Dear Self, you are not clever for holding
your love captive until it burst into flames
and ignited a fire inside your heart that he
was not capable of putting out with his love.
And you are not smart for trusting this boy
to be different than all of the others, you
are not sly for kissing and not telling,
or having secrets, or allowing yourself
to be one of his secrets.
You are intelligent but you are still a lost girl
without a Peter Pan to lead you, you are still a
Wendy dreaming too much and deciding for
yourself too little, you are still stuck on nursery
rhymes and happy endings when you should
have already realized that the process is more
important than the finished product and you
are making a mess of this journey—
This is just another lesson that you are foolish
for putting all of your hope into people instead
of ideas, that you should stick to what you know:
books and coffee and poetry, not things you
don’t understand like people pulling you into their
arms and then pushing you out of their lives, that
staying in on Friday nights never brought you
heartbreak, this is the universe saying let go.
Because yes, you are fantastic at figuring out
how to get yourself into sticky situations, you are
more familiar with how it feels to be in between a
rock and a hard place than you are with being in
your own bed, you are good at ruining things for
yourself but so is everyone else, you are an
expert at being left by people but you have left
too, and somewhere deep down you know it’s not
your fault that another season has come and gone
and that nothing is the same as when it started.
You know that somewhere in San Francisco,
there are cherry blossoms just blooming and in
New York there are friends thinking of you before
they fall asleep, waiting to help make all of your
skyscraper dreams a reality when you finally arrive—
You know that there is still something good to hold
onto and you do not need to carry the burden of
the past, so comfort yourself knowing that the only
baggage you will be bringing to a new big city with
brights lights is the kind filled with clothing, and
before you go, empty it of the memories you have
spent years collecting, knowing you don’t need them.
