Things I'm afraid I'll forget with age.

Things I'm afraid I'll forget with age. The way the grass feels beneath my bare feet. How to sleep in. How to be the "bigger" person. Listening to loud music to feel something. The taste of spicy foods. How jumping on a trampoline is the closest ill ever feel to flying. How to ride a bike (I mean a real one, not the stationary ones at the gym). That wrinkles are just a part of knowing I've lived a long life. How to camp in a tent. How to not take things so seriously. That driving a car is a privilege. How holding your hand is the safest I've ever felt. How I really dislike soup. How to age gracefully instead of with rage. How important it is to stare at the moon and watch sunsets/sunrises. That I was once the youngest and oldest I'll ever be. That aging is a privilege not gifted to everyone. That I love fiercely, with all that I am and that is not a weakness. How to make grilled cheese sandwiches. How to grieve and hold space for my feelings. That I am loved loudly and how to love loudly in return. How to age in general. How to be the oldest version of myself and be okay with that. How to be happy with this life I've built. How to be freaking happy with this life I've built. -M.D.L.

Recluse

I will coil up inside myself like a snake wrapping tightly around its prey. I will shut the doors that are my eyelids to the world, I can’t bear to look any longer. I will retreat into my other lives that live deep within my chest, the dreams and hopes I once had that are now locked inside the cage that is my being. I will retreat to the only world that feels safe, the one inside myself, the one I created. I will wrap my arms around my legs and pull them into my chest like it’s the only movement that might save me. I cannot bear to feel reality any longer, it’s too much so I will shut down my being, lock it away. I want to upheave my past lives, my future lives and just simply be. I want to sit with this pit in my stomach of who I am and melt it into the dreams of who I’m becoming. Life is overwhelmingly too much and I feel every once of its weight on my shoulders even though I never asked to carry it. Put it down, put it all down they say but little do they know I collect feelings like rocks and shove them in my pockets until they weigh me down. I will become a recluse, shrivel up and bury myself deep within the crevasses that make up my future. I will rot here inside myself until the world decides to change. Until the world decides it can bear to hold me in its arms and coddle me like it’s the only mother I have ever known. Until the world accepts me for who I was, who I am, who I am becoming, I will die here inside myself and wake up anew like a caterpillar bursting from its cocoon. I only hope the world will do the same. I only hope one day the world can hold me like I have held it, tightly and with all the love I’m capable of possessing. If only the world could love me like it’s supposed to so I didn’t have to sit here and hold myself. -M.D.L

Shedding

Are you okay with me coming over and shedding my skin? Draping my skin across the living room couch so all you can see is my bare soul, exposed. Are you okay with knowing the truth of who i am? That underneath all this excess Im more light, more depth, more shiny toy you wish you could have opened on Christmas morning? Are you okay with dripping with want? With wanting all that i am as I shine in my true form? There's no room for half assed "skin in tact" type of want. Rip it off me like a cheap suit. Let me come undone. Take all of me or let me be. Can you handle seeing my soul? The light and dark of it all. There's nothing but truth intertwined in these bones. Nothing but yearning for you to undress my skin and roam around inside my beating heart. Climb inside who I am and walk around, see that im all you thought i was and more. Undress me and leave me standing in the middle of the room for you to admire. There's so much here for you to take in. Grasp all that i am and revel in my being so I can revel right back. I want us, skin off, nothing but our souls intertwined. Then and only then will you understand I'm always more than I seem. -M.D.L

Everything about you

I want to know everything about you. I want to know how you got that scar on your left knee when you were younger. I want to know what your favorite meal is and what it was like when you tasted it for the first time. I want to know everything about you because I care. I want to know everything so I can wrap my arms around you and learn how to treat you better. I want to know what you do on a random Wednesday after work when it's raining and the world feels dark. I want to know about the books you read in middle school that you sometimes re-read just for the nostalgia of it all. I want to know everything maybe because I care too much or maybe because it's the little things wrapped around the big things that make up someone's soul. I want to know what your first fight with your parents was about and if you slammed doors like I did. I want to know how old you were when you got your first cell phone and who was the first person was that you called. I want to be able to know you on a level that shows you I will be here through it all, the boring, the fun, the sad and the happy. I want to know what it looks like when you peel an orange, if you are the type to eat it with your elbows on the table, juice dripping down your face. I want to be able to tell people if you like your coffee hot or cold or if it just depends on the season. I want to be able to tell the stories of the kind of person you truly are not the one you pretend to be for those who don't know you. I want to know your pet peeves and If one of them is people chewing with their mouths open. I want to be that person for you that you can go to and not be afraid to speak your mind, the person you have told so much to, what's wrong with telling me one more thing. I will hold your stories close and remind you that you are perfect just the way you are and it's because of the little things that make up the whole of you, the quirks. I want to know everything about you, simply because I love you. Love is about showing up and loving all of you, not in halves but in absolute wholes.

