Mid Youth Crisis

25, and still, stuck in a town I always said I'd leave. 

Is this all there is for me? 
Follow in the footsteps of my parents and just... Be? 

Is this all I'm supposed to amount to? 

A simple breath upon this earth? 

A west wind so faint, no one feels its passing? 

No songs, no prose, no monuments, or fanfare? 

Just a voice that will fade along with the voices of many others who came before me; all the others who left no mark before me. 

I am a line in the sand, trying to become a bay, a pool, even a puddle, before the tide comes back to eradicate everything that I've made, everything that I am.
But here I am struggling and fighting against the rising tides, the waves that will erase me from being. 

Digging deeper and deeper, trying to peave a mark, a memory, a monument; anything except a tombstone and tears.
I am stuck. 

I am stuck trying to move, trying to create a semblance of SOMETHING, trying to touch as many lives as possible, trying to CREATE something that will REMEMBER.
25, and still, in a sea of faces, you wouldn't see me.

R E V I S I T

I sit alone in a restaurant, it feels weird after a year or so of never sitting alone. Nothing's wrong, I'm just really hungry. So I sit alone, and look through my phone until I stumble upon a memory I never thought I'd ever see out of that proverbial rug I stuffed it under two years ago.

Golden flecks from brown eyes I know I'll never see again assail my thoughts as I struggle to finish reading whatever idiotic little puff piece I wrote about some douche (he wasn't, really, it's just easier to think of him that way) I used to pine for when I was twenty years old. Stupid girl.

You write it down, and write it down again.

Did I not understand, that the thing about writing things down is that you can't take the ink back?

So I carry on reading about how he used perfect grammar and understood the importance of commas, how he liked The 1975, how he always said goodnight when he could have left the conversation hanging like SOME guys I used to like. I read about how after months of absolute gray existence, I felt life trickle back into my veins.

Oh, how stupid. I didn't want love, I just wanted a good time.

Burn it, bury it, hide it.

Some guys just aren't worth it, but he was nice enough to be. Polite, smart, and wonderfully not arrogant. He wouldn't rub his car knowledge in your face, or make you feel inferior. I understand now, he was a breath of fresh air, a primer for what I would find after. A sort of crash course on how to handle the nice guy, because I found one.

I read about how I'll remember that he never liked travelling in the rain every time the sky darkens and lets forth its weight in water. But I don't anymore, the rain is just rain to me, now. Poetic, wonderful, addictive melancholia, but just the rain, all the same.

 His story's covered by others now, under the rug I keep in my brain. 

So over a meal of Korean fried chicken and spicy ramen where I struggle with my chopsticks, I decide to use my fork, and to clean out the rug in my mind. I have no time for this, and I have better, brighter, happier stories to tell now.