Tyler...

You have come up a lot lately. I don’t know why. Of course, this has me thinking of you and the love we shared and you shattered. Invariably, I try and place how to ever love someone, the way I loved you, again. I don’t think it’s there. I don’t think I want it to be.

Skipping over all the details that made me the way I am, well the way I was before you anyhow, the easiest way to say it is that back then, before I was shattered, before you, I thought everything in the world was about falling in love. I thought that every time the sun went down and the stars came out was about falling in love. I thought every event, every day, every moment was about finding someone to love. I never realized what it was going to do to me when someone loved me back. It fucked me up. You…you fucked me up. All these years later and I am still your fuck up. It’s your doing and I can’t fix it. Everything, with you and I’s beginning, was beautiful, and the way it happened was as close to magic as real life sees. You, we, were everything and I just....... lost myself……

When you cheated, you absolutely ruined me. I couldn't breathe for so much longer than I would ever admit to you. Part of me still can't really get there. Get back to where I can breathe easily without focus. When we were doing the whole "still in love with each other while dating other people" thing it made everything awful. That life lived in the shades of gray was my existence for so much longer than it was for you. I don’t think your world ever went gray over me. Why is that? Didn’t I love you good enough for you to miss me a little… I know that we loved each other and it had nothing to do with me when you cheated. It took me some time but I finally figured it out. It wasn't about me. You just wanted to get away with it. Either way, you – our love and what you did with it, was the end of that girl that lived in me for all those many years that believed that love was the rhyme, reason, and purpose for every breath we take. You killed that girl so quickly that I can hardly remember her name. So much of me didn’t ever walk away from our love. It still lays there bleeding. I still worry sometimes that you will always have control over who I am because you made me this tiny thing inside that can't seem to muster confidence or trust or desire to love. I worry that I will always be this shattered excuse of a person because of how you ruined me. When I finally threw the "Tyler Box" away, I cried while doing it. I still lose my breath when I think I see you or see someone that moves like you or smiles like you. Not because I'm still in love with you, it's been so many years, Tyler. I lose my breath because I fear you. Fear seeing you and remembering all those mornings that I couldn't find the sun and all the nights I couldn't find rest after you ripped me apart. Some how though, still to this very key stroke, I feel as if I felt all those moments of pain because I lost you. Why is that? Didn’t you lose me? I’m afraid of you because I fear ever feeling that pain that lived in my chest until I couldn't remember what it felt like to not hurt that way. That pain just became who I am. Cuts salted and veins explode and some how… I fear you. I fear that moment that I lose myself in someone else and they destroy me without my consent and I am left to reinvent myself into someone that doesn't cry until she can't breathe. I don’t want to have to learn, again,  to become someone that doesn’t weep and ache until I can’t recognize those sounds and realize, horrified, when I see these sounds are my own. I know it may sound dramatic but it's the way I loved you. I’ve had too many people tell me that "I've never seen anything like you and Tyler"... Why would they tell me that? Don’t they know you ruined me? Don’t they see how awful it is to make me feel like I will never be loved again and if I am… they’ll all do just what you did. How many times can I be ruined before I just don’t get back up? Obviously, following you with Sergio was….well…. not the brightest idea. I didn’t know, then, though that he would break me too. I have spent all these years living in the shadows. Living as a ghost of the girl you stole. Could anything ever happen that allowed you to give her back to me? I am so tired of being told that it has nothing to do with you and that I have to find a way to be that girl all on my own again. Don’t they know she’s not dead in this world, don’t they know you still have her? How can I create someone new when the old heart lies with you? How many years will it take before I stop seeing our pain in every smile? How many kind words will it take, from the people who love me, to make me see that they aren’t saying it to cover lies? How many moments will I ruin because I can’t just allow myself to be in them because of all the moments you vacated and left me standing there alone with my heart in my hand? Will I ever be someone who is Me and isn’t the one that Tyler cheated on? Will you ever release my soul and allow me to be someone beautiful? What makes it hardest is that you have that girl. She is all wrapped up in every moment, every memory that was us, and you never did know her name. You never did know what you were doing to me or how you were destroying my every fiber. You didn’t care when it made so much of me leak until I went dry. You still don’t know her name, do you? The girl you stole from me. The girl who lives in your smile and your hands and your eyes. The girl who I watched dance across your eye lashes trying to get in and then trying to get free. She’s still locked in there, in your stare and your laugh and your breath. She stopped fighting for release. She accepted that you were now home. She lost her fight… You stole my fight. You stole everything about me that thought love was a color. The color of life. Why didn’t you care that you drained it to white? Why don’t you care that my heart is still white? At least if it had just small shades of something, anything, I could find the right mix to make a new color. Mix the color of the bruises that you left and make something new and, dare I say, better… You though, you drained it to white. White. Just…white. You left me with nothing. How could you do that? How could you steal my color and dangle it in front of me that way? You knew I was starving and just kept lying while you held it up to drain. You knew I loved you enough, too much, and that I would lie there while you took it away. White. I don’t know how to make something new from what you left and make it someone who can love again. I hope you love her, the girl, who used to be mine that you stole. I hope you hear our favorite songs and dance with her as she deserves to be spun by caring hands and held in loving arms. I hope you care for her when she cries and love her when she’s lonely and melt into her when you can’t stay away. I hope, so desperately, that you take care of her because she will always live in you because of what you did with us. I can’t look into your eyes but I think she will always love you and I hope, so deeply, that you will love her better than you ever loved us…

