Sword Fighting in the Aisles of Wallgreens

As of today, I love my life.

I'm feeling spontaneous; I want to army crawl underneath a rosebush instead of walking around it. I want to climb a tree with Stepney and ask random passer's by if they've ever had to mow the lawn twice in one day because they didn't do it right the first time. I want to sword fight in the aisles of Wallgreens, despite the disapproving glares of fellow shoppers. Nevermind that I have a Geometry test to study for and a Sociology book to read. Screw following through with obligatory nonsense. I'm going through the McDonald's drive through in a shopping cart and ordering baked french fries and a veggie burger instead."Umm, we don't have veggie burgers here," the voice at the window will say. "Oh, so you're just going to slap some dead cow on people's plates?" I'll shout back in a British accent. I'm not a vegetarian, nor am I British. But does it really matter? What's the point of being alive if every single thing we ever do has to make sense? I don't want to be normal, I don't want to follow the rules. I want to steal sticks out of people's hands and chase after birds. I want to play unicycle hockey. I want to stand on the top of a massive cliff and look down into what could be the end of me.

I want to LIVE.

Neighborhood Streets

Two feet planted firmly on the concrete porch steps. A light winter's breeze gently gliding through a wisp of honey-blonde hair. Faintly, the sound of a lawn mower resounds, and the smell of freshly cut grass tickles the noses of familiar strangers that roam the neighborhood streets. The sun shines through the branches of a lonesome tree, exposing just enough light to catch the beauty of its glistening leaves. Has spring already begun?

A pair of blue jeans, vibrant in color but frayed at the seams. Glancing down at them, she realizes how similar they are to each other. She wasn't new anymore; she was worn, used, slightly torn in such a way that could never be sewn back together again. Cautiously, her eyes creep forward until they reach her toes peeking out from the sandals her grandmother had bought two years before. Santa Monica Promenade, she remembers. She gazes curiously at her toenails, naked in the absence of the sparkly pink polish she had carelessly abandoned around the age of ten. It made her feel grown up, she remembers. She had tried so hard to be.

The air lingers with the bittersweet taste of nostalgia. Everything about her life made her sentimental; her house, her street, the stop sign around the corner, her neighbor's tire swing that still hung from the tree in their front yard. For a moment, she wonders what it feels like to be an innocent. Why did I want this? She asks herself. Why did it have to go away?

We search our whole lives to find an experience.
But the journey was the experience.
And now we can never go back.

Boats and Birds.

There's something about this song that makes me want to sit in the darkest corner of my room and play the guitar for hours and hours, just for the sheer peculiarity of it all. It makes me want to run outside in the middle of the night in my polka dot pajamas to look at the stars. I don't look at them nearly as often as I should; I don't think anyone does, really. It triggers a strange sense of curiosity in me towards the simplest things; the grass, the sky, the sea, the color purple. But mostly, I think of life and the world and innocence; these gifts that are so generously handed to us, but that we never stop to appreciate because we, as humans, are selfish. We take things we don't even realize we have for granted. We don't share our toys in the sandbox anymore, even though we know we should. We think we know the answer to everything, and if we don't understand something, then it must not be real or important. But there are a lot of things we don't understand. Like why people jump off of buildings; why our calender says January when it's really March. Why that man in our town always runs through the streets naked and looks in people's windows at night. Who we are as people, and the planet that we live on. How all of this came to be in the first place. But people still jump off of buildings, and do things we can't explain. Still, the world spins on its axis, and still we remain alive. But we don't care about those things. Why waste our time with such nonsense? The world is sick with apathy, and I hate it. So I stop to raise my gaze and look up at the stars, and when I do, it amazes me that something that appears to be so close can be so incredibly far away. It takes us years to travel to the moon and yet, it seems as though we could touch it if we simply cared to extend a hand. Maybe the earth isn't even real; maybe everything we've ever known in life is a lie, just a way to justify everything that life presents to us. I don't know, and I probably never will. Maybe we're not supposed to.