We’re tearing ourselves apart;

Every day this country has loss and darkness that follows us around as if a shadow, clinging to any sign of doubt.

This darkness grows, getting bigger and bigger until every inch of the world is corrupted with power hungry people in the high leadership, to low, and hate that never seems to go away, like a fire that turns every grain of life to death.

In the hands of adversity we stand, us tight in their grip and unable to escape, as sides disagree over the right and the wrong in our world.

Each and every one of us has a different opinion on events, and it turns to rage towards the ones that do not believe the same.

A storm is overhead, here comes the rain and lightning, hearing thunder and feeling the strong winds whip you with fury as the storm turns to a hurricane.

Watch as the sun fades as the clouds cover the sky with pitch black and blots out any light left.

But we must stand defiant and resistant to this monstrosity of a void in our hearts and our minds.

We mustn't let the hate outweigh the love.

We mustn't let fear and belief outweigh logic and reason.

We must see the truth, that all men are created equal, all men and women, all people have rights. All people have hearts.

We the people must learn to love again, for we need to see that a country divided is not a country, but a fallen kingdom; yet that kingdom can rise again.

Hand in hand we can rebuild.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." 

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

These words have power. These words have meaning, and truth. We must come together and forget our differences, it is the only way we can all survive in this divided world we live in.

I'm not a native Spanish speaker, nor am I fluent (I'm learning it in school), so this may be pretty rough.  My vocab is fairly limited, so some of the words are probably not the best grammar or meaning for what I'm trying to say

Quiero ir al mar, y

Nadar en el azul, en

El agua y

En el cielo, porque

Los dos están uno cuando

Levantas tu corazón hacia

El mar.

I want to go to the sea, and

Swim in the blue, in

The water and

In the sky, because

The two are one when you

Lift your heart

To the sea.

It’s not the slashes through the timeline, 

Not the practiced cursive

Spelling out names

That we must all know.

It’s the blank in between

The names we will never write.



It’s voices that didn’t get recorded

Speeches spoken at thanksgiving dinner tables, 

To sisters and cousins. 



It’s not just the cursive names on forever preserved papers

Not just the cursive dates on eighth grade social studies timelines, 

It’s the bated breath and hopeful glances and calloused hands

From the spots on the timeline

That don’t get marked.

You sit in the middle of your college cafeteria—top floor—and things become very apparent to you, very quickly.

One. Your stomach hurts. Another girl is wincing in what seems like sympathy—how convenient. It should feel like solidarity, but it isn’t—you most likely are not in pain for similar reasons.

Two. A man you have never seen before, although the back of his head looks familiar, is scrubbing the empty tabletops with a wet cloth. His lips are set. When you look at him, his eyes do not rise.

Three. A mixed group of kids walk past you in mish-mash twos and threes. It reminds you of the summertime, and who you knew, the pairs you acknowledged and were a part of.

Four. Tears do not come, but the rotting, aching feeling persists. It does not matter—you have been reading your aunt and mother’s letters; real, tangible proof of the perseverance of joy beyond grief, beyond losing people—dead, living, or otherwise existing in perpetual limbo.

(This limbo is unfixable and not your fault.)

It is a scary thing—changes, in the new year, are coming quickly. Your hair is longer. You no longer shake at the thought of failure. The cuts on your fingers are finally from food wrappers. Humiliation makes a laughing fool of you.

Fate sometimes comes up in conversation. This is not a reason to become detached, or afraid. It is not a sign. You are nineteen—people start thinking of things, of the future. Relax. It’s 5:55, but there are no angels coming to kill you.

Or maybe there are. They just haven’t arrived yet. Does heaven take Uber?

You have an aborted thought, very quick, that sets off the pessimist in you: What kind of person cowers in the face of change?

An existing, honest one. May your cowering persist, and yet not hinder you from propelling forward. May your cowardice make a fool of you, a few times, until it steps aside for your determination to accept such changes as they are.

Sunday in the cafeteria is a time of introspection.

You may never know it again, but it exists here now. Even if you forget, it will be back. 

These things tend to. 

When you bite your jacket,

you taste the salt that has soaked in,

all the times you have worn it.

But there is no detaching-

you have sunken your teeth into a moment.

You can't let go,

the world might resent them; the words that will spit themselves out into orbit, they might sound like cracked doors you've locked shut.

Zipper-tough, damp, thick,

the wall you refuse to permeate. 

The salt sinks into your tongue and down through your feet.

The road is icy, the road is wet,

your teeth are doing your neighbors a favor,

you say. A favor

and the roads will be clear and your lips will stay clamped shut and this will melt the ground.

Melt it so much that it morphs into mud. 

Dear love, 

The night you slept in my room the first time you were wearing one of your white cotton shirts.

I woke up before you; my room was still dark, yet small speckles of light were coming through my blinds. There was just enough light for me to see the outline of your dark tattoos beneath your shirt and I laid there trying to figure out what shape they were. 

As I contemplated, my eyes wandered from your shirt to your sleeping face. Laying next to you, I memorized the curve of your pointed nose, your chin, and the curve of your lips, noticing how the top one jutted out the tiniest bit more than the lower one. I don’t know how long I spent memorizing your sleeping profile, but I only paused when a thought entered my mind. 

“What if this is the boy that I am going to marry?” The thought struck me by surprise and my heartbeat seemed to skip. The idea of marriage had never once crossed my mind with any of my past relationships. But as the thought expanded, our life together flashed before my eyes before I could stop it. 

These thoughts confused me and my mind raced uncontrollably. 

One thing was for certain though: This boy, who had come into my life at one of the most vulnerable and delicate times, meant something to me. The thought didn’t come lightly. In fact, the thought terrified me and I did not know what to do with it. 

