Paper and Ink

(Try reading this one while listening to 'Gone So Long' by Breathe Carolina.) 

Empty coffee cups, pads of paper bleeding my ink. Stories swirl around me, pulled by the gravity of my imagination. Take what you will, and take what you need: I have enough for everyone. What you see is a smile, and what lurks beneath the surface of my thoughts is a river, wide and deep, strong enough to drown you, gentle enough to refresh you. Skin like eggshells, so delicate and beautiful, protected by the armor no one sees. Read my lips, guess my mind. Blankets and warm fires, strong sunlight and warm water, I will keep you content and give you a place to grow. Gently, I spread my wings and feel the ripples around me, life like drops of water in a lake. Stories are all around us, new and beautiful. Words live within us, powerful and nurturing. Some cannot see, some close their eyes, and others leave what they cannot understand for the closeness of their own worlds. Strong hands shall cradle your dreams, saving them like fireflies in beautiful mosaic jars. Leaving the nest, forgetting the rest, passing the test: strive for my understanding. Close your eyes and breathe in, feel the black and white march across the white waters of the world. Breathe out, and spread your paper wings across the calico skies. Maybe you will shrink away, afraid of the vast emptiness beyond your comprehension. Maybe you will fill it with your ideas, words, stories, drawings, and all your creations. But maybe, just maybe, as you look out to the void, you will understand that there must always be a small corner, an escape from the bustling of today and the rustling of paper, that can never be filled. Curl up, and go to sleep here, with open hands and a peaceful mind. Come out when you are ready, and begin again. 

On the Wing

Soundtrack: On The Wing by Owl City

Wide-eyed, feel the slow rhythm pulse in time with your breathing. In, out, in, out, as deep as the tide and as wide as your soul. Deep blue, beating heart. Oceans fill you with the waves, even as you walked on the paved roads of the city’s center. Walk in the woods, smell the pines around you. Walk, run, and then glide over the fallen leaves, the wood loam, the sea foam, the firm and soft sands, the asphalt, the colored glass. Stand apart, look over the balcony and see beyond. Neon dreams and flashing signs neither distract nor detract, not so far down under the surface. Curl up in your apartment bed, and wake to find yourself in the mountains. Follow the soft, swelling tide all the way to the center of yourself. Reach out and stretch, never lose your starry gaze as you see past the mass of humanity that neither adds nor takes away, but simply is. Rise up, and feel the sky scrape your back as you fly. No, not fly: that is no way to describe this. You float over the earth, neither judge nor creator, but simply a watcher. See every vein in every leaf, every grain of sand, every drop in the ocean, every pane of stained glass, and yet, still take in the forest, the beach, the great, seething sea, and the cathedrals standing as sentinels against the night. The pearls that shine in the sea, deep in their protected shells, have nothing against you. They wait, watch against their time. They know they will one day leave, to grace the old arcades and grand old avenues. So too the gems in the mountains, hidden and sleeping. Float above all this, do not take part, until you are as a star in the sky to the people watching below. The words that will never echo from your mouth again sound forth in the deepest tiers of your soul. “Are you there?” Once again, become aware of the rhythm and pull of the sea, the oceans, and the moon. “Are you there?” Breathe in the sand, the pine needles, the stones of the mountains, the grains of the beach, the feathers of all the birds, the clouds in the sky, and the water on the face of the Earth. It is enough. “Or are you just a decoy dream, in my head?”

It is enough. 

She Has A Way With Words

“She has a way with words.”

She cast her spells as casually as she threw aside her cloak in the springtime, weaving intricate stories where there was no visible loom. Like ripples in a pond, her words and feats of mouth spread, reaching everyone in her small worlds and beyond. Count her as a friend, and you will never die. Make her your enemy, and she shall smite you down with power you never knew could be housed in her stately frame. And yet, most only see the effects of her words, the symptoms of her greatness. They never know, never will find out what really transpires, behind the scenes as it were, in her mind. They hear her words and look to her lips: a wonderful, lucky few see her stories play out behind their eyelids, and then look to her mind. She is free. She is a princess in her tower, a passenger on a mysterious ship, a warrior resting before battle, a weary soul laying down to rest, a young girl finding love, a star in the endless night sky. If only there was a lens through which you could see her lives, her stories, her imagination, you would never take it off, never leave her side. Her words, her words! They worry and tease, they sting and bite, they soothe and heal, they rip and tear, they rise and fall with the cadence of her every mood. If only there was a way to share intimately this great mind, to touch thoughts, to let her fill you, make you overflow with the wonderful things she has to show! In comparison, you feel your own words fall flat. Nonetheless, you must try and that statement that emerges becomes such a complement, and yet, it is hard to ignore how small and inconsequential it is before the great sky of her stories.

“She has a way with words.” 

