Finally did it.

The strangest thing was waking up today, surrounded by this lovely shade of Ikea/sky blue and feeling consciousness slowly seep into me, and being just... content.

If You Were Here, You'd Be Home Right Now.

Cold coffee and a pocket full of change
were all that I ever needed.
Bare notebooks and plastic-covered pens,
Grippy and smooth.
And you were here
And all I ever needed
was right
here.

The days were long,
and the nights were late.
and the moon peered out
lazily when we called it.
And you were here
And you were here.
The pens leaked, dried and faded, love.
They crisped and burnt.
Rings of brown ingrained into the paper
to replace the words and the feelings
those damned
feelings.
But you were here.

"Peacock," you told me.
And that was what I then needed.
The topic of my next great ball of
burning
wadded
paper.
"Chicken strips."
"Sparrows take flight!"
"Chickadees"
You taught me about the birds
and I scribbled, scribbled, scribbled
in my chicken-scratch.
Because you were here
and you were all I ever needed.

The world swirled around us,
turned, danced, dipped.
But we paid them no attention, dear.
Because we had all we ever needed.
The crinkly paper
The dried-out pens
And the caked-on coffee.

We needed no introduction
and we didn't care for conclusions.
But the body, how we loved the body!
And the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives
like our own children.
Remember
Green
Wrangled
Sky
Hair.
Because all we ever needed
was right
Here.

You saved it, didn't you?
Even after our inevitable conclusion
and all the words we loathed,
like
Loathe
Tired
Dry
Bored.
And all I needed
was right there.

No the world didn't stop spinning,
but after our self-obsessed meandering
we finally took notice.
There was evil and hate
and love and satisfaction.
Bright Sunday mornings
and slow drivers.
birds
and slow goodbyes.
and lingering,
quite a bit of lingering, actually.
But that was all I really needed.

What I set out was
not a sappy love poem.
And what I did
was not the broken attempt.
What I knew
was the weight of humanity.
And you said it was enough,
just enough.
And maybe
all I ever needed
was
right
here.

-------

Merry Christmas, all.

Thought I'd Do Without

What I needed was a realization that I wasn't a robot and could feel real emotions, that I was deeper than a kiddie pool and could connect on a level a little more personal than cellphones and acronym-filled MSN messages. I gave up my Livejournal because my own juvenile delinquency, my ridiculously emotive bleeding-heart posts were tiring me out beyond belief, and needless to say, I was sick of it. So I closed my doors to the personal blogging world and filled out my very basic, very minimal Yahoo 360 required for school. But I'm back (I hope), because words were just going to waste in my head.

What I want to remember right now is how it felt the moment I stepped into the school hallway for the first time back in kindergarten. The itching of a stiff red dress and feigned excitement on my face. That's what I want to remember. Because right now, I'm about seven months to the end of small white rooms and posters on the door, and decorated lockers on my birthday; stiff green attached desks, and locker combinations scrawled on sweaty palms of teenage boys. Am I prepared?
No freakin' way at all.
Progression is natural and graduation is inevitable. So why am I still sitting here, wondering where all that time went and regretting I had done more with it?
Obviously this is only high school graduation, and I'm kidding myself to think that my life has even begun; but I don't want to forget this, you know?
It's funny, I've spent about 16 and a half years imagining myself one level up in University, seeing me with freedom and independence and a higher level of maturity; but now as I'm nearing the end of my 17th, the future has started to freak me out like no other.
S'messed up, I'll tell you that much.