color of my bedroom wall.

I find you in sermons and stories and books.

I find you in so many books.

I find you in the things we used to share, and the things we used to do.

For when a person is near, you find them not at all.

It's when a person leaves, and your heart craves them that you find them everywhere.

Renewed

People have a sick fascination with intoxication. Whether it be by illegal substance, prescription abuse, or alcoholism, people love the "high" and that is a truly terrifying fact. I just got home from two exhausting, hot, taxing but totally worth while weeks of church camp. I recommitted my life to God on Tuesday, July 8th, and let me tell you a little secret, ready?
You can be high on something other than brain killing narcotics. You can, in fact, be high on life. I can tell you from first hand experience that happiness is the best natural high you could ever find. I have been in a moody, dark, sad, angry, depression since September of 2013. For the first time in eleven months, I am truly happy. My soul is finally at rest and my heart is soaring through the clouds. I smile almost constantly. I laugh, completely and wholly uncaring of what anyone else thinks. I am finally happy. That isn't to say that I don't get sad or cry or get upset, because I certainly do, but the difference is that the sadness doesn't rule me anymore. It doesn't take over my mind and create twisted, sad views of the future. It doesn't warp my sense of self or my view of the world anymore. And this change was instantaneous. I bowed my head with a hateful heart and fifteen minutes later, after giving it all to God and deciding to life my faith instead of just say it, I opened my eyes with a sense of lightness and a genuine smile.
Finding God and letting him move through you is seriously one of the most incredible experiences in life. I have never found anything that eases my burdens like the hand of my Lord and Savior. I can't even describe the sensation I had after I gave it all back to Christ. Words like "peaceful" and "joyous" and "lightness" come to mind but don't even begin to encompass how amazing it was. I was weightless. I felt like I could literally soar through the clouds.
I don't know what your walk with God looks like. I don't even know if you have one. All I know, all I can tell you, is that I was lost and drowning in sadness and pain. If you read back like four posts, you find a dark, pained individual who couldn't tear the pain from her mind long enough to write a happy poem. As of Tuesday however, I can't fathom anything less the magnificently joyous. I didn't know peace like this could find my heart again. Now I'm not saying nothing will ever go wrong, because it will probably go worse than before as Satan tries to trip me up. And I'm not saying nothing hurts and nothing phases you, but I am saying that if you just give it all to God, ALL of it, all the good, the bad, the ugly, the pretty, the stupid, the huge, the miniscule, give it all up to him, and you will find that things are easier to heal from. If you rest in God's arms, the arms that created you, and take advice from the mouth that breathed life into Adam in the garden of Eden, nothing can take you away from him. You can wander down the wrong roads but he will find you again. He will always be there, and that is a high that you never lose.

Your Downfall

A mess of emotion eats at my empty stomach making it ache deeper, to my core. Desire fills my chest and the act of breathing becomes laborious in the tightened pathways. A need so guttural screams to be released making my teeth grind together in anguish. This uncertainty of your feelings for me is going to destroy me from the inside out. I devour every memory of us in a frenzied attempt to see through you. To dissect your motives and read your signs. The need is an instinctive primal one that consumes me most hours of the day. Sleep hardly offers a solace. Your smile fills my dreams and the places where your figurative fingers met my dreaming skin sting as I wake. Confusion is hardly capable of describing how I feel. I weigh the rewards and consequences of perusing this tugging in my gut with eager fervor. I'd like to tell myself it's your name that this insatiable yearning stems from but I am doubtful. Tracing my steps backward farther and farther into the blackness of the past, I stumble across too many resemblances of these gut wrenching feelings. You are not the problem. It is I. My desire for requited affection grows daily, fed by the hopeless romantic living deep in my soul. The desire for love is accompanied by the strangest want of tragedy though and this makes my hair stand on end with curiosity. All imagined scenarios come with a tragic, painful twist. Without which, they become unsatisfying. The things I write, the stories I create, the desires in my heart have become polluted with a dark taste for pain. It is unsettling to realize this. Maybe I'm drawn to you because of all the red flags and not in spite of them. Maybe triumph over the battles is less of a victory and more of an attempt to placate myself by playing with fire. It is for this reason I hold you at arms length. Close enough to feel the fire under your skin but far enough so as to not be blinded by my want. Protection for you and myself is more important than my desire to dance amid the flames. And the desire for dancing in flames terrifies me. I am not the girl I used to be. I am darned and jaded and changed. I seek out tragedy and find beauty in it where it used to only show me pain. After everything you've been through, I don't want to drag you down too. No matter how much I ache for your touch. Or crave your breath on my skin. Or need to hear your laughing voice. I will not be your downfall. I refuse to be the anchor that drags you to the rocky bottom. If I must sink, I will untangle myself from you first. I will not be your downfall.