Viewpoints

Let the city fill you up, let it overwhelm you. You can drown in the noise, burn yourself with the movements, and immerse your mind in the rhythms, take your pictures and then follow me out to the desert. Breathe in the smell of the creosote after the afternoon rain, feel your heart beat even faster as you race above the sand on two to four wheels, and laugh with delight as you find a relic of Indian life. Come down to the valley, nestled in the shade of pine and pecan trees, and sip on sweet tea as you watch alfalfa ripple like water in the wind. Hear the guitars strum and soft voices harmonize against a blazing sunset, and later, take a walk under a sky overflowing with stars. You may go back to your city, with its mindless rhythms and thoughtless days, but remember how you felt here in the desert you may prefer your city, but I belong to the desert. 

Dancing With Strangers

Stepping out of the carriage, I take a moment to stare at this grand palace, but only a moment. It would not be seemly to appear late, or to hold up the next arriving guest. I sweep up the stairs, and find my way through the palace to the grand hall, already filled with wonderful music and dancing couples. The footmen announce my arrival as soon as the song is over, and everyone takes a moment to bow to me, the guest of honor, as I carefully make my way over to the dance floor. Every young man my age is expected to take a dance with me, and I am soon swinging from arm to arm, dancing gracefully, sweeping around the room in my beautiful ball gown, seemingly made of leaves and vines. The great crystal chandelier floats above us in a sky made of gold and pink clouds. Everything here is perfect, and the music is simply grand. It is easy to dance to such tunes, my body easily swaying and molding to the shapes the sounds dictate to me. How beautiful this evening is, surrounded by friends, meeting beautiful strangers, and taking part in the festivities. But yet, something seems to flicker at the edges of my vision. Something is changing, something important. For a while, I cannot remember, but then, I glance at the ceiling. It is changing. The wonder sky painted upon it is fading, is changing. No longer the marvelous colors of the sunset sky, it is fading into greys and dark blues. As soon as I realize this, everything else starts to change as well. The guests take their leave, and fade into the air. The footmen announce the next song, but all I hear is a light breeze, rustling through the trees. I stand, and slowly turn, surveying my new surroundings. I am merely standing in an orchard, the dead leaves rustling under my feet. The sun has just set, and in the twilight, I can see my plain brown and green dress. Maybe I was never in a ballroom, maybe I never danced with those people, and maybe I never heard that glorious music: but in my mind, I hold those memories, memories of a dance that had never truly happened. 

The Story of My Life and Writings

Hello, Dearest Readers, 

Here is something I wrote for my college English class, which I thought you might like to read. It is the story (in essay format) of how I learned to read and write. (It's pretty long, so kudos to you if you read the whole thing)

I remember learning to read when I was four. It was an incredibly early age to start down a road so complex, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I had had enough of staring at the magic lines on the paper, the lines that somehow turned into the words and stories that my mother read to me, deep in the living room couch that she had upholstered herself. There was magic to them, like a box on your birthday that you know houses a delightful surprise. Though it was hard to keep my attention on anything at that age, learning how to read kept me quietly occupied for hours at a time. As I grew older, I realized that this early start had taught me far more than words and letters: I understood the intricate meanings and abstractions behind them. This is how my journey of words really began, leading me to ascend a staircase of ever greater literary heights throughout the stages of my childhood and adolescence.

By first grade, I realized that something was wrong. My hours and hours of reading children’s novels and dissecting the words and phrases in songs on long road trips were fueling something that I didn’t have. It felt like there was water pouring out in front of me, but I had nothing to catch it with. Finally, one day, I came across a name in a book. That name captivated me, and I repeated it to myself, over and over, until unconsciously, a person formed around that name. A woman, practically a goddess, who was worthy of that glorious name. I decided a few days later that earth was too common a perch for my brainchild, so I created a new world for her, naming it with another name stolen from my beloved books.

I was overjoyed to find what was missing from my creative process, and instantly began flexing my imagination. I would watch an interesting movie, or read a good book, and then hit rewind in my mind and insert my character somewhere early in the storyline, and then imagine how the story would change. Through this, I learned plot, story writing, series of events, protagonists and antagonists, climax and finish. Eventually, I came across one online comic that I couldn’t leave. Usually, after finishing out the new storyline in my head, I would leave it behind and start a new one, but this comic, and especially the four main characters, stayed with me for years. I had already mastered storylines and understanding how characters would react in any given situation, but as I began to mature and change, my new characters, as well as my original character, began to grow with me. Through the awkward stage of puberty, I learned character development, and along the way, added four new companions to my mental wanderings.

After writing down short stories of my character’s doings for so long, I grew tired of them. I still loved my characters, of course, but I didn’t enjoy the writing anymore. I couldn’t stand the rules, didn’t want to follow all of the niceties of narrative writing. One day, I finally sat down, grabbed a notebook, and just wrote. Ignoring all the rules, I found myself pouring out words, phrases, and all of my thoughts in a torrent that alleviated my need for rule breaking. The result was a beautiful form of prose that painted an abstract picture in my mind. I consider this to be one of the greatest achievements of my literary career, and it is still one of my most beloved forms of self-expression.

