“You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” — Grow every second (via lofticriess)
(Source: ordinarywonder, via motherfuckingfox)
I.
Dad finally slept in.
Dad never sleeps in.
Dad goes and goes and goes cause he didn’t have a father and he thinks to himself:
I’ll give my kids the world
I love them more than anything, I’ll prove it, I’ll provide -
- I think Dad thinks he doesn’t deserve to sleep in.
II.
- Dad didn’t know how to be a dad because he didn’t have a dad.
I didn’t know his face until I was four -
- with his black-heeled boots and stern voice -
- my bare feet ran in fear. Before I realized that same scary voice
which appeared in the house only before sunrise and at night
would teach me how to be an anchor for the others.
Would explain damning and beautiful life to me.
Would lecture me on how to walk tall and tie my shoes.
“Attitude is everything”, “have compassion”, “take a bullet”,
“do the right thing, even if The Right Thing is breaking the law.”
He wouldn’t give a lot a lot of hugs until he realized hugs were okay.
But that’s alright.
I never really needed a lot of hugs anyway.
He was wrong: hugs aren’t weakness.
III.
In short, he’s my hero.
(Even if he doesn’t know how to give hugs.)
Dad taught me how to be a man cause mom couldn’t show me how to be a young woman.
I chose it. I embraced it.
I was practice for the first-born son.
IV.
Dad could save a whole nation and still not sleep well, always thinking
I could’ve done more. I could’ve saved more people -
- Hans Hubermann, Schindler, Abraham Lincoln. My father.
His cousin had a dream Jesus told him He was happy with Dad.
Dad didn’t cry in front of us, but I heard he took a day off of work.
Brought mom flowers.
Smiled a little.
It was enough.
V.
Dad loves everyone on the planet more than he loves himself.
Dad loves the most removed person on the earth more than he loves himself.
Dad works 50+ hours a week and sometimes does the dishes too.
And now, Dad sleeps in on weekends.
I’m trying to teach my father and mother how to like themselves.
Like I taught myself.
“Be a rock, firstborn son.”
“Be willing to take a bullet for the least of them all, Kaeli”.
VI.
Speak like mom, walk like dad.
Woman-Man,
grow up to be a Woman King.
VII.
Dad danced with Mom in the kitchen, Jimmy Buffet playing softly.
It was enough.
[video]
“I loved her, though!”
“Until you didn’t; that’s not love. Either you didn’t love her, or you didn’t love her.”
“Look at you. You’re young. And you’re scared. Why are you so scared? Stop being paralyzed. Stop swallowing your words. Stop caring what other people think. Wear what you want. Say what you want. Listen to the music you want to listen to. Play it loud as fuck and dance to it. Go out for a drive at midnight and forget that you have school the next day. Stop waiting for Friday. Live now. Do it now. Take risks. Tell secrets. This life is yours. When are you going to realize that you can do whatever you want?” — Louise Flory
I’m sipping tea and you’re far away. Even on the map, it’s further than I can spread my fingers.
An elevator door slides shut without a sound.
A white-bearded man walks by with echoing words on his shirt. A Thousand Years.
There’s a bucket in the middle of the hallway picking up the ceiling’s slack.
In his closet, he has Converse covered in mud, piss and beer (none of it his).
Today, I opened a book I haven’t touched in far too long.
The air smells of burnt leaves and home.
“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight” — Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (via dontwaitforasign)
Regardless of how untrue this is,
skinny does not always feel
like happiness (as they’d
have you believe).
It’s okay to indulge in happiness,
whatever form it may come in.
(Source: hipstersanasians, via cicatrici-belle)
i had no way to tell you how beautiful you are.
so i kissed you.
it was selfish, but it was the best my lips could hope to do.
sometimes i think about the windshield he
didn’t go through. and how close (the light of)
my life came to ending, saved by a seatbelt
he didn’t always wear. and that — count it: one,
two, three, four — seconds after i kicked
the door open, the heavens opened up. a half
minute sooner, then the glass might have
been more than traced with spiderweb
compression-cracks. i remember hearing my mother
outside the ambulance, demanding to be let in, frantic
even though i started the phone call with, “don’t worry,
we’re both fine.” there was no blood, on us or them,
save for the bleeding red hair dye the rain mockingly
streaked on the collar of his shirt.
sometimes, between a gifted lucky penny and
the will of God, everything ends up being okay.
[video]
We yearn for the past because its beauty can be sealed, with clarity, behind glass and placed on a desk (or mantle, wall, in a wallet, or the second dresser drawer). The future is an abyssal unknown, but it’s the thinking about what was that threatens to drown us as the nostalgia fills our lungs and squeezes our throat.
Maybe, then, we ought to remember that our universe still exists as we step into the void, just as the sun does not die when we close our eyes. Let the photographs be reminders of the bright things that may come out of the murk and shadows before us.
“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” — Thich Nhat Hanh (via kari-shma)
(via poetdreamer)
“In hell you’re always in love
with nothing to love,
and something hates you
for all the wrong reasons.”
— Charles Bukowski (via homosexualheartthrob)
(Source: buttholepoetry, via unexpectedbalance)