Adam...

I thought of you this morning when first waking. I don't know what brought you to my mind, you were just... there. I wondered how you were, Adam, and if your heart has healed. I don't know what broke it, nor would I ever ask, but I know the pieces of our heart's identify with one another's and know that they have common scars. I know your siblings treat you like mine treats me. Like you are nothing. Like you aren't good enough or smart enough or funny enough. I don't really have a way to tell you this but you ARE good enough and ARE funny enough, and you ARE much kinder and unique and beautiful an individual than most in this world, your brothers included. You have this childlike thing about you, that you are always waiting for that moment that they are going to let you in to their "club". You are in your 30's and somehow you are still waiting for that day. The day you gain entrance. What a beautiful soul you have, Adam. I hope that you find comfort in knowing that your soul is that good. You have made mistakes, many that hurt others, as have we all. I hope that you forgive yourself for those and know that from the time I was a small child I have always looked up to you and still do. Your ability to have that childlike wonder and carry something about you like you do, so buried, I sort of admire. I can identify with it sooner than others, because of the way my brother makes me feel. I see it in your eyes, when we are all together for family things... I see how much it hurts you and how much you wish it didn't. It's held deeper than mine though. You keep it more sheltered from the eyes of observers. You keep it hidden amongst laughter at yourself when a joke is made at your expense because you laugh along and cry later. I can't get mine that deep. I cry at the joke.

I admire you, Adam. I always have. You're beautiful and kind and completely yourself and I love you.

I hope that you have a holiday that has something special. Something that reminds you that you are loved, in abundance, on this holiday, as every other. A small part of me sees you...and recognizes a  hero.

Merry Christmas, Adam, and Thank You.
Thank you for giving me faith to be myself at several different moments in my life that you had no idea you were giving me that unspoken permission. Thank you.

Thank you for being yourself in times you could have "blended in". Thank you for giving me the strength to do that in so many moments that you didn't have any idea that I was watching.

Thanks, Adam. Just for being who you are.

What a beautiful life...

It’s Christmas time and some how I keep feeling like it’s summer (which I hate after about 1.3 weeks). This may be due to the 80 degree weather we are having here… I can’t even go into how angry this makes me. One time, just ONE TIME I would like to have a white Christmas and some how this year it’s 80 degrees. GRR! “Next year”, I keep telling myself, “next year”. Next year I’ll have more snow than I’ll know what to do with!!