High school was a period of pain and discovery for me. I became an outcast in my private charter school, spending lunch in the library to avoid the humiliation of having to eat alone. I had no friends, and eventually, my mother, who was my main rock of consolation, was swept up in legal battles with the school, leaving her with no time for me. I was incredibly alone, and I turned to the poems of Edgar Allen Poe, which swept me into a whirlwind of depression. I began cutting myself, leaving long, bloody marks on my arms that I later had nightmares about. Through this time, I learned poetry, expressing my despair through long, demented poems. Eventually, my mother pulled me out of that school, and when I had recovered, I renounced my poetry, keeping only one poem from that time. Now, I rarely write poetry, since that kind of writing was is now tainted with unhappy memories, like water stained with ink.

In my sophomore year of high school, I decided to start a blog. I knew it would never become a very popular or well-read blog, but I definitely had ideas and writings that I wanted to share with the outside world. I started it in May of 2010, and steadily posted my abstract writings, updates on my life, and occasionally pictures and videos that I found interesting. As I was part of no sort of social media, it became a way for me to give people ideas and my own opinions. It was a good way to teach myself how to present my writings to the internet or to people, in general. Through that blog, I learned that it was okay to share my thoughts over the internet, and to put a piece of my mind, like a thumbprint, upon the web.

When I turned sixteen, I began to write a book. My characters and ideas that had lived for so long in my head had now matured enough for me to write a full-scale novel. However, an unlucky Irish temper that had been inherited by me now raised its head. Twice, I deleted my half-finished novel in fits of rage, and once more, locked it in a word document and forgot the password. However, I once more began to write, helped along in the process by National Novel Writing Month, a challenge to write 50,000 words during the month of November. I managed to write 45,000 words, and finished my book a few months later, at around 60,000 words, when I was seventeen. I never published it, but I fully intend to in a few years. It remains my masterpiece, a wonderful monument to my willpower and imagination.

Looking back, one can see how the stages of my life affected my literacy. As I began fine-tuning motor skills and learning how to speak fluently, I also began to read and expand my vocabulary. First grade led me to discover children’s novels, which in turn inspired my own epic literary creations. The awkward ages of puberty taught me character development, and my teenage rebellion years helped me find a kind of self-expression that helped me deal with my unruliness. A time of confusion, sorrow, and loneliness helped me to discover poetry, and my need for online social interaction turned into a blog where I could post all my thoughts and writings. As I prepared to become an adult, I began to settle down and find my stride in long term writing though writing a book that would take persistence and stamina throughout the years. Adulthood taught me willpower and endurance. Reading has never deserted me throughout all of these stages, but has acted as a stepping stone to reach the next level of writing proficiency. I was not always a great writer, but as time passed, my hours of reading and imperfect writings has led me to a level of mastery and excellence in writing that even my tremendous imagination could not possibly have imagined.

Stardust in September

Look at us, falling through the galaxy. Take me away with you, I don’t know where…but I know you do. Come on, dance through the leaves in this memorable September. We’ll have to part, but not now. I try to find you, but all I can hear is you singing me along:

“I may be lost, but you’re not found

Where our wings scrape the sky

But our feet stay on the ground”

Dive deep, into crystalline caverns filled with sharp angles and soft lighting. Walk on the surface, still thousands of miles from earth, kicking up dust and leaving footprints that never fade. Float above it all, lounge among the sounds of the stars, find yourself in the sky, and lose yourself once again on the journey back home. We’re back here, and as I hesitantly push open your door, I see that you are the one that needs me to take your hand and lead you back to the starry heights that I know you forgot. And gently, oh so gently, I cradle your cracked porcelain heart in my hands and slowly, oh so slowly, bleed for you. One day we’ll be okay, I swear to myself. We’ll leave it behind and watch the stars, and laugh to each other just to hear the sound of our joy. When we get there, I’ll let you know, and before anyone can take the next step, look back. Old pains make new contentment into something you can never let go. We’ll find ourselves in the memories that we had forgotten, plastering old photos of ourselves on the wall, like an extra layer of skin thick enough to absorb it all. Let our structures fall apart. Take off your shoes, and remember what old leaves and fragments of paper feel like on the soles of your feet, on your soul. Breathe in the rain, and walk on the old train rails, through hometowns we have forgotten. But the stars never fade, not like we do. When you remember yourself, let me know, and we can smile shyly at each other as our old routines are revived. You’ll lead me again, up to the old attic that I had sealed off until today. Pick up that old box, blow the dust off, and let the stars out to play around us again. Our hands meet, and we dance again, just like we used to, before I packed our stars in that box, before you forgot how to walk barefoot in September.