Summer Days

These summer days are good for the soul.
They lighten your hair and your heart and only your skin gets darker.
Saltwater is the elixir of life in these times.
Lazy is less of an offense and more of an ambition.
The days are hot and bright and long and waiting to be devoured in the nothingness of relaxation.
Responsibilities seem more like adventure in times like these.
Midnight is an acceptable hour to be prancing upon the beach, soaking in every ounce of saltwater available.
Friendships are seasoned and tested and praised and strengthened by the giddy joy of sun exposure.
These are the days of summer.
The days our souls continually long for.
And I thank God for giving me so many.

The Fault in Me

So I read The Fault in Our Stars today. Yes let's all take a moment to sigh or aww or Ooo or whatever you do when you hear someone's experienced some really beautiful, touching piece of art. But beside its beauty and the artfully written story and the heart wrenching plot, it gave me a sort of new view of myself. Augustus is so openly accepting of all of Hazel's quirks it's quite beautiful. And what I realized is that I try and change who I am for others. Not in a big way, but still. I have a tendency to dumb down my speech or not speak at all because I often throw in words of higher level vocabulary when they aren't needed. I say things like big and tumultuous together. I am not the scholarly person who uses incessant amounts of philosophical metaphors and speaks a soliloquy for a mere thought. I'm the girl who says "dude that was inconsequential". But through the inspirational words of John Green, I realized that one day, someone's is going to find my sporadic use of scholastic words enticing and quirky and cute and lovable. Not at all awkward or annoying or strange. Someday I'll find someone like Augustus who replies to my goofy quips with equally unequal ratios of stupid and brilliant. Someone who knows what all of my big words mean and maybe teaches me more. And starting now, I refuse to dumb down my vocabulary in an effort to make friends or find a significant other. My irregular vocabulary is part of the package and it's a beautiful, freaking awesome package if I do say so myself.

Isolation

Life isolated and alone is not life. No matter how many trials you've been thrown, your soul will always desire companionship. We are social beings created to converse and live with and amongst other beings. No matter how bitter you are or how much you claim to hate people, a life of isolation will not satisfy you. I realized this today. I constantly write about finding love and friends and people and I am one of the most bitter, people hating people you'll ever meet. And yet in the core of my being, I crave interaction. We were created, yes created (but that's a different argument), to be with one another. People get pets for the accompaniment. People marry for love and life together. Social interaction is crucial. I promised myself today that since I have realized this, I will try and be more open to others. I have dispositioned myself to scoff at going to lunch with people and going for coffee. I have dispositioned myself against other people because so many people have failed me. Today I realized that I can't assume everyone will fail. I have to give everyone their own chance. I have to be open to their attempts and forgiving in their failures because we are all human and all destined to fail. We cannot condition ourselves to be cynics. We cannot push everyone away because of the actions of those that came before them.

Every Motion

I'm reading into every motion.
Every word.
Every look.
Is this how friends behave?
I try and use caution as I have been wrong so many painful times before but I have a tendency to be reckless.
A tendency to fall into things to soon.
To take on things I can't handle.
Things I don't want.
My track record is marred and scuffed up with the records of my failings.
Of my misguided judgments.
Of my mistakes.
I can't help but think you'll just be another name on the list of people I ruined.
I am careful with everything but my heart.
And truth be told, I know you have a habit of breaking those.

I pretend not to be jealous when you look at her.
I try to ignore the sickness in my stomach as you say her name over and over and over again.
I tell my self "he's just a friend" "he's just a friend" "he's just a friend"
Somehow, no matter how many times I say those words they never feel quite true.
This friendship is something I don't want to jeopardize though.
So I go on joking and laughing and watching.
I go on acting like a storm of nerves doesn't hit me every time I see you.
I go on acting like you're just my stupid friend.
Truth be told, I don't know how to stop acting.
I don't know if I should.
All I know for certain is that I want you in my life, as whatever you are, forever.