A part of my heart was lost to you that day, but what I didn’t know at the time was that I was also losing myself. 

I think a part of me knew that I loved you from the beginning, although you try to deny that I even loved you at all. My love for you was the sneaky kind of love. It was always there, laying dormant, waiting for the right time to bubble up and explode. And eventually when it did rise to the surface, it wasn’t something I was ready for. I don’t think either of us were. But I won't apologize for loving you. 

I should have never had to beg to be shown the love you said you had for me. 

If you had truly loved me you would have shown it and I would have felt it. 

I should have left when I didn’t feel any. The pit in my stomach should have been a sign. 

But like many other women, I stayed with you because I thought you would change. 

The nights I spent waiting for you when you said you would come over. The times you said you’d do better, not for me, but for yourself. The times when you said you’d be there for me but you were nowhere to be found. 

These times should have made me realize. But the thing about you was that you had your hand wrapped around my brain so tightly that I was nothing more than a puppet to you. 

I think a part of you knew that you had me wrapped around your finger and you liked it. You reveled in the fact that I would stay with you even when you were not good for me. Not good to me. 

You wrote in your letter to me that you were sad that I could only think about the bad times I had with you. But the thing is, is that all I can do is remember the good times even when I don’t want to. 

Every night when I close my eyes I am forced to re-watch our happiest memories like a broken movie projector. 

The first time I met you flashes before my eyes, you coming into my room and accusing me of only wearing Brandy Melville and being surprised when I told you my shorts were thrifted. 

Laying in the hammock with you as crickets sang around us. 

Listening to music in my bed as we held each other into the late hours of the night. 

I could go on and on, but it’s not worth it to get stuck in the past. Because trust me I have, and once you’re stuck, it’s hard to pull yourself back out. 

You see, I never wanted to love you softly. I wanted to love you hard and fierce, but I couldn’t when I didn’t get anything in return. 

Now, sometimes I hear your voice in places where you aren’t there. 

“You have freckles on your nose.” I hear as I shop for parmesan at the grocery store. 

“There aren’t many things I care about more than I care about you.” I hear as I watch a movie with my sisters. 

“Sometimes it feels like I need you more than I need air.” I hear as I am out to dinner with my friends. 

I can’t escape you. 

But the thing about you is that you took and took and took and took, until there wasn’t anything left to take from me. Maybe you didn’t realize it, but I became a shell of the girl I used to be and you became the emotional rollercoaster I couldn’t escape from. We didn’t love each other the way that we wanted each other to, and for that I am sorry. 

All I can do is remember, and all you seem to do is try to forget. 

Now we are nothing more than villains in each other's stories. 

It didn’t have to end this way. 

But it did and now the only time I see you is when I close my eyes and the only time I talk to you is in my dreams, which is often. 

But now I hope you can understand that I cared about you. I cared about you so deeply that I was willing to stay even when it wasn’t healthy for either of us. 

I don’t know if I hate you. It would be easy to say I did and move on with my life but you said it perfectly: “losing you felt like losing a part of myself that I didn’t know I had.” 

But I’ll never know if you truly ever cared about me. If it was as meaningful to you as it was to me. My guess is no, and that is something that I am going to have to live with. The fact that I gave so much of myself to someone who genuinely didn’t care about me. I think that is what breaks my heart the most. Sometimes the biggest lessons learned are the ones that hurt the most. 

I hope one day, you find yourself. Because I think you lost yourself a long time ago. 

But I know I can’t be the one to help you search, even if a small part of me wants to. 

You need to do that yourself. Or else you’re going to be lost forever. 

There, on the shelf in my attic, hugged by the pictures and drawings my sister had created, these two shoes sit surrounded yet alone. Light pink like the lonely notes in an instrumental piece, these ballet slippers small as a pea remind me of our young days. So naive with not a care in the world but to run free. I was a dancer. The dancer was me. 

These little pieces of cloth sewn to be something beautiful no longer are mine. They belong to that girl who twirled for hours in her living room. Little dancer, so carefree. Didn’t care what they thought or what they could mean in the tiny remarks they all said to me. Didn’t matter what my hair looked like or what was happening in the world because all I knew was that I was a dancer. The dancer was me. 

Slowly, the shoes grew too tiny. First, as a little girl, it was exciting. I was older. More grownup. What else could a toddler want? But days grew longer and nights grew harder and suddenly I wanted to go back. Back to those shoes on the shelf, back to when I believed in fairies and elves, back to wanting to be older. Dance became both a passion and a chore as each dance class was filled with doubts about whether this was what I was meant to be. Because that dancer’s prettier, and that one’s livelier, and that one is better. That one is more flexible, and that one is on all of the teams, and that one is the teacher's favorite. It grew more difficult to believe that I was a dancer. That the dancer was me. 

My family always thought I was a dancer. A performer. An artist. This was my job. My calling. But every time they send me videos of these dancers online, way younger and way better, a piece of me dies wondering why. Why am I not like them? Why can’t I turn like that, bend like that, kick like that, look like that? Those little shoes mean nothing now if I am not good. Was I not working hard enough? Was I not giving my heart enough? Was I not enough? I knew, I knew, that they were dancers. It was not me.  

But I had to be. It was always what I did. That little girl in those little shoes had a dream. She knew that tiny shoes became bigger shoes, and bigger shoes became pointe shoes, and pointe shoes became jazz and tap and lyrical shoes. She was a dancer. She knew what she wanted. Those shoes carried her as she went from Clara to Oddette, Christine to Giselle, Rockette to Rockstar. She wanted me to be a dancer. She wanted me to be a performer. So I am the dancer. And the dancer is me.