the weight of wishes
there were reasons for living today, but it gets hard to remember them in the dull evening.
a flock of small birds, plump feathery morsels with sweet soprano voices, balanced like leaves on the grey branches of a bush. skittering back and forth between tenuous branch and the turret of dirty magenta college house.
i see into the tiniest window of a person and the view is fascinatingly familiar and strange. what territory, this, the dreams you hold? what unspelled breath of horizon, what fantastic alignment of stars? there are conversations that linger in my mind. to hear someone anxiously pouring the barest lines of their life onto my page. to see myself as reflected in someone else's eyes: what beauty, this, the unfinished poem of a girl before you?
the reality of a human life is so much smaller than the dream of one.
but in those moments, in the warped mirror of a 2 am bar discussion, i am no longer a girl powerless
(a frail winged creature staring down the spider, who crawls slowmotion toward her web-wrapped legs, a moment at a time, a death extending into a lifetime)
; i am instead the dream of what could be.
i understand, now, all these months later, the sorrow in his eyes when he said, "i am a wish."
if i could capture my reflection. if i could be no more than the potential that a stranger sees in me. if i could exist as someone's wish that never-quite but maybe-someday comes true.
the only thing i dispense: some drunken hope, some pretty girlface, some imagined wings, some stories told.
there is as much sorrow in nonexistence as there is in existence.
i just want everything, is that too much to ask?
i want Life.
a flock of small birds, plump feathery morsels with sweet soprano voices, balanced like leaves on the grey branches of a bush. skittering back and forth between tenuous branch and the turret of dirty magenta college house.
i see into the tiniest window of a person and the view is fascinatingly familiar and strange. what territory, this, the dreams you hold? what unspelled breath of horizon, what fantastic alignment of stars? there are conversations that linger in my mind. to hear someone anxiously pouring the barest lines of their life onto my page. to see myself as reflected in someone else's eyes: what beauty, this, the unfinished poem of a girl before you?
the reality of a human life is so much smaller than the dream of one.
but in those moments, in the warped mirror of a 2 am bar discussion, i am no longer a girl powerless
(a frail winged creature staring down the spider, who crawls slowmotion toward her web-wrapped legs, a moment at a time, a death extending into a lifetime)
; i am instead the dream of what could be.
i understand, now, all these months later, the sorrow in his eyes when he said, "i am a wish."
if i could capture my reflection. if i could be no more than the potential that a stranger sees in me. if i could exist as someone's wish that never-quite but maybe-someday comes true.
the only thing i dispense: some drunken hope, some pretty girlface, some imagined wings, some stories told.
there is as much sorrow in nonexistence as there is in existence.
i just want everything, is that too much to ask?
i want Life.