The Haze

The haze of the fictional word I've been living in is clouding my vision. I hear murky voices of people who do not exist inside my head. They keep me company, these nonexistent people. I create and solve their problems one after another. I laugh as they laugh and weep as they weep. They are an intricate part of my being, perhaps even made from pieces of myself. It's hard to leave them when reality comes knocking for their absence leaves me feeling lonely and lost. Without their conjured identities and persons, I have next to no one to accompany me in the long hours. As physical beings let me down time after time, I have come to regard these characters in my head as family and dear, beloved friend. Not only the auras I create but those created by other brilliant minds and trapped between pages of parchment and paper. Daily, I linger among them. Laughing with them, talking with them, admitting my flaws and awaiting their advice. Some might think it silly to commune with the voices in my head by they seem to have provided me with ample supplies of ingenuity. No one around me understands my desire, my need, to be accompanied day and night by these people. These voices. These figments of imagination. For they are no more tangible than a thought. Yet some how, without hands and fingers and breath, somehow these creatures have touched me. They have left a mark deep in my soul and have a special spot in my heart. When I am hurting, they hurt with me and in my joy, they rejoice along side me. It is both a blessing and a curse to have feelings multiplied in your heart by the number of characters who have ingrained themselves in your mind. But yet, this is the mark of something greater. The mark of someone willing and able to create and mold people out of thin air. I am glad to carry the burden of odd looks and whispered criticisms as I converse with those living in the cobwebs of my mind. I find joy in expanding the room inside my head so more can trickle in. I long to forever live in the haze of this fictional realm of life. It fills me with a greater sense of purpose, and that sense of purpose, sense of identity, sense of reason is what we all search for in the end. 

I Am...

I mourn for lost friends as one might mourn a lost love or a lost life. I mourn the loss of simplicity. I mourn the ease. I mourn the joy I found in the little things. I mourn the people I used to know that have gone and disappeared.

I resent the changes. I resent the fact that they've become what they swore they wouldn't. I resent their blaming me. I resent the fact that I'm the one left to pick up the pieces. I resent the facts that they move happily along while I cry myself to sleep.

I am confused. I am shattered. I am hurting. I am scared. I am alone. I am terrified for my future. I am in desperate need of someone who knows how to do this. Someone who knows how to manage heartache. Someone who can teach me to turn cut into callous. Someone who can help me build these walls and keep the pain out.

I am mourning, grieving. I am angry, resentful. I am lost, and in need. I am a fragile birds nest ripped apart by the howling winds of time. I am in desperate need of repair.

In My Losses

Sorrow shoots through my heart as I watch the faces I used to know interact. I used to talk to him everyday. I uses to know exactly what that look on her face meant. I used to be in the center of their happy world. As I watch from the outside, a hot tear slides down my cheek. Who knew one day I would feel annihilated in the only place on earth I'd ever felt accepted. Times are changing. We are growing. Only, I'm growing up and having to fall away from the happy bubble I used to be trapped in. I was foolish to believe that I could leave and things wouldn't change. They are drastically different and it rips my heart in two. I begin to mark them among my losses. Tick mark after tick mark build up as I list them all. People I used to know. Strangers who used to share my past.
The number is crippling and makes my heart stop in my chest. Is there any end to this torture? Will anyone walk in and stay? Will trust ever be in my nature again? The tears come in torrents and I lock myself in my room. They don't need this. They don't need to see me like this. I'll shut them out like I do everyone else. As I crumble to the floor in broken, aching pieces I sob into my hands. How do I fix this? No answers come my way. Tears all spent and throat sore from crying, I tremble and wrap my arms around myself. I am alone. And I am scared.

The Mirror

That mirror has seen a thousand inward battles.

It has seen a girl learning how to make herself presentable.

A girl trying to decide what armor to put on.

A girl trying to find one thing she likes about herself.

 It has seen sobbing, wracking tears as she wonders what she's even worth.

It has seen a million genuine, shining smiles.

It has seen the empty, lost stare of confusion.

Of grief.

 

It has seen a girl brake into a million pieces.

It has seen her try desperately try to put herself back together.

It has seen her trying to decipher mixed signals and unwind lies.

