I hate artificial light, it distorts nature’s might. There is no authenticity in its artificiality. It reminds me of small talk and the relationships we pretend are important to us but never care about enough to move on from talk about the color of the sky to the colors of our souls. And the color of the sky reminds me of the color of your eyes across the room from mine. Small talk drones on but I’d give anything to talk even about the weather with you. Discussion of the weather reminds me of clouds and elementary school mornings with science lessons of cumulous and cirrus clouds. And science reminds me of school and how I should be studying but instead I sit here pen in hand, fingers poised over the keys like an instrument to play stringing words together like notes on a measure. And writing sparks in my memory all the wasted moments ripe for writing but spent stupidly, and all the feelings gathered up inside my heart that feel too large for words, too much to hold. Feelings that drip over and run down and splash like that mountain creek we wade our feet in every summer. And that creek speaks to me of summers past and summers to come and pine trees and cousins and consistency. Consistency is not the monotony I once thought it to be. I long for it now with the blank canvas in front of me and all the twists and turns that I cannot see. I wish you would look at me. I’m afraid to stay, I can’t live without seeing more than what I have. But I’m terrified to step onto a plane that may take me a thousand miles away (or will it take me only fifty?). My heart burns at all the things that might not be. And it’s tucked away in a closed off corner of my mind that one cannot live their life asking “what if?” but what if… what if… what if…

“the main thing he wanted to weep about was a sudden, vivid awareness of the terrible opposition between something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him, and something narrow and fleshly that he himself was” – war and peace