I'm so tired. And not in the whole, I haven't slept for the last three weeks kind. But in pure, and utter exhaustion with life. My life. It has been so terribly long and untrustworthy and unhappy. And now my only goal is to survive it. My only goal is to find some way of life, some path, that happiness can actually sprout from. The only thing I care about is the feeling that life is worth it. But I'm tricky. Because I have to believe it, and fully and it can't be based off of anything except myself and my beliefs and my goals and my cares and my needs. My life has just got to start being about me. And that's hard, making your life about yourself. That is the most incredibly difficult thing to do because you have to give up everything and everyone else in order to do it. In order to fill yourself up, you've got to empty everybody else out. You have to depend on yourself. A responsibility to life that is beyond any other. I have depended and lived off so many other people throughout my 17 years. Their values, goals, humors, tragedies. I have eaten them up, choked them down and breathed them deep. But now, I'm vomiting them back up. Because within that whole process, I've forgotten the most nourishment I can possibly feel is from myself. Life, itself, is the most outward experience one can encounter and in turn be forced to have. But then life goes up a level and whispers the secret of the inner, of the soul. It crawls up on your shoulder, and then, only if you listen very, very carefully, it will tell you that the key to life in its most purest form, is to live for yourself and develop your own, values, beliefs, goals, disappointments and then to love all of them and accept them so fully that it doesn't matter in the slightest what anybody else thinks about them, thinks about you. But thats all so hard to do. Life is so hard to live.

Watch out for the people who come and leave your life quickly. Watch for the fleeting, the ones who don't last. It's too easy and meaningless for a person to stick around forever. Because its the ones who come and go quickly, not always quietly, but without an outward care that teach the lives they move though the greatest lessons, give the greatest reasons, and share the greatest blessings of themselves. These people, they will never give you everything. But they will give something even greater than that- they will give you a piece. The exact piece you need at the exact moment you need it in order to greater complete the puzzle of our life. And while the people that stick around forever help you complete that puzzle, the ones that come and go give you a piece in which to complete it. And while you could complete the puzzle without help, you will always and forever need the pieces to do it.

You need the people that leave. You want the people that stay.

i was standing next to a rose bush, and you said "I don't even really believe in God." and my little six year old self was shocked. And I stared at you and said, "You don't believe in God?" And you shook your head and looked down at your feet and went "No, not really. I don't go to church." And I just couldn't believe it. My little six year old self could not even fathom the idea that there may not be a God, there may not be a heaven. I was a little six year old girl who every day of her six years of life did everything she possibly could to be good for God. Sure, I hated church, sure, I didn't pray every night, and sure, every time I tried to pray the rosary and follow my little packet I got bored. But I believed, without a doubt, that God was up there, and God loved me and how could not everybody else in this whole entire earth not believe he was there? Because in my world, everybody did. In my world, everybody was Catholic. I have home videos of my grandpa teaching me how to say "Peace" and shake hands while I was still learning to talk. I even had little candy hosts and would make everybody bow and say Amen to me after I said "The body of Christ."

And now that I'm 17, and all these beliefs are catching up to me, I can't help but question if my catholic faith was a product of my environment or is actually the belief system coated in truth and hope that it claims to be? Because some girl, between the ages of six and seventeen, got a little lost. And I'm trying so hard to pick the spot. To dive into my past and find the turning point where things fucked up. Perhaps, the wrong "right" turn I made. And the funny thing is, that while my brain is enveloped in utter confusion, I'm really, really grateful. And am, in a twisted around way, in utter awe of the way "God" perhaps, could've, if i believed, worked in my life.

But in the mean time, God, thanks for the car rides. For being egotistical and self-possessed, you really are a good listener. And maybe Maggie was right, you might be full of it, but you sure aren't a jerk.

time has passed. and i've had so much to say between then and now, but just haven't had the words. and i can honestly say thats the worst feeling in the world. having everything to say and no way to say it. well, thats me in the picture. in new york city. it was breathtaking. i felt a peace there- but a strange one. the city spurred and stirred and stripped and moved and shaked my soul and afterwards, on the flight home, i felt new. i'm starting to believe that life gives you what you need when you need it. and ineeded that- to feel new. i needed to feel like i had life beyond me, beyond the present, beyond my lonely life of a present. that a single life is much, much smaller than the wholeness of life. New York City taught me that. with all the people and all the parts it taught me to be a piece of a puzzle instead of the entire puzzle itself, which is what i had always expected myself to be. However, that's way to big a job for me, a human, a single life. and the puzzle of life transfers over time in such a vast way that nobody could ever possibly understand their singular importance in any human context. it is beyond us. the world is beyond us. i've learned to stop trying to figure it all out- because it's just impossible. and not in a "we can defy the impossible" sort of way. In an "it's actually completely impossible" sort of way. And i'm learning to accept that. i'm learning to accept that i cannot possibly be the puzzle because i cannot, first of all, live for all time because some amount of time has already passed for which I have not lived, and because I am human and humanity is so disgustingly limited. We are limited. But we are a part of many limits that together are unlimited.

If only I actually made sense.

I don't really know what to say tonight. About anything. But I'm compelled to write- write something. But you sort of need something to say in order to write. And I've realized that this has sort of become my diary. And I think, I think I'm ok with it. I think I'm ok with the fact that 16 different strangers are reading my innermost thoughts. That's sort of strange though, don't you think? That I won't tell a single living breathing named soul these thoughts, but I will pour them out online and allow faceless strangers to comment? I don't know the type of people I am allowing to see these thoughts- to hear them, so to speak. And maybe you can really hear them? The voice each and every one of you has made me out to be, ringing and echoing against your skull, maybe they have been heard.

I, I have been heard.

If only every single soul in this lonely world had that luxury.

I am, forever, grateful.

You know, I could really go on and on about how depressing and worthless my life is. How everybody and everything that matters to me, has decided I don't matter to them. But in this one fleeting moment, I won't. I won't complain that my best friend is really just a half-assed acquaintance and that I desperately want a boyfriend, but am too fat to have one. And that my mother hates me and that I hate my mother.Oh, and that I feel like my life is crashing in on me and nobody accepts me and that I look disgusting and that I need help and... This could go on and on. I could make it all perfectly poetic, and maybe, in some sickly way, beautiful. I could deceive you all and make myself look and seem almost god-like.
But I'm not. And my life isn't anywhere near poetic. And so I'm not even going to start- tonight, I've finished before I've started. This little self-pity fest, just for tonight, is done with. Over. Out the door.
And maybe, this one little decision on this one little gloomy night means that everything that went wrong, is finally about to go right.
Hope has shown its pale, adolescent face.

I left and returned as two different people. And it feels weird to be back. It feels weird to be thrown back into a mold of a life I created blindly and not for my pleasure. And now I have to live in it, and dance in it and smile in it. And the thing is, I don't fit my mold. For some reason, my heart aches. Maybe for the people I met while away, maybe for the person within myself that I left. Maybe for the life I'm about to go live now. Maybe it was for all of this and more. I can tell you one thing, though. I don't really know what is about to happen to me, and who is about to touch me. But I know I'm ready for what I wasn't before this trip. I'm ready for love, I'm ready for friendship. I'm staring at life with big, bright sixteen year old eyes and saying "Bring it on."

It's powerful. We are powerful. You, you are the most powerful person to have walked across this breathing earth. Power is between our ribs and in our toes.