Somehow though, while I am not thankful for this weather, for some reason I have been happy about the simplest things over the past few days. I am VERY easily pleased as it is so it’s not surprising that things like this make me this happy but they have been in abundance the last couple of days and have helped me smile while being sleepy and stressed… The list of happy things is as follows:

1.) I love when I pull a rubber-band off of something and it falls on my desk in a shape that is so similar to a treble clef. It’s like a little musical reminder of how lucky I am to have music in my world. It makes me happy.

2.) I love when someone calls on my work phone and knows exactly what they need, how they need to say it, or who they need to talk to. It makes me happy.

3.) I love when my phone goes bliiiing ity bling bling with a text message and I “know” who it’s from and then it’s from someone totally unexpected. It’s a reminder that someone was thinking of me, when I wasn’t around, and it’s a surprise all in one. It makes me happy.

4.) I love when I get new music. Music from a movie that moved me or music from someone because they loved me that much. Most people would think that it’s a cop out on spending money kind of gift if someone makes them a CD. I personally think it’s the best. For someone to hear the beauty and life that is music and think of me while doing so… What a lovely thing to have exist attached to my name and for them to give me music that they own, that they have and love… how special. New music makes me VERY happy.

5.) I love when I am looking for something, usually irrelevant, on the internet and google images gives me this random picture that has nothing to do with anything I am looking for but was tagged in some random way that brought it up in my search. So many times it’s these breath taking pictures that are so stunning that I can’t help but feel like they were a little surprise left there…just for me. The following picture is an example of this (which is now the background on my phone)… Can’t remember what the search was for but my goodness…

 

6.) I love when I expect to wake up sleepy and I wake up alert. Then I go to my closet without knowing what I am going to wear (which causes stress for someone who gets up in exactly enough time to clock in on the very minute she has to be at work) and my mind puts together a bangin’ outfit without me touching a thing. It’s just a better, fresher, start to a day that could have been otherwise meek and dreary. It makes me happy.

7.) I love when I go for a drink of coffee (vanilla chai tea, peppermint tea, vanilla late, ect.) that I know is going to be cold and it still has just enough heat to make it the perfect swallow. It makes me happy.

8.) I love when I find something in a store and it’s more than I want to pay for it but I really want it. I decide to try it on and then it works perfectly. I walk up, ready to pay more and then WHAT?! It’s on sale?! Oh my gosh that’s so exciting. I know that this makes everyone happy but the silly thing about it for me is that it always makes me buy something else. I didn’t want to spend that much and then get a break on it and I think “Well I was going to spend that much anyway so I’ll just get something else”. It makes me happy it the most ridiculous of ways.

9.) I love when I think something is going to make me miserable. Something that I just know is going to make me cry and lose my breath and have the dull ache in my chest that I can’t shake no matter the laughter or the words of love and then it happens and… I’m fine. I don’t know how it happens when it happens and it’s just so beautiful. To expect pain and when it doesn’t come, that relief bringing actual pleasure… It makes me very happy.

10.) I love this most of all… I love when I wake up on a Saturday morning/early afternoon after a relaxing, calm, restful sleep. I walk into my perfect living room in my comfortable sweats and snuggle up in my favorite chair. We (my roommate and I or just me if she's not home) eat unhealthy and delicious food all day long. We watch movie after movie and eat snacks and drinks the stuff we don’t take the time to get in the week before work. We laugh and commentate and just…are. We don’t have anything we have to do. We don’t have anything that even requires us to get dressed or worry at all that whole day. So many people find this lazy and so on. They would feel guilty or totally uncomfortable with just…being. I find it beautiful. We talk, every weekend we have the opportunity to live this way, about how lucky we are. How lovely a leisure it is that we can lay in our apartment, safe from the wild and crime and hunger and severe weather and do exactly what we want to. This makes me happiest of all... 

