I’ve tried to maintain the quality and length of my blogs so far this year, and so far, I’ve managed to muster the sufficient willpower to, even when this means sitting in front of my computer for an hour and agonizing about different subjects and brain childs, a panel of voices going back and forth in my head like that one TikTok trend: 

• I’ll have to censor it so much it’ll barely be recognizable. 
• If people wanted to read about that I might as well post the link to the well-written article / podcast I got the idea from.
• That’s far too personal.
• I don’t have the emotional capacity to write about that right now. 
• Why can I literally not think of anything to write about.
• That’s just… depressing.

Fighting the urge to write a sequel to “Finding My Voice” (basically a blog about struggling to blog), and knowing that I have two physics tests tomorrow and a 4-minute memorized Spanish presentation which I haven’t even hit the “create new slide deck” button for in Google Drive and that I’ll be gone for college admit weekend Wednesday-Saturday which is great but which also means that I’ll have to finish studying for two AP exams and make up three days’ worth of schoolwork on Sunday in what feels like an endless game of catch-up that is mostly my own fault, and having sat here for the past hour and a half trying to censor various different pieces of my writing from the past few months or create something new from a headache-y brain that at once feels overstretched like taffy and dense like a block of lead or write an appropriate, PG reflection of my high school career, I’ve finally decided to cave and exploit, I mean share, a poem that is really just prose broken up into lines that I wrote a week ago after being re-inspired by the protagonist in I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, and move on, the assignment a day late, an hour behind my daily schedule, and having produced nothing new, to creating my presentation about the Catalan dialect which I, as of now, know nothing about. An oddly fitting theme for my last blog, chucking perfectionism out of the window doesn’t feel as grand and liberating as it should, but maybe that’s something which comes tomorrow, when I pray to feel the enlightening effects of those extra, precious minutes of sleep. 

no title
which is not a literary device

beams of stadium lights cross-crossing with the glow of a distant sun
in a liquid dust clinging to the first breath of summer that seems to me
the stairway to heaven

sit with me behind the bleachers and share your mind with me
what makes you who you are?
why do you live that way?
what have you poured your blood, sweat, and tears into,
how do you rage against the naturally rising entropy of the universe?
how do you see the people around you?
and,
what sets your heart on fire?
i want to know what it feels like to be you
not just your surface politics and your obligations and what happened yesterday in chemistry
but what your story is
where your humanity is
who are you?
show me, in bits and pieces, and i’ll use it to paint your portrait in technicolor in my mind
so that you might see your likeness reflected in my eyes
our eyes, that are windows to our souls

i know we’re on borrowed time
that as the leaves change and sigh one last time and flutter, lining the sidewalks as inevitably as they do every year, unfeeling
and the coming summer that now beckons us with such promise recedes, imperceptibly at first, and then with crushing certainty
the railroad tracks of our lives will diverge

and yet.
and yet, a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts
if this is borrowed time, lend it to me
there are things the future doesn’t have to take from us, and among those is the present, you and i
if you can’t be my last, won’t you be my first?
won’t you be with me, here, in the marred paradise of youth
where there is yet time, where the world is our oyster

and oh, to be seen
to be seen and touched and heard and felt and understood
and to do the same unto another
i have spent my life observing the world, learning of it from the windows on my bookshelves
but now i want to be a part of it, to taste the love and heartbreak and the closeness of
souls of which i have read
and find the humanity in my pages in a real life before me
and be a part of something greater than myself 

so, won’t you be with me?
be a friend of my mind,
and share this tiny piece of yourself, this avenue of your life, with me.

Quotes/Inspirations:

• The whole idea of getting to know someone on borrowed time is inspired by Erika Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.
• “A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.” –Vision, Avengers: Age of Ultron
• “… a friend of my mind” –Toni Morrison, Beloved
• “the railroad tracks of our lives” –Mr. Horner, my 5th grade teacher