Screaming

You are like a diamond, you must boil and break under such heavy pressure in order to shine. This life can’t just be handed to you. You must scream for it, claw your way out of the depths, heaving and sobbing in order to see sunshine seeping into every crevasse of your being. You must feel the pain of living, the rawness scraping against your insides. Life is such a beautiful devastation. You can’t feel happiness without first screaming from your very core. You were born screaming. Did you think that the screaming would end? That you would be born and not have to feel every inch of sorrow that comes with it? You must embrace the dirt of it all, the rawness of being alive. You must cry and scream from your very core in order to not forget for a second that you are a miracle. The stars had to align just right for you to be pushed into this world. You wouldn’t know what warm weather against your skin felt like without feeling chills deep into the marrow of your bones. There is no equanimity without rage boiling deep within your gut. Rage from being born and not remembering that sadness and happiness hold hands. That on Sundays they undress and make love together, becoming one and the same. You can’t feel one feeling without feeling its opposite. You must bare your skin to it all, soak in the madness of what it means to feel alive. What it means to simply feel. You are living, breathing, bathed in love and hate. Drenched in misery and happiness. It’s such a godsend to feel. Feel all that you can deeply, soak and revel in the greatness it is to be you. The greatness it is to be born and drenched in emotions. Greatness comes with being raw and vulnerable, open to emotions like a wound. Feel them all. You didn’t come into this world screaming for nothing. -M.D.L

Red Flags

Red flags feel like home. I grab your red flags and wrap them around my shoulders as if they will be the only thing in the relationship to bring me comfort. As if they aren’t all bad. I make shitty excuses for them because they feel familiar, they feel like safety in disguise. Your red flags pile up and I could set fire to them to keep warm but where’s the fun in that? Let them pile up, I’ll find ways around them with words like “he didn’t know any better.” “this is the first time he’s done that.” Excuses because I have seen these red flags before, in all the eyes of my ex lovers. I’m collecting them now like a long lost collection of jagged rocks. The red flags feel like home because I have collected all the similar ones over the years and put them in a pile in the back of my mind to collect dust. Red flags wave just as good as green ones so why not settle? Settle into the words that sound alright in my mind like “he will never do that again” “he said he’d quit”. Words are just words but they add up like a stack of Jenga. I collect them just as much as I collect the red flags and it’s all adding up now. Red flags feel like home because you have disguised them, wrapped them up with pretty bows. You have disguised the red flags as yellow flags and I fall for it every time. It’s not so bad. This won’t last forever. You’ll change, but the red flags won’t. They stay red, blood red and I use them to wipe my tears because they are supposed to provide comfort but there’s none of that left here. There’s no more excuses for the red flags I have piled up high towards the ceiling. There are no more moments for change. I think I see them all so clearly now. The green flags can’t make up for the red ones my heart is buried in. It’s too late. I use your red flags as a rope to climb out of this hell I’m in, to escape the inevitable. Red flags are red flags and you wave them too often. -M.D.L

Blockbuster

It’s Friday night And we are driving to the blockbuster on 12th street. You know the one, with the blue sign out front and the m&ms piled up in the front of the cash register just waiting to be taken home. It smells like popcorn inside which I never understood because the kernels aren’t yet popped in their little packages. We take turns every other Friday deciding who gets to pick the movie. It’s my turn and time slows down as I scan the shelves for the next best pick. It might be the lion king or something scary like nightmare on elm street even though dad says I might be too young for that one. My dad wears black t-shirts and khaki shorts with socks that are too long. My dad says movies are art and watches cartoons with us every Saturday morning. We pop popcorn with our newly found blockbuster movie, putting the tape into the VCR and pressing play. I shove m&ms in my mouth, feeling them melt into oblivion. Life is good and I don’t know if it could get any better than this. I want to stay here with the movies and VCRs. The melty m&ms and the popcorn that comes in a package. I don’t know in this moment that things will eventually change. That movies will be streamed and subscriptions will be invented that cost way too much. That movies won’t be in a physical form, I won’t be able to hold them in my two little hands, blowing into the VCR before shoving the video in. That blockbuster would go extinct, not to be known by kids in the future. My childhood was movies with my dad, the drive to blockbuster where my siblings and I could barely handle the excitement. Time stood still then and things didn’t feel so out of control. I was lost in a world where movies felt like they solved everything. It was a tradition until time took the trips to blockbuster away from me. Time takes everything away eventually but I hold onto the memories. I can still picture the inside of the blockbuster, the thousands of shelves filled with different genres of movies. I can still picture my dad loading us all up into his Toyota truck just as excited as we were for the next movie to be chosen. Life’s too short not to remember the good times. I soak them in and hold them close to my heart. Time can pass all it wants but my memories will be for keeps. The trips to blockbuster just can’t be beaten. I thank my dad for creating such traditions for us kids, for helping create my love for movies. If only kids today could know the feeling of a blockbuster trip.-M.D.L