It’s such a pleasure and such a luxury that too many people don’t pay attention to. Not just take for granted but don’t make enough of an effort to really pay attention to. We all see these commercials or benefits or intense money raising campaigns after earthquakes and tsunamis and war… Every other day though, people just…forget. Take a moment: the next time you have 10 extra minutes to lay in bed when your body is warm and your pillow is the perfect cold -  or you have 30 minutes for lunch rather than a normal hour and you are stressed about it because it’s “unfair” – the next time you run out of shampoo or hairspray or whatever we use every day that seems like a necessity and have to use the back up bottle that we “hate” – the next time you are absolutely furious that your ipod died and you don’t have a way to charge it – the next morning you wake up and (only) have to do laundry that day – the next day that you get to live like you do that allows you to taste what you swallow and see what is coming up behind you and know what is in the bowl you are eating, the next evening you are sitting judging the person’s style choice in the booth next to you (we all do it and bullshit if you say you don’t) while at dinner across from someone you love or even someone you love to hate, the next midnight you are lying awake in your bed…

Really make yourself understand that you could be:

(instead of having to get up in 10 minutes) Paralyzed and unable to feel anything or even gone all together instead of feeling the soft touch of your sheets even if you have to get out of them in just a moment.

Or

(intead of a 30 min lunch) Going hungry. Not just “oh poor thing you are hungry” but really starving. You have that open, burning, empty, aching pit in your stomach that water would hurt in abundance because it’s been so long since your stomach knew what it was like to have it’s walls stretched.

Or

(instead of running out of shampoo)Walking to the community shower, in your shoes because “No one is allowed in the shower without shoes”, where you are washing each limb of your body, every hair on your head, every private crevice of your being in front of 15 others who are doing the same thing. No pride allowed, just hurry to shower in the cold water amongst the others and try your best to keep to yourself.

Or

(instead of having your ipod) Having to listen to the sound of mothers giving birth in a tent guarded by machine guns because the people holding those guns have just been waiting to take the baby from you that you carried because the same guns raped you. Or listening to the sounds of torture or pain without medicine or cries of women who watched their husbands get beat to death or kids that don’t understand where their parents went and why the people with the guns are hitting them so hard… You have the songs of your recently dead ipod in your ears until it’s charged again.

Or

(instead of having only laundry to curse your day) Going to the river to beat your 2 pairs of pants and 3 shirts against a rock naked because you only have a small amount of time to “do your laundry” and you can’t leave your clothes dirty to wear them while washing even.

Or

(instead of living like you get to) Eating whatever can be found while guarding whatever “it” is with your life because you can’t see what is coming up behind you and there isn’t anything that keeps what could be behind you from taking everything that is yours.

My bed, my fridge, my full laundry hamper –that says nothing of the closet and dresser that are still over flowing, my couch that has a snag and my phone that drops calls and my ipod that dies and my job that “doesn’t pay me enough”  and my friends that were too busy to have dinner one night and my vehicle that gets flat tires and has to be washed when it’s cold outside and my food that had a piece of foil in it and my sunglasses that get smudges too easily and my brand new nail polish that chips… What a beautiful life I lead. I’m so glad I have a bed and food and electronic devices that supply me with my “air” and friends who love me and a Mom who fills my fridge when she comes, no matter how old I get, and a job that supplies me with enough income to buy Christmas presents for the ones I love - even if it’s not in abundance, and allows me to eat dinner with these beautiful people I am lucky enough to call my friends – even if it’s just something quick and cheap. What a beautiful life I lead in comparison to the lives that are lead by people across the seas and right down town in every city we lucky people, who bitch about everything we are lucky enough to have – most certainly myself included, fall asleep in every night. What a beautiful fucking life I lead. A merry Christmas it will be in my bed, with my beautiful tree in my beautiful apartment surrounded by gifts and my Mom under my roof and my friends wishing me just that… Merry Christmas to the lucky ones. I’m glad I remembered today, in such a passionate fashion, that I am, in deed, one of the lucky ones. Merry Christmas in deed because of this beautiful life I lead.

