Isn't it incredible how fast hair grows? How hair stands on end and that they are called goosebumps? How simple things like nails growing, eyes blinking, and chests rising signify life. A broken bone and a broken heart have completely different meanings and entirely different cures. How tears of joy and tears of sadness can look the same, unless you look a person in the eye. And if one million people were lined up, I'd look only for you. How coffee always tastes better with a little milk and sugar. How trash cans are like diaries of our daily lives, yet it's all combined into one individual life. One ugly, smells-like-shit mound of garbage, that's the combination of all of our lives. One big mess. And how socks and mittens are incessantly going missing as if the hands and feet of the owner were in them when they weren't really in them. How fingers and eyelashes and lips feel on the skin. How it makes me blush. How it feels to sleep next to someone, even when their feet are freezing. We feel so vulnerable when we open up the rib cage and expose our hearts, but it's so easy to keep it locked up.

I need to keep my heart where it belongs. Imprisoned behind my ribs, deep within my chest. My tongue held hostage behind my lips. My oversized teeth guarding my oversized mouth that is now regretting what it has just revealed.

My life is full of so many loving people, but they will always strangers to me. No one knows my feelings and I can't imagine anybody that would want to know what goes on in this little head. No one knows the songs that reach down my throat and grab at my heartstrings until I'm being played like a harp. And I have so many people in my life, but they're all at a distance. They've always been just out of reach. There are so many walls around me, walls that I have never wanted, and never will want. I want to get out of here, set foot on the soil of every country until my feet are black. Until exotic flowers stem from my toes and I'm turned into the most beautiful garden anyone has every seen.

I keep drinking, but my thirst is never quenched. Isn't it a miracle that even some live to be one hundred? There are millions of instances, of ways to die that are out of our control, yet I've made it this far. I've never broken a bone, never even had a cavity, but each space in between my breaths brings me closer to death. But is also what keeps me alive. Am I ready? Are any of us ever ready for anything? I live the way I live because I've been taught to plan for my future, a future that may not even exist. I've also been taught to live every day like it's my last, but how can I do both? Lovely things stay at a distance because I'm too busy being educated about the sentence structure for phrases I may never say and conversions of chemical reactions that just might wait to take place until my body is decomposing, which I, of course, won't live to see.

Why is it so much easier for us to love the imperfections of someone else rather than our own? The way you bite your lip when you're holding something back. I love it, you hate it. The way I can never walk in a straight line. Well, maybe you don't love that, but then again, neither do I. I don't love the way everyone holds on just because they don't want to be alone, but that's also because I am that way. Watching the skipping stones jump across the water until they sink to the bottom, that's just it, it's living. We just keep going and are admired just up until we start sinking, and at that point no one cares anymore. When we hit the bottom we just get buried back into the earth, a skipping stone is just a rock, and a rock is nothing beautiful to look at.