One word. Introvert. But seen as antisocial. None know that behind the black soul and DMs lies an irreverent and intelligent mind. Not antisocial, but an observer. Seeing, hearing, smelling tasting all that you put out there. It gives me pause, and ideas. The purple ink flows freely as the discombobulated tornado of words and emotion spiral in my brain, slowly penetrating paper and leaving my fevered fingertips. It is all I know. The words.

The words come unbidden, and most inconveniently. In water, where life is born, I give breath to those letters, slowly forming the syllables that refuse to leave my lips. It is my release, my outlet. I cannot SAY what I need to, want to, have to speak; but I can write. Penning prose in the darkened corners, on my illuminated screen, or in the sand at the beach. It is how I can communicate who I truly am to the world. The world that cannot see me, even when I am directly beneath its plastic, upturned nose.

I write so I can breathe. I write so I can share thoughts and ideas. I write because my colorful characters have more depth and affection without affectation than those who surround me in the real world. I  write to quell the fear, to release the excitement, and to remember that I am real.I write because you never let me speak. I cannot voice thoughts, opine or share my fears or successes. You don't let me tell my stories. You raise loud vocal sounds as words to cover my meek voice, even in a scream. I write because the world listens to my epiphanies, secrets, dreams and hopes. I write to be heard, to know that I too am alive. Breathing, living, pulsing like the purple prose penned in the darkness.

I'm having trouble comprehending the frustrating irony

of the way that

i can't get you off my mind

but yet, i can neither think of

one single way

in which you are good for me

my emotions perch

on the branch of your regard,

ready to gain flight

upon your praise, or free fall

at the notion of rebuke.

I really don't believe in run-on sentences, heck just add a comma every once in a while and make it flow smoother than butter, sweet butter churning the summer heat with just you and your grandma sitting out back under the porch top listening the the silent hums of the red wood trees, and what beautiful trees they are; some days I just go out and lie in a hammock and stare at those beautiful trees all afternoon, feel God's warmth radiate down my spine all peaceful and quiet, but quiet with a prescience of course, ah and what a crazy prescience it is, I mean just the other day I was out at the local grocery mart picking up some bananas and milk- that's right I'm the person that makes a twenty minute trip so that I can have fruit mixed in with my cheerios- and any who that Margret Matlin walks up to me and says "girl the good Lord put you on my mind recently", now surely I won't go into detail (if I told you everything Ms. Matlin had to say you'd be here till the next full moon-two years from now), but it was quite the comforting little moment...now I do believe I was telling you why I don't believe in run-on sentences...

For me, it all came down at fourteen. I was a skinny kid, with awkward corners that were yet to smooth down, and a gangliness in my limbs that was just starting to slough away. 

Innocence was getting a little short around the ankles, and I could feel my girlness beginning to grow and change inside it, beginning to tighten in places I hadn't thought about before.

My own innocence was so familiar it almost didn't exist to me, other than this tightness around my body, which brought an itchy desire to pull free of it. 

I let it slip from my body as casually as an outfit my mother had picked out, as thoughtlessly as if I might get it back someday. 

It was that easy. Gravity took it. I didn't pick it up or, gingerly, fold it, crease by crease, into a tidy pile. 

I didn't take one final look, as I can do now, in retrospect, to handle its precious edges, showing their wear at the cuffs and sleeves from a long childhood spent idly and unselfconsciously romping in it.  

I just let it fall. 

I was a shy and edgy kind of kid, with thick bangs that I hid behind like a duck blind, only I was the duck. My hair, a dusty blond brown was growing back from a short cropping in the 8th grade - the year before - and I remember, even including the bangs which directly fringed the top of my vision, my hair was very far in the background of my reality. I wasn't all that worried about it because I wasn't very good at that kind of stuff. 

I wasn't disinterested, exactly, more carefully aloof, even to myself, about matters of looks and beauty. 

But boys were noticing me. Not my age boys, the ones I had crushes on the years before. Different boys. Boys in my sisters grade, strange boys, older boys. And I was interested in them. 

During this time my parents were spinning in their own worlds of confusion and re-orientation. We were all hanging, suddenly and jarringly separate, in the forceful redistribution of divorce. So there was no one, other than my sister - a high school senior - keeping an especially close eye on me. 

My sister was my mother then, which was convenient. I mean convenient for the shedding of innocence. 

And there was no other way. The uncontrolled disintegration of my family was compressed by my awkwardly and untimely becoming no longer a child; while my skinny arms, even wound tight around me, could not contain the adult that I wasn't. The only way I could make sense of myself was to transform.

There was no room for me in my body, which was galvanized and terrifyingly secret, and there was no room for me anywhere else, and the only way to make room was to try going places that were bigger - farther. 

There is no place as easy to go much farther than you are ready, than in the arms of an 18 year old boy at night. 

And it was in those arms, with those zippers, and smokes, hands and fingers, the same underwear my mother had washed for me the year before being seen on my body, being reached around with a deftness which seemed worldly and unknown, it was under those tee shirts, with those abdominal muscles flat as a school chair, where I rolled my self over and over in an effort to weave something in which I could change, transform myself somehow through heat and pressure into something else, something where I was lovely and strange and free, and unimaginably precious, to somebody. 

Are not we all the same

Will live to have the same fate

For sure

We will accomplish different things

But death we will ultimately await

Why not be proud of one's success 

And their overcoming of life's many 

                                    regrets 

We do not in fact bleed the same 

                                    blood 

Because individuals we are

The realization is that 

We have progressed

But we haven't gone very far

Don't believe me

Take a glimpse at the news 

                      the morning paper

The biggest clues

I hate to suggest we may never unify

As a cohesive unit 

And we all are apart of the reason 

                       WHY