 

It watches her fight for sleep on hundreds of different nights.

It watches her startle awake when the nightmares get to be too much.

It watches her wake with a sleepy smile after a sweet dream makes its way in.

 

It sees her painting on her game face.

Sees her painting on the mask.

Sees her practicing her smile for that perfect moment with that perfect someone.

 

It watches helplessly as she tears apart her self esteem.

As she picks apart her being.

It has seen trillions of emotions flash across her quiet face.

It's seen dripping tears carry mascara down her face like war paint.

It's seen a dozen tissues try to silence the truth.

 

It has seen her for who she truly is.

It may be the only one, in all honesty, too see her in her true light.

It has seen how complex she is.

How torn she is between that happy-go-lucky girl and the girl tormented by her past.

 

It has seen me.

All of me.

Fantasy

It's hard, it hurts, she doesn't want to let go, but she has too. She been holding too tightly to a fantasy that can never be hers. She falls asleep with resolve in her heart and tears in her eyes. When she wakes, she feels empty, unaware of what there is to feel anymore. So much of her heart was dedicated to a lost cause that she doesn't know what to do without it. Her thoughts are a jumble of confused questions and painful memories. The words he hasn't spoken to her face cut her like a knife and rip her heart in two. A useless cause is all for not. Empty sorrow bites her soul and a single salty tear slips from her eye. She gave too much, as she always has and in the the cause is lost.

I Sit and Think on You

As the sky pours out its torrents of rain upon the unsuspecting world, I sit and think on you. Days were spent hoping, loving, needing, all for you. The butterflies danced in my stomach, hunger and sleep both failed me then. I was a perfect picture of what they call head over heels and what I term hopelessly lost . You held part of my world and I held tightly to the hope that one day you might see things the same. I guess I knew all along that it would never work. You are an intricate being of infinite, deeply scarring pain. You have faced horrors unknown. You have demons I may never know exist and things you think might terrify me if let into the light. I though, I am merely a silly girl. I have faced pain, but the difference between us is I choose not to let it consume me. I cover my insecurities in loud laughing and sarcasm while you cover your pain with grim expressions and build a wall around your heart. Hear me not wrong, I know your tortures are deeper and darker and more fearful than mine, but I have them all the same. I have grown up in a home of togetherness and love and acceptance, while I see years of loneliness etch lines on your face. My heart aches to think of you in that insurmountable pain. I knew we were destined for ruin the moment I set my eyes on you. Fairy tales have a way of bringing ones like us, from opposite places together, but reality is not so. But somehow, unknown to me, when trick turned sour broke my heart and threatened to humiliate me, I was stunned and shocked by your willingness to be part of the ploy. Now all is forgiven, all is at rest, all but my faintly beating heart.
I know you have demons. It terrifies me. But so do I. And I feel an all consuming need to stare into your eyes until I know all of yours and you all of mine. I want to help you face them and fight them down daily if need be. I want you to find in me the pain and teach me how to callous is so it hurts no more. I want to show you how to escape the shadows you've been living in. I know all you need is someone to pull you close and whisper that you're worth it. I know you won't believe it at first. I know you think I'm not strong enough to carry your burdens, but over two, the weight will be lessened. I don't know how to show you that I'm stronger than you'll ever understand. I don't know how to show you that when I'm with you, the broken parts of me feel less jagged. I don't know how to tell you I need you, but I do. And whether you know it or not, I think you need me too.

Trying

I am trying.

Trying not to talk about it.

Trying not to bring it up in ever conversation.

Trying not to think about it.

Trying to move on.

Trying not to whine.

Trying not to use the word heartbroken.

Trying not to overreact.

Trying to understand how something that was only planned,

and never took place could hurt so much.

Trying to decide if I should tell you that I know.

Trying to figure out if you even care.

 

I'm trying not to feel broken.

Or empty.

Or betrayed.

Or hurt.

 

I'm trying to come up with words for what this feeling is, but all I can think is "empty".

Waves of hurt come and go.

As do waves of sadness, of treachery, of confusion, of nothingness.

I 've never felt so helplessly lost in all my life.

 

And the really messed up thing is,

I think you would know how to help me.

You know what this is.

You know how to fix it.

You've been in this living nightmare.

You live it every day.

Yet, you put me here too.