Someone gave me a jigsaw puzzle and no picture to match it to.

At 2:45 AM on February 7th, there is dissonance.

There is a red door I have never seen that screams life and pain at equal levels. There is a feeling like the ones wind chimes give me--deep, resonant, and hollow.

I am not inside my body. I am on a front porch with a girl whom I love more than anyone I have ever met, and I cannot explain why. I am telling her that when she laughs at me, it hurts my feelings, and she laughs again, and I love her more. God help us both, I love her more.

I am not inside my body. I am standing in front of that red door, with its broken telephone dangling from a stretched cord, waiting for my best friend to come back. She won't. She has fallen in love and in need with the people inside that house. I can't even say I blame her.

I am not inside my body. I am watching my loved ones cry. I watch my brother as he watches the world end and inscribes it in ink in his sketchbook. I can't say that I've ever seen an apocalypse myself, but it doesn't matter--he has. And that dread is more real than any life I will ever try to lead.

I am not inside my body. I am not outside of it, either. I am barely a soul, existing on simple, failed dreams and a desperate love so strong it rips me to shreds every time I dare to probe it. I want to be a lighthouse, even after all these years. I want to be a harbor. I want to be the shore. I want the hurricane inside a five-year-old girl to pass above me over and over and overandoverandover until it stops. Until the clouds clear and maybe she can do better than me.

I am not inside my body and I wonder if that means there is space for someone else's fears to nest in the bowl of my pelvis, or roost on my sloping shoulders. Can the people I've met with no voice borrow my vocal cords? Can they find peace in the newfound silence of my inner ears?

I am barefoot on the porch with the girl whom I love more than anyone, and when I watch her reach for my hand I am filled with vehement passion. I am filled with poison. I am filled with the question of existence--hers and mine, here. Someone loved someone else, and neither person was us, and now here we are, the Big Dipper shining pin-point bright over our heads, and we are here. We are here because someone else decided we should be, with not a single thought spared to what that means.

I watch the hurricane-girl spin and spin and spin and I am filled with anger. Because here she is, volatile and beautiful, and no one ever thought about what that would mean for her. Only for themselves. Only in her creation. But she's the one who will deal with the storm inside her small and hurting head every moment from now until her world ends. Until she is not inside her body.

I love them. With the atoms in my blood, I love them. With the neurons in my head, I hate that they are here. That I am here. That someone else pulled us all from the void and said, it is your job to exist.

There is dissonance.
I am not in my body.
There is dissonance.
I am in one someone decided should be mine.
There is dissonance.

There is love.

Even here, where there is no choice, there is love.

Fragments: Ends and Starts

The hardest thing to do as a writer is to try and capture those things that no amount of writing can ever do. Even the act of explaining your silence to the paper turns itself into a cliché, as if it is defying any effort you could ever put towards making any of it legible to the rest of the world.

But nothing can ever be read the way you mean it to. Every single mind that drinks it in will take it from the vessel of their own lives, and its taste will be altered by the experience in which it's found.

- - -

My friends enjoy drinks filled with alcohol that taste like forgotten childhoods, and I can't help but wonder if maybe we all want things to act like wheels—carrying us forward while returning to the same spot again and again. Perhaps we do what we do because we're hoping that repeating our actions will somehow bring us peace. As if replicating happiness will cause it to stay.

A mark of experience is recognizing these motivations.

Another is realizing that even wheels move on as they circle back

- - -

It's hard, contemplating the idea of leaving all these beautiful souls behind. There are so many people I've been promising to see this summer, and I know I can't follow through on all of those promises. I have two and a half months, and for some of that, I'll already be gone.

Still, the idea that my choice to go away to school means losing these connections temporarily... it's a scary thing. I feel like, perhaps, without their influence, what makes me a better person might fade. They are such a part of who I am, and they have been for so long. I have to wonder if I can be who I am now without them.

And then there are the people who I just started to know, people like the one who left poems (which you can find at the end of this post) tucked into the back of my yearbook, who I stayed up with until odd hours last night, discussing philosophy in metaphor so thick, I'm shocked either of us got out alive.

It has always been the idea of letting go that scares me.

- - -

So this is what it feels like to start—infinite potential plus infinite choice, fanning out like so much awe ahead of you, to be compressed one step and one choice at a time.

It's fragile. Potential is only valued if you can use it, and sometimes choices slip away before you get a grip on them. But it is also beautiful. Can you see it shimmer at midnight, trembling lightly with the sound of laughter from the backseat of an over-crowded car?

This is your life. This is your life, spread out like gossamer dreams behind the darkness of your eyelids. You only need to shut your eyes to see what you're becoming. Take a deep breath. Let it out.

You have your entire life ahead of you.

Start moving forward.

- - -

These are the two poems left in my yearbook. The author gave me permission to link to his blog. Aaron, has other pieces on his blog. You should read them. They are beautiful.

Prism and Passage by Aaron.