W O R D V O M I T

I got sleepy and thought I'd rest my eyes on something familiar. The selves we all so readily left behind, what seems like not that long ago but in some ways is a life time. I thought about how small we all felt, begging for the pens to crawl off the paper and mark our skins, edit the selves we never knew, the adults we were becoming--halfheartedly. And we all took a stab at growing. Carving into ourselves more&deeper until we realize we couldn't grow just by tearing ourselves apart. You minus comas, you minus past-tense-shifts, you minus high school. The only way we could grow was to add in jobs, to add in stress, to add in real-life-problemsolvingbullshit and deal with the things our parents still think we're too young for.

So our eyes get tired and we all blink more than the average person. And we all wander off the map to places where people don't know what vocals, visuals, or crazy art school kids are and we get scared. Or we get scary.

I feel taller, I only speak word processor. And reading all those words you said, the image clusters and the metaphors wet my lips and made the words creep out of me. And my fingers shook, really shook, and I crawled into myself and thought about crying. Because it really isn't youth until you're older. When you're there, when you're standing in that skin it's the oldest you've ever been and you feel it. You feel like you're all you're ever going to be, you feel invincible and tiny and the same time. Safe in whatever corner of high school you've stored yourself away in. But when you have to actually walk outside, and you look back--you really see what's true. You really know what happened and I see us differently than I see MTV and down town Collins. We look big. We look nearly full-screen. We embody the missing link in adolescence. We are prepared as prepared could be. And that makes me happy.

Nostalgia is youth minus youth. It's younger minus stress; hormones; parents. It's riding in the car singing American Pie. It's staying up all night writing plays in your dorm room. It's a real life cafeteria musical every day. It's what you want to see. But I'm choosing something else. When I look at you all I'm choosing more than that.

I want to see you crying on the bathroom floor, dragging your mattress in so we can sleep alone and talk and whine and tell each other everything no one ever knew except for the few friends we don't have anymore. The things you never tell boyfriends because they don't stick around. And we had to learn that the hard way.

I want to see your parents house ripped in half and you parenting your siblings 100 miles away. I want to see you succeed beyond that and force them to balls out and be proud of you. Because you're so much more beautiful when you're falling apart, only then can everyone see how strong you are. How together you're becoming despite everything. How perfect we are because of the holes drilled in us before we're old enough to know it's happening.

And it makes me want to write. It makes me want to put you all in words, in free form poetry images slipping down acrylic paper and dancing through my typewriter. But you are more words than I have fingers for. And they just aren't used to the pole-driving method of type writers. They racket of production. They're spoiled by these computer machines.

I just don't want you to fill in the memories with some nirvana high school experience that didn't exist. We did things. It was hard. But don't fill in those holes we never drilled with parts of us that don't exist. Love the people we are. The whole person. Even the people that aren't whole, even the cracks that let the light out enough for you to see the perfectly broken people we really are.

And I just want to love you. In whatever way that love can be in whatever distance has to be between us for me to, in some way, be able to appreciate and accept that you exist.

I don't edit these things. My computer sits here with blogger open until I think it's been filled enough. I just thought you should know. I'm aware I ramble.