It’s not that I’ve never needed anyone to understand, never to relate or sink beneath their nails. I’ve not asked one person to doubtlessly agree or ponder in the same perspective. I am my own pool. I build my own bulbs out of someone else's glass, and I’ve done it with ease. No one else keeps them aglow after the preceding spark. I am my own battery, often needing a preliminary click, the on switch activated by collecting someone else's light. But I run my own show. I jump-kick my own cables. I intertwine my own lines. I weave my own thread, and I’ve never asked another needle to help me play that part. But sometimes, I want someone to listen.

I never rode horses. I never climbed mountains. I never went to the lake. I never needed help to make up that dance; I just wanted someone to watch me. So much imagination and creativity hits my restless mind that I struggle to run after my own ideas, because I only end up losing them and chasing after them again. I do not struggle to stand out from a crowd of look-alikes. I know I’m not the only one and I know to never succumb to the overwhelming desire to be so — but sometimes I really need to know that I’m different than the rest, especially if I’m not considered a similar species of situation. I need to know I am something of my own, of my own tangle. I need to know that I spin my own web and you’re caught up in it. I need you to tell me I’ve got you caught and that you'll keep your promises and hold your head high beside me and not deny it.

It frustrates me when I simultaneously mix in with the other hues and blend onto an artist’s brush; or when my creativity crumbles slowly to the other side of the plain spectrum.
First I stop washing my favorite mug right after I drink from it. I leave the bills in my mailbox but take the letter. Stop picking the clothes off the floor, a sweater here; some socks there. I stop talking as much and start keeping my hair up more than I let it down. I forget about writing and about saying "goodnight" and "thank you" and all the little, but most important things that make my world orbit around. Yet, the grass outside keeps growing taller and the world keeps spinning madly on but this is how it gets bad. How I give up in small anecdotes until I give up for real.

I gave up on so many things and I need to figure out how to pour the measuring cup of my life back out without flooding the floor. I enjoy weaving my own, individual motives onto an old sweater and seeing others observe my difference; to watch the way people's hands move when they are nervous; to remember the idea of home as a state of mind. Wooden front doors. Midnight camels on my front steps. To feel what it is like to miss so bad it hurts. And the darkest side of that last point is that it never gets easier. And the quality of the ache isn't always relative to the amount of space, either. The distance between the past and the present, the present and the future, my mom's house and every city where it isn't, the open space of fields or the intrusion of the water that covers my entire surface area, the stories I like to tell and the places where they manifested, my head underneath the flat plains of worn floors. Nothing has ever made me more desperate than these distances of originality and creativity. Even worse, I am always aware of them and I sense when one pulls closer and when another reaches farther and farther and farther and farther and farther.


It will all seem so real that you will believe you'll always remain this way. And you're not sure if you're dancing to a voice any more or if the voice is dancing you. Or if you're even dancing at all. You’re not acting. You’re sharing how things really are.

Do you ever feel good knowing there’s not a lot to feel good about anymore, but just enough to sink and swell inside of anything that hints at tempting possibilities? Nobody’s solid anymore. Nothing is original. We live in a broadcasted world. But of course ... Facebook has an “about me” section.

There’s nothing like knowing, upon the meeting of tomorrow, you have no idea where you’ll end up going. Be your own spectrum, not someone else’s. Be that fruit loop in a world full of cheerios. Be your own kind. Be you.