Stories and Starlight

i. the guardian your wings are warm and wide they circle the nest, cover it, envelop it Security.  you tell us someday, the wings will be gone,  nothing to separate us from the sky and air and the fall Alone. Free.  Terrifying. but words exist and evaporate (promises, promises…) while walls of wings remain. ii. the fledgling my wings have just come in.  they are imperfect, there are still feathers left to grow peering over the edge, I can see so far. Possibility.   I tell you someday I’ll be out and gone,  nothing to tether me back from  the sky and the air and the fall Alone. Terrified.  Free.  but the passage of time is too slow and not fast enough. I’m running out. I wonder how far I have to fall before I float (soon, one day soon…)  and if the pain of the                               ...

  We’re eight months away from turning twenty, and whenever something significant, or even mildly significant, happens, I keep thinking back to the past version of me who was pretty lost and raging at life — the past version of me that was you. I think you deserve a recap by now; maybe a touch of hope. (Maybe I need to remember these things too, and that’s why I’m telling you, because otherwise it would feel too silly to just tell my present self these things. Like a pep talk, but less cliché, I suppose. I hope.) I’m rediscovering my love of writing. It’s been about two years since I started writing again, and up to now it’s mostly been poetry, but I’m hoping to change that too. Fanfiction and prose and screenplays, maybe a novel someday. Definitely a memoir: it’s on my bucket list. I’m glad we’ve been keeping a diary since we were nine. We haven’t always been a consistent diarist, it’s true, but it’s helped me remember past versions of me like you more clearly.  You probably ...