It’s so quiet the stars could hear me scream.
My street is hushed, empty. Crisp cold oxygen clears my sinuses.
I don’t even want a jacket because I am a ghost of echoey faraway winter laughter, and ghosts don’t feel the cold, they only breathe it.
I have to leave this oxygen soon.
I wish I could bottle it up, but it tastes of freedom, too, and freedom needs open to survive.
I’ll leave it here, for everyone else,
And hold my breath until more comes along.
When someone tells me, “Don’t dream. This is all there is.”
Well, excuse me if I continue on with my journey into the clouds.
Because there is this voice within me,
Sometimes a soft gentle whisper,
Sometimes red jagged edge screaming.
It says, there is more.
More oxygen to breathe.
More jungle dreams to see.
And honestly?
I trust that voice more than I’ll ever trust you.
“I’m hungry,” I say, “Starving.”
You offer me a Snickers.
“No, not that kind of hungry.” I push away your candy bar.
“I wish something could fill up me. The endless pit in my soul that craves more.
But I haven’t quite found it.
And sometimes, I wonder if I hunger for something that hasn’t quite been created yet.”
You smile and eat the Snickers. “That just means you can create it for yourself.”
There is this conflict inside me, gnashing its teeth, clawing at my insides.
I want to travel the world, see sunbaked orange canyons and crashing-river jungles and oceans lit up by jellyfish glows.
But at the same time,
There is this monster inside me,
Whispering
It isn’t safe out there.
It costs
Money
Time
Other people will tell you what they think.
I squirm.
Nature calls.
Am I really cursed to just sit and listen?
Some people build ladders to get to the top.
Rung by rung, hammer pounding nails and fingers, but they keep going because patience is the beginning of receiving everything.
Some people leap to reach that siren song. That voice calling now you are here. Now you have made it.
They spread their wings, fling themselves into the sky, watching others fall but still others make it. Grappling with their raw battered hearts to heave themselves onto the precarious cliff of stardom.
The climbers and the fliers.
The ladders and the wings.
Which is better, you ask?
You’ll have to see.
There’s a storm rolling in.
Though I may not have mountain air in my lungs and crashing jungle rivers running through my veins,
There’s a part of me in the sky tonight.
Thunder screams its deafening presence to the world.
I have no choice but to follow.
And then, suddenly and brightly, like a lighthouse spotlight sweeping over a dim dark forest,
There was oxygen
In this abandoned wasteland universe we call Reality.
And I feel.
My word, I feel.
As if the world dumped its weight on me and told me to suck it up.
What does one do in this situation?
Does everyone really expect me not to go mad and claw my way out of this prison by writing my burden to the world?
I used to be afraid of the monsters under my bed.
I am not anymore.
I slip into my headphones and my words and the monsters can’t reach me here, in this safe secure cocoon of me.
No one else.
And if that isn’t safe, what is?
The air is full of crisp fresh sharp tonight.
Icy wet grass under my bare feet makes goose bumps rumble up my arms,
And I breathe the stars.