  

If it changes your life - Let it.

I thought about him quite frequently this weekend, but it bothered me much less. The idea that I am bothered by this, I have shared with a few close friends, and they tell me it is not insane and that they would feel the same way. Some how, this made it better. It made it easier to not feel so ashamed of the humiliation and the despair that have taken residence in my chest the past few weeks. It made me feel less like it was me than it was a normal reaction. It bothers me still but it hurts less. This was a huge step, resulting in a wonderful Monday morning. Maybe there were things about him that I didn’t see yet that would have appeared too late and I would have been trapped. I’m not good at walking away from things, when I know I should, if I am emotionally involved. Maybe he would have been another heart break that I couldn’t have survived. I will learn to take this as something I wouldn’t have been able to avoid, had he stayed such a force in my mind and be happy that the universe bestowed the kindness that it did in removing him from my path.

I watched such wonderful movies this weekend. Somehow, in all of my thousands of movie mornings, afternoons, days and nights, I had never seen Tuesdays with Morrie. What a phenomenal film. This too, helped quiet the pain in my chest. The wisdom of those whose lives that have already been lived will never stop astounding me. The things that I look back at now and think of how silly and trivial they were to have been fretting over. I don’t believe that it changes how you should have been effected but it does feel nice to look back at how far I have come in 26 years. When you feel like your whole world is falling apart, it’s okay to feel that way because, at the time you are shattering, it is actually the end of your world. There may not be death, their may not be a change in the Earth you walk on, it doesn’t change that it is the end of your world. After being hurt like I was with the loss of my first love, my world was over because it has never, nor could it ever be the same. With the loss of my father, my world was over for so many reasons. My face would never be touched by his loving eyes. My ear would never hear the beat of his heart. My many days to come, so full of numerous important things, would never have his support or kindness or love in attendance. He was gone and so was the world as I knew it. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to have my world changed or even brought to an end. I read something that was so simple and in such few words, changed my attitude towards so many things…

These simple words: If it changes your life – let it.

The anxiety labeled fear, breeds in my blood when I think of ever losing this information that I inadvertently learned and instantaneously fell in love with… if it changes my life – let it. If I miss someone or gain someone or love someone or lose someone or hurt someone or cry until I can’t remember how to catch my breath… just let it happen. Let it change me like it is going to either way. Let it change me like it needs to. I learned that if I take in account all the things I fight so hard against I spend far too much of my time fighting life. Fighting others, fighting myself, fighting situations and feelings and moments. Moments that could very likely take me to some place new and teach me how to be someone new that instead I fight. If it changes my life – let it. Just learn to let it.

It’s odd how such simple words could make me excited to be someone new.

While watching the movies, that I did, this weekend I suddenly felt different. Different about myself and different about the coming months. I have been going back and forth with myself about getting my shit together and losing weight. I’m not a monster but I weigh much more than I should. A couple of the movies I watched were stories of an extraordinary kind of love. Love that, in some ways, actually did create miracles. Love that is something so beautiful and so unique that there wouldn’t be a way to replicate this sort of magic if you wanted to. Love that is built so firmly within the identities of such individuals that it has no choice but to be one of a kind.

