grip

She is not a nameless
face, encapsulated identity, gasping for
sky and all else lack thereof

And for reasons still largely
unknown to her, is beginning
to see that it is okay, on behalf of

A face with a name,
her identity, locked not in dusty
containers of hollow glass jars

She is mopping up all
else and the sky, rhythmic inhales with exhales
buried deep chested, at peace

no more sinking ships

There are two kinds of smart:

1. Smart that you squeeze.
Like a tart lemon, this smart bears its face only when pushed to the edge. It won't magically appear at its own inclination or in an organic manner. You have to fight with it - sear, rip, lacerate, strangle. Essentially, you get your ass kicked. This involves studying into wee hours of the night, re-editing as a necessity and not at discretion, memorization as a wrestle with death, himself. People call you smart, but little do they know it's a product of countless years of toil against an only average intellectual capacity. It's pushing through the ceiling and roof when you know fully well that you maxed out long ago. It's trying to stretch brain matter as far as it will inflate without ripping. It's a constant struggle between weighing cost versus gain. Only blood, sweat, and tears brings the sugarcane. Your smarts aren't cultivated naturally out in the fields soaking up rays of sunshine. Your smarts are cultured in a laboratory specialized in synthetic experiments, with trial and error, failure and success.

2. Smart that oozes.
Shake up a full Coke can with intensity, and an explosive fireworks effect results. Even after the fireworks are over, Coke bubbles still eagerly rise, dancing and oozing around like a little, industrious ant colony. This type of smart simply comes with the package, like one of those plastic toys or beanie babies that come with the cereal box. You needn't study - study is, after all, a rather foreign word to you. All your pre-test preparation resides snugly in your head. You retain and soak up material from class like an extravagantly porous sponge. And likewise, all post-test harvests reap only the most pleasing of results. Your smarts are 100% organic, whole wheat. No need for artificial steroid syringes.

My brother got into the Blair Magnet Program. Something inside me always knew he would. He's one of those genuinely rare smart kids (type 2, refer to above), who carries his head nice and balanced on his shoulders, despite the brutal beatings it's had to endure (pun intended, just in case you were wondering). In the realm of everyone in my sphere of influence, both the old and crinkly as well as the spirited young, my brother is the strongest. Not necessarily strong in the physical sense, although, for the record, he can effortlessly run a 6 minute mile and spar a 6 + foot brown belt.

I am proud of him. There is nobody in my eyes that deserves more to have a chance at happiness. Don't we all? Why is it that some people can seize it and selfishly store away in locked chambers complete with a whole ring of iron locks and keys, while others come back with their head buried in their hands, fingers burned and blistered, when they so much as reach out to try and touch it? I want life to be fair to him, for once.

So Dustin, when you read this, I'm sorry that I didn't say congratulations. My pride seems to get the best of me, half the time when I least want it to. Where I failed and wasn't accepted into Richard Montgomery IB, you have triumphed. A part of me feels redeemed, in knowing that you proved Mama wrong. Another part of me feels infinitely jealous - is this a reaffirmation of my shortcomings or simply a mark of final surrender? I know well enough, although I have difficulty admitting, that you can outdistance and surpass me academically and in every other way for your future, hands down. Heck, you're nearly taller than me now. (I never thought the day would come when you would be in my direct line of vision.) You're type 2 and I'm type 1. God blessed you with something He chose to withold from me, for His good yet unfathomable reasons. If you value my advice at all, even after every bloodcurling scream that has chilled the living daylights out of you, I say: simply do what you think will make you happiest. Forget about the unnerving idea of keeping up your GPA while maintaining Cross Country, Karate, Chinese School, college options, and all that jazz. Everything will fall into place, so long as your face and heart stay smiling.

:) I love you BRO.

coming full circle

feel, feel inside
so burns the pain
so floats the joy

run, run away
so shrinks behind
so swells forward

steer, steer angles
so curves the road
so bends the bridge

feel, run, steer
moment's paused none
if only to where

we may learn to breathe
breathe one day the ugliness we see
so much as love will be like breathing

we will rise and fall with tides
wane and wax with moons
cycle alongside seasons

come and go, all the while flanked,
coming full circle

mother goose & co

Today, my sister asked me to read to her the story of Humpty Dumpty.

As I was reading I realized - be it by coincidence or by a quite striking dose of reality - that Humpty Dumpty and I would likely be the bestest of friends, were he only real enough for me to identify with.

He sat on a wall and by a most unfortunate turn of events, as fate would predictably have it, came crashing to the ground. His remnants lay scattered like broken glass about the ground, irreparable by even the combined efforts of all the King's horses and all the King's men.

Humpty Dumpty probably built that wall and sat on it because he was terrified of letting anyone in. Perhaps if he let someone in, it would disrupt his equilibrium. He would inevitably lose his balance, and in oblivion at the falling moment, blame himself for not sitting upright enough. Or maybe it would just make him feel as if his efforts in constructing the wall went to vain, in and beyond their entirety. The intruder would not even begin to imagine how many painstaking hours Humpty Dumpty had spent building his wall with the all too dependable mixture of mortar and tears. His hopes had already climbed the highest crags and leaped over gaping crevices. Was it so wrong for him to wish that his final product be resistant to wear and tear, bullets and bombs, thunder and lightning?

I understand Humpty's thought process - his path of logic and attempts at self-preservation. I find myself doing the exact same thing. I build up walls, swearing never to let anyone in, in fear of the past bearing its atrocious face, the ever so mocking flag of my own vulnerability. My walls are built so high that they tower with an almost ominous glare, as opposed to the protective purpose I had initially intended for them.

And with karma flanking me left and right, one day, the walls just crumble. With a few words, a look, a smile – anything even mildly suggestive of anything beyond nothing – they collapse. The burning embers recoil around what once were strapping walls, until only the putrid smell of grey ashes remains.

Time to rebuild again, I guess. Hopefully I can find the right proportions of mortar and tears so my walls serve more faithfully to their purpose this time around.

wishful thinking

I can't seem to put into words how I've been feeling lately. Nothing seems to serve proper justice in capturing how I feel. I know this because I've been here before, seen the same insanely enticing sight, and walked away the same way. Walked away the whole road home battling heart and head, wondering if it would have been a rising or setting sun - a luck of the draw or one just to find you've picked out the shortest clover in the bundle. Walked home the whole time trying to convince my two feet to make a 180, carrying me backwards to that familiar crossroads.

I can't say if you make me happy. But I can't say if I'm sad because you can't make me happy. I can't say if I want you enough, that I might face and embrace my flaws in hopes that you would, too. I can't say if I could ever see you wanting me enough, flaws and all encompassed.

I can't say because I've never seen and would hate to falsely imagine what it looks like on the other side of our wall.
But I can say that I want you to know and desire everything that there ever existed to know and desire about me.

Perhaps this is all beyond my means. Inside my dreams.