Heaven bend to take my hand

It is fifteen minutes past midnight, and I'm crying because my siblings are awake and they don't bother, my parents are away, and there have been no text messages, and I just need someone to acknowledge my existence and feel loved.

This is beyond pathetic. I know. But I feel so wretched and so sad and so alone, as I do every year.

Begging for a savior isn't really going to help, because I know I'm supposed to go it on my own.

But still.

Lead me through this fire.

Catch A Falling Star

At what age should I finally stop holding on to my childhood dreams?

My birthday is two days away, and I feel more lost, more alone than ever before. One by one, my hopes died quiet deaths, imploded upon themselves with no one any the wiser.

I am lost, I am losing myself, and I have lost confidence in those to whom I'd confess these fears.

Please, don't let me fade.

Quietus

Gradation is ten days away.

Everything is fine, except for the dull roaring in your head insisting otherwise.

I ain't ready...for a crazy little thing called love

Syllable
“I learned the truth at seventeen,” the song warbles, soft, lamenting, as you stare at the ceiling of my room, spread-eagled on my bed. It seems to fit—in the seventeen and four years and counting, you’ve never been a beauty queen, never felt the eyes of a lover linger on your lips.
And so you stare at the ceiling and dream, dream of boys with dreamer’s gazes and poet’s smiles and artist’s hands with a really nice set of pecs, as they bend down to lie down in your bed and whisper the three syllables you so badly want to hear.

Vaccine
From when you were very young, they’ve given you shots for chicken pox. Small pox. Protection against bacteria that would have slain you centuries, or maybe even four decades ago. Later, there were the shots for tuberculosis, for the prevention of breast cancer.
You don’t remember the infant shots, but a phantom twinge echoes in your shoulder in remembrance of the last. You avoid looking at the needle, but from your sister’s whimper it must be at least two inches—maybe more. From that one glance, it seems awfully thick.
A brave little girl, merely three times seven, you scarcely feel anything beyond that first prick, and the immunization is over in a moment.
Fleetingly, you wonder if there’s a vaccine for loneliness.

Aide
It’s when you’re helping your friend bolster the flagging organization, as a somewhat useless aide-de-camp, that you’re hit with the realization.
This isn’t your story. Your role in the universe will always be relegated to The Best Friend, the Joan-Cusack-type Older Sister, the Angsty Misunderstood Daughter, and happy endings, like it or not, will always have to be lived vicariously.
Because you are sidekick, and it’s the heroine, in the end, who gets the boy.

Alarmist
Sometimes, it perplexes you when people say you’re a leader.
You have a tendency to panic, to react immediately, arms flailing about. You get frustrated at incompetence—especially your own--, and during crunch time, your statements have an alarmist tinge.
Deep down, you know you’re more suited as a foot soldier.

Cub
Just before you go to sleep, and moments in between waking and facing the new day, you imagine having a family of your own.
The face, the hair, the build of your husband-to-be varies; his gaze, ardent, is the only thing unchanged.
An infant wrapped in swaddling clothes lies between you. Or is it two, three? It does not matter. You feel a surge of love to this as-of-yet-unborn children whatever the shape of their eyes or the color of their hair or the shade of their skin, and in your mind’s eye the babies are perfect, and more importantly, yours.
And come heaven or hell, mama bear will protect her cubs.

Blackjack

Society proclaims me to be of age. An adult, it seems, for four months.

And yet I know I'm quite the opposite, utterly inchoate of matters carnal and practical. I am a mere dilettante in the theories and interests that so permeate my academia. An absolute infant when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex.

I have never been kissed. In keeping at arm's length men–and yes, men, because those that surround me are of other predilections or preferences–I do not know if it is to protect me from the hurt that rejection would bring, or the standards I long for are nigh too ideal. For the longest time, I've labored and hid under the impression of a conservative upbringing. There is that, yes–but it is not as constricting as I would have others believe.

I cannot keep the friendships I've held so dear. What worse can it be with a supposed man I might spend my life with? You say, date, what harm can it do? I reply, much. I can love far too easily.

Society calls me an adult. At heart, I'm still that naive little girl.

Rasa

I can't write.

The feelings are all locked up inside me, and like a volcano, I'm terrified of what will happen when they reach the boiling point.

A Strange Sorta Fairytale

It would be strange to think of myself as some sort of Jezebel, a temptress with scores of men at the crook of her finger. It would be bizarre picturing me as an angel-faced beauty, ludicrous to think men flirting for pleasure, or asking for my name or number, or even drawing me as their goddess.

It would be harder, still, to imagine myself in some sort of romance story, a protacted courtship over modern post--the eccentric yet "charming" girl, and the confident, intelligent gent toiling continents away, who haven't seen each other in four years.

It sounds like a recipe for a a fairy tale, which is alarming.

How much love can there be if the girl-woman is certain her otherwise Romeo is a Don Juan of international stripes, and she is no longer interested besides? There's not much chance if the poet doesn't even recognize his maybe-muse in their last face-to-face appearance.

No happily ever after here.

Earth Angel

Someone once told me I had an angel's face, a living, breathing china doll of innocence.
     I ingloriously snorted.

A friend, upon looking at my school identification cards through elementary, high school, and college, said it's as though I haven't changed a bit.
    Still she of the smooth chubby skin and naive eyes.

Strange, though, how different I feel now. If I am an angel, I am fallen..or an angel teetering close to the cloud's edge, waiting for someone to drag me down.
    I'm sick of being caught between innocence and desire.

    I wonder if one day, I'll see him in singing,
    and it will make me cast off my restraints and my looms,
    and climb down from the tower,
    and lay down on a boat
    and meet him in death.

Easel

My parents surprised me with an easel the other day. It was gorgeous, carved narra, taller than my rickety bookstore one.
    So I painted.
    It's a lot easier to paint, to just let colors mix and stroke the canvass with hues, because then I don't have to think about anything.

Like how I'm still at odds with my closest group of friends, over my superficial changes.
And how I won't celebrate my birthday, for the first time, with my grandfather, and how no one will probably remember that it was OUR birthday, and not just mine.

Three more days. I hope the painting gets finished before then.

Inamorato

I see him not, and yet I see him still.

He's out there, and though he's no longer wearing armour he's still a knight-a-shining. I have to believe he's out there somehow, the compliment to my dark mirror.

And I am mixing allegories with the best of them.

This will be my personal journal, for those thoughts too private to be shared by friends, yet less prosaic than written in my spiral-bound notebook.

I'm a bit worried I'm compartmentalizing myself, but there must be SOME outlet where I can vent my darker half. Or at least my more pathetic one.

Keep spinning, wheel.