Hope for the best, but expect the worst.

I hear rain rapping on windowsills and puddles forming and growing, though the storm passed hours ago. It is nighttime and the sun is blinding, filtering through the cracks in my curtains and bathing my room in light. My family is partaking in rowdy conversation downstairs, laughing like drunkards and acting as though everything is fine, despite having left the house thirty minutes prior to me writing this. And I am so caught up in my past that I cannot even begin to comprehend the present.

Life flows together like ripples in a pool, and the waves crash just off shore and sometimes, it gets hard and unbearable and you think it will never get better to the point where your thoughts flow together and become so twisted, so knotted that it is impossible to distinguish one problematic situation from another and life just becomes one long run-on sentence and that is when you need to close your eyes, clear your mind and

breathe.

Because life really is not that hard. In fact, it is short. Choppy. Sentences. And fragments. That all end. Sooner or later. And as you flip the pages of your so-called life and as each chapter transitions into the next, you will realise that it gets better. In fact, the epilogue? Those last few tattered, dog-eared pages? They are filled with beautiful, wonderful words. The ending is simply marvelous, really. I assure you. And if it is not?

It is not the end.

They said I couldn’t do it,
I’d never be enough.
That when the going gets tough life
turns to be fucking rough.
But I’m not one to listen,
I’m deaf to their fears
of getting up to fall down over the years.
And now I’m laying here staring at the ceiling,
watching the fan spin repeating to myself,
“I showed them the world,
I brought them the light.
I gave them hope on the darkest of nights and
if I can smile after all I’ve been through,
then they can fight by my side and see it through their eyes
that they can too.”
You can’t have a rainbow without a little rain,
and love isn’t love without a little pain.
Pick up the pieces of that broken heart,
and next time take a look at the end before you even start.
Or take a picture, that’ll last longer,
they say a thousand words.
Deaf ears to fears, their words unheard.
Or take a look at me,
just a random civilian.
Smiling in the pictures that don’t say a thousand words
but scream a million.

I missed the way the sun shined, so I kissed the rain goodbye.  

There was something in the way her vertebrae cracked and ribs broke when she arched her back that made my mouth water, just something about the clavicles protruding from her paper skin at the turn of her head that made me want to fuck her, mournfully love her. It was in her hallowed gaze that I found myself lusting for ivory and lace over decaying and tattered organs that poured from her thoracic cage and into her pelvic girdle. It was on her coxae that my hands sought solace, her gnarled phalanges that filled the spaces between my own. There was something, just something about her lovely bones that made me force the wires around her neck, and hung her up to dry next to a Christmas sweater I’d never wear past the confines of my closet walls.

Her mother never liked the way her clothes fell to the ground and stayed, forcing anybody who entered her room to sidestep this pile and that. But it was said that she never like her mother, and instead found the makeshift forts and ruins of past days comforting. The paths were something similar to fingerprints for her now, unique in their own way and familiar to an eye that has studied them for some time. Something that was often as she fell into her bed and buried herself beneath sheets, quilts, comforters, and unnecessary throw pillows. She would lay on her side and observe the room in the candle’s dancing shadow, tracing each crevice and obscure shape with her gaze. Her mother may not like the mess, but to her, it was organised. Relaxing, as edges blurred together and her eyes closed slowly, drifting to sleep in a way that only a home would allow.

It’s just one of those days, you know? Where every answer is one or two words, where your mood is “fine” and your day is “fine” and everything is simply “fine” so “don’t worry about it.” It’s just one of those days where something is wrong, or you have no idea what’s going on, or nothing is wrong at all. Full of would’ve and could’ve and should’ve but didn’t, what if and why not and it happens, get over it. “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life; it goes on.”

Just one of those days.

They lived in castles with closets full of missing shoes, notches in trees that spiraled into labyrinths fit for seven dwarves, searching for true love that suited queens and happily ever after’s that whispered of futures with romance and endings that weren’t for princes and princesses.

I lived on lands with mushrooms for ceilings and leaves for buildings, where doorknobs talked and bottles danced. I ran across stars and in streams and through mountains with elves and faeries, laughed with trolls and played with giants. I was surrounded by everything I ever looked for under rocks and maps labeled with X because the north star always led you home, and it pointed me to the second star to the right and I went straight on ‘till the next morning’s glow. I broke glass walls with pirate ships and slayed witches with lions, went to war with hobbits and filled the hollows of my life with wizard magic, adorned myself in feather headdresses and painted my face with juices from fruits. I said I went and I did, I went and I lived because today I woke up in another land, in the heat of battle with owls and bats, and tomorrow I might just dine with Lilliputians and Blefuscidians.

I left behind castles and crowns because I hated reality and substituted it with my fantasies, and I became a lost boy that ventured over lands and seas even though they said I never could, and never would. So I closed my eyes, and believed.