I was talking about for a long time the way I needed to do more things that scare me. And I am. I want you all to know that I am. I want you all to know because you have watched me struggle with this more than most. We share a moon and a sun, but there are spaces between you and I. And when the planets kneel down to pray to the bone-white lamplights that show them all the way, I watch them whisper constellations to your bright eyes. And when we hit the light we never stay for long, we crack into a thousand pieces and cut across the room.

Sometimes I thought I had diamonds dug into my fingers, I thought I was born with these pieces that reflected like broken mirrors in the sun, but it was only glass glittering in the morning. And you pulled out the pieces, your ink pressed into mine and all our colors overlapped. We tried to split them apart but instead I pulled these flowers out your spine, tucked their petals behind all the pages I hide between my mattresses. We took pieces from the other and stuck them in the holes in our hearts. The ones that sink deep, bare footed and pink. Fists full of nervous energy and words that could walk on water. And you smiled at me like no one was watching. Your hands felt the space in between my ribs where mercury and mars glow red. We’re stuck in the dark’s last cough waiting for the light to be casted on us. Thick with the fear of never wanting to be found but all the firecrackers in our fingers were itching for us to get caught. Sometimes you make me feel star blind, like I’m just riding on your coat tail while you streak every thought in my head with all your light. I'm trying. I'm so afraid. Rip me open, here I am.

I was born mid-dream, fevered and fairy-tailed. My mother taught me how to build things great like oak trees out of broken things. She would sit with me outside in the grass when I was younger, always singing lullabies to me calling them skeletons for the soul. I guess I’ve always been lonely. It never bothered me like other things. Like fractions and middle school boys and poetry better than mine that was carved into desks where I spent detentions. How I’d trace my fingers over those words, some four or five if they were lucky. Wondering what it was like to destroy a thing with something potent and true. With words that could make thirteen year old girls dream, cast from them the echoes they’ve been collecting. There are so many things I haven’t seen in a long time; like detention desk poetry. Like the stars spread generously above some pine trees sticking their necks out to see. Like soft clementine light dipping into the cracks of cobblestone.

Words… “words” is even a word. A word, in definition means, “A single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing.” So basically it is all symbolic… symbolic from what we have been taught, from what we have made up from language and phrases and gestures, and every other form of expression you could imagine. So words, or any form of expression, are merely symbols. Symbols made to express what we are, as individuals, ultimately from what we’ve experienced… to create a way to verbally express what we mean when we feel something, so we can share it with someone else to make it easier for them to understand it. It is all so incredible to me.

And I stood there utterly terrified because I didn’t know where to look and I didn’t know if I should lean in closer, I didn’t know what to do with my other hand or if this was the kind of thing you were supposed to talk about. Spent years and cheap notebooks trying to put the moments together, trying to make them something better, something softer that people could make sense of. Are people unsure what kind of route to take when they want to love me? I want to take trains across city lines just to pull into yards and watch stars and never say what I'm thinking. I know I’m quiet but it’s just that the feelings are festering beneath and my hands don’t know what to do with them, so afraid to damage the sincerity in anything that it’s easier to pretend I’m a bystander even in my own experiences. I was always wondering, always waiting. I am always dividing that level of uncertainty in everything, picking apart the pieces that don’t make sense and bailing out the ones that do - forever giving them their chance to defy me.

Are we there yet? Can we see the makeshifts and time changes dwelling, like the gallons of blood circulating in your body can make oceans. We breathe heavily through ashes and alcohol and half-smoked cigarettes on damaged balconies resembling a kind of freedom that you cannot afford. The feeling of being fundamentally fucking free. I can’t describe it, it is something so beautiful and so raw that builds up inside of me whenever I get to see you. We walk on paths that lead us to where we are supposed to be, and it’s like, I can’t believe your here walking with me. I remember being so scared but never telling you because I wanted to be tough in the ways you thought I was. I wrote sad and strange poems when I was sleep drunk because the dreams were too much so I swapped them for homeless words and letting my concern be heard, sometimes when I ached so loudly that unfathomed stars started to burn. And I am just overwhelmed. Those quiet things I never talked about with anyone because they were all mine and I was protective of them. All those people who never knew about the moments that tried to stay lodged in our bones but they burned us through.