So many people that I know, none of which who read this or even know this blog exists, tell me that I am “unique”. I was told once, years ago, before I was even really aware of what a compliment I was receiving , that I was “intriguing because I was unique”. To some, these words are a few of many that could be used to make someone feel the way you want them to that will help you reach the ultimate goal of head fucking them so royally that they can’t remember who they were before your invasion. These words, in the context of the compliment I received, weren’t to get me into bed or to make me feel in any way different that the moment before the words were spoken for any purpose that just providing the information about a feeling. I wish I had housed the ability then to step back and realize what it means to be intriguing, especially if your intrigue stems from originality. In one word you go from being someone, just one in a sum, to being one who stands alone. What a brilliant thing to be. Someone who is unique. I am allowing myself to find the beauty in this, all these years later, because it is something that I was slowly losing sight of. I tend to do that. Allow things, even and sometimes especially, the important things to become smeared into gray when I feel rejected or lose sight of my worth. While I don’t carry confidence in many things, I do own, proudly, my accomplished desire to be someone who is in deed, unique. In all the heartache I have been dealt and all the drama I have been weaved in to and all loss and agony I have survived, I have survived uniquely. I have survived as exactly who I am. Someone the same, someone different, someone weaker, someone stronger, someone bigger, someone smaller, someone broken and someone whole – I have survived as me. This is something that I take great pride in, today more than others for a reason unknown. I am not perfect, nor would I want to be. I am not demonic, nor would I try to be. I am not beautiful, I am not revolting, I am not completely compassionate nor completely hard. I am however, me, and while it may fall in only a moment, I take great pride in me today.

Set fire to water

Have you ever realized, in what seems like all at once, that you don’t have the slightest clue about how to be happy? I tell you now, it propels a heavy rage that, in me is somehow still sort of numbed out. It’s not easy finding cracks behind the cracks you knew were there that lead you to see that you are far more shattered than you could have even placed. It aches. I don’t know when my heart started crying and I don’t know when it lost that ability to do so… I only know that I ache.

I met this guy and he was…so many things. So many things I thought were good. So many things I always wanted to find in someone, aside from my good friend Kyle, who is gay. I couldn’t count the number of times we discussed how exquisite my life would be if I found someone that was just like him but straight. What we didn’t talk about was me finding someone like him that didn’t want me…

Devastation.

I have gained the ability, over the years, to manipulate my feels fairly easily if I can catch it soon enough in. I keep trying to stop thinking, stop feeling, stop wondering and worrying and I can’t seem to get there. My mind still races in circles and ends up at him. My mind races in triangles trying to figure out what was wrong with me this time. My mind races through square tracks wondering what happened and where he went. My mind dives through these octagons of self doubt and internal loathing. If you were to lay these shapes over and over and over again, on paper, at the same speed and with the same intensity that my mind does repetitively like this, you would soon see what used to be this lovely idea in my mind soiled with the ink of the lines crossing each other until there is nothing left but this…void. This space that is never quiet but saying nothing new. Just that it was me that he didn’t want and that it makes it clear that nothing has changed. Crying drown by screaming that’s drown by tears and so on. All the while, in this space, my face smiles. Smiles big and laughs often because this Jekyll and Hyde routine is exhaustingly who I’d like to say I have become but I am fairly certain it is who I have always been. Blackened laughter and bruised dreams. Loveless longing and an aching beat. Just once, I’d like to remember, if I ever did know, that the beautiful things in this world are for people like me too. Just once I’d like to stand on top of my world and set fire to water and know that one moment of that moment was actually, really, wholly, unsuperficially and unscathingly something made of…magic. No rabbits out of hats or flowers from a sleeve. I want that magic feeling like love. Real, unbridled, purely decadent love. That makes you new, for even just a moment. It makes you exist.

Christmas is almost here, and for some reason everything about this season makes me want to feel alive in all the ways that I am dead. The lights and decorations and weather and food and fragrances make it seem like it is the right time to love someone. In the cold, in the snow, in the early moonlight. Somehow, this year, it’s about him. How obnoxious. Of him to have done that to me and for me to be that way. How obnoxious am I... It’s grotesque. Those feelings though, that I usually have such a tight reign on, ran wild for a moment too long because of this or that and now I can’t seem to gain control. Hopefully though, it will subside soon. It’s my last Christmas in Texas, for a while at least. It’s my last Christmas with my best friend in the US. It’s my last Christmas with my other best friend in the same town. It’s the last time that I will wake up on that magical morning and know that they are all so close. These Christmas angels of mine, that make every day something beautiful. These friends of mine will all be so far away this time next year. I know this is coming and I want to cherish every moment that’s left here. He’s tarnishing that with stressful, sadened thoughts, and this makes me furious. How dare he. How dare he set fire to me and leave it to run wild, burning everything that was starting to feel alive again after all this time. How dare he turn me to ashes like that. How fucking dare he…