We build upon experience and it shatters us from the inside out. A dangerous thing to wear willingly. There is nothing beautiful about falling asleep under heavy covers of a former life filling pages of colorless poetry before your dreams spur with nightmares and truth which once was a mere escape to. No longer are these words yours for you to fill life into them. Be concsious, be living. One day you will find purpose. One day this will make sense.

I'm not going to sit here and write about what I wore yesterday, what food I'm eating for dinner, or what books I like to read. I want to depict and deconstruct what I find most essential; my happiness. I have found myself to have such a sentimental heart and that makes it hard for me to be completely happy. Even the most beautiful things in life such as music, love, poetry, literature, and film can make me feel sad. Especially music. Some songs just open me up and rip me apart. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you? And it’s so frustrating, cause it’s always the little things that get to me and mess my insides all up. Like sitting on a crowded bus and feeling the person next to me breathe or seeing two strangers smile at each other. And I’m always affected by other people’s problems. I feel sad for everyone. My heart is never free from melancholy.

I also feel like I’m constantly waiting, waiting for something to happen or for someone to take my life over and make it worth living. All I do is stare out of windows or dream and stay inside my head, but I rarely go out there to make things happen. Sometimes I do try to do more than just exist, but it never really works out. I’m always struggling to live and surviving instead of really living. I always forget that this is my life and that there are things within my control and that I can be whoever I want to be. All these things make my heart heavy and hard to carry. I don’t know, I guess I just feel way too much. I’m a bit overwhelmed by life.

The body is a complexly beautiful, natural form of expression for our souls, for our consciousness. And the over-sexualization of our bodies that the media glamorizes, influences the masses to associate our bodies with superficial or unhealthy ideals - narcissism, arrogance, shame, insecurities, etc. It takes us away from nature, away from each other, away from who we really are. The human anatomy is something to celebrate and used in ways that nourish ourselves, not that make us feel ashamed. Being fit would come naturally in a world that hasn’t been over-industrialized. We would be outside, exploring for hours, climbing all over shit, hiking, swimming in fresh lakes, jumping off cliffs into water, white water rafting, skiing, snowboarding, etc., etc., etc.. And those are also activities that are exciting, spontaneous… good for the soul. Being fit would be normal, it wouldn’t be praised, and labeled as a form of discipline. That’s how far this commercialized world of business has taken people away from nature. (Model: Emelie Larsson)

I’d woken up early and I took a long time getting ready to exist. It's almost like I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there’s a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense. People keep interpreting me completely differently. It’s beginning to make me question which one of them I actually am. What horrifies me most is this idea of being uselessly well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age. I want to bring depth and meaning to the little humanity we seem to have. Forgive me, if I were to bring down your spirits, for that isn't my intention, but to merely forge your perspective to that of a more realistic one. It's one of those days.

Our expectations mold the way we view our personal life situations and the life situations of those around us, even if the true intentions of those around us aren’t really the way we perceive them to be. Humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. … If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

Imagine how incredible it would feel to be the air that inhabits another person for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. It’s like your name, how you don’t notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can’t help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for your whole life.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside there's unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe. I see the ocean in front of me and I’m exactly where I want to be. My thoughts can't help but linger on the thought of you and your soft skin and what is real and what is beautiful and what just should never have been. It all sounds poetic in my head as I breathe these words. Is it because we're so trapped in our culture. In the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and legs everybody has. We’re so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we’re trained to want. Scary. I’m looking forward to looking back on these times.

There comes a time when everything seems narrow. Our choices become actions like the back of our hands. My jaws almost clench at the thought of my life without flavor. How so much can exist within my skin. How small sentences can form large armies. How intricately we exist together in dimensions of things we try so very hard to understand. It took me far too long to realize that there are no wrong choices. Every choice you make is the right choice. When standing at a crossroad figuring your small life is facing decisions too large..fuck it. Alright, don't fuck it. What I'm trying to say, without intentionally digging a grave, is that you can only continue on. I cannot regret the ghosts in my past nor the depression I suffer from and yet everything seems possible. Each of these lives we live is the right one. Every path is the right path. Everything could have been anything else and it would have just as much meaning.

Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love. I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets, without conversation, face to face. It is strange how the image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.