I spent last week in New York. It was everything I wanted it to be. Busy and cold and beautiful and dirty and made me feel squeaky clean. I live in a small place where people are stupid and spoiled and hard hearted and judgmental and close minded and mean. If you walk alone you are avoided. If you eat alone it happens amongst countless prying eyes. In New York, it was just living. Walking among hundreds of people I felt crowded and still had the comfort of feeling alone. It was magnificent. I can’t wait to get to Chicago. I’m just not made for Texas. I have known that all along but the trip up North made it that much more obvious. It made it that much more real, that places like that do exists and that in just a few short months I will be living in a place where I can be busy and lonely. It's made for me. 

I had jury duty this morning. I have ALWAYS wanted jury duty. I want to be on a murder trial so bad. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think this happens often, but this morning, my very fist jury duty, was CANCELED. They just didn’t need jurors. What the fuck? Who does this happen to? If I documented my wildly bad luck people would think it’s false. It’s like there is something out there… a bitch friend of mother nature… that waits to pounce on each moments she can. Waits for these moments that could be grand or even just unnoticed and makes them something terrible. I don’t really think a lot of it now. I laugh when people ask “Who does that happen to?” because I ask it approximately 75 times a week… Who does this shit happen to? I know it happens to me but does it happens to others or is it something special that I don’t know about just for me? It’s ridiculous. However, I try and be happy with the repayment of some of these moments with excellent rock star parking spaces, pretty much everywhere I go, and really excellent clothing deals. It's something I have, that far exceeds others, so I guess it’s not all bad.

I ordered Eat Pray Love, book and DVD, and I can’t wait. This movie, is the movie, that changed my life. It’s the biggest reason I was open to meeting the pyromaniac that fucked me up. It’s also the reason that I am more comfortable with myself and who I am and the biggest reason I was finally able to convince myself to make the move to Chicago. It made me feel like someone, somewhere, wrote a story – just for me. While other people can see it they don’t know what it was saying because it was written just for me. For me to see and be changed in so many ways that I went home happy to be crying and crying because I was happy. It made me breathe in and find something beautiful about the air. It made me see myself like I want someone else to see me. It made me feel like… Christmas morning.

Years ago, I read something that changed me more than anything I think I have ever read. It was a note from a girl to a boy that read “I love you like Christmas morning”. I knew, at that moment, that I would never be the same. I knew that this line was something that I must feel before it’s love. Real, love. The love that is going to make me new. Give up half of my bed. Share a bathroom. Give up HALF MY CLOSET. Give up my alone time. This love, the one that is my Christmas morning, is different. It’s not built from romance or lust or similarities. It’s a love built of sheer…magic. The feeling like I know nothing can hurt me as long as he’s around. The feeling that no one will see me, breathe me, love me, need me the way that he does. The way that every time I hear his heart beat or feel him cry or make him laugh that I will be made better, stronger, more beautiful because I truly believe Audrey Hepburn… “Happy girls are the prettiest girls”. It doesn’t matter that I look like this and hate it. It doesn’t matter that I cry at this and want to change it. It doesn’t matter that I think like this and don’t understand it. It matters that when, if ever, I love someone like that, how I look and what I think will be something beautiful to someone that makes life magical. What is life with out a little magic. I want to love someone. I don’t know if I can. I certainly don’t know if someone could ever love me. Especially like Christmas morning. I guess that’s my fear… that I will never be someone’s pixie dust. I will never be what completes someone’s masterpiece or makes them feel like every time my heart beats or tears fall or laughter rings that my existence is something…magical. Part of me, that continues to escape all the fires, hope for a love like that…

Can I feel enough, be enough, love enough to find a way to set fire to water...