Sometimes we crave what isn’t good for us.
Smoking cigarettes and wearing secondhand clothes, driving in a junk car with a plastic Jesus melted to the dashboard from the summer heat. Believing your parents are truly against you to justify your bitterness. It sounds like a hazy half-memory already, and it’s something you might not have experienced.
These are what modern romantic notions look like. Pretending things are worse off because it sounds better than saying the truth. There isn’t anything wrong in your head, your siblings still have all their limbs, and your parents don’t throw dishes at you with nicotine yellow hands at Thanksgiving. You don’t have a great tragedy of your own, so you borrow another generation’s.
It sounds poetic and pretty, yellow sunlight in unwashed curtains while you read Sylvia Plath on a window seat. The sorrow you feel through a novel’s character is so much more real than your own. Before too long you wish you could curl between the pages of Catcher in the Rye or The Bell Jar and live in their world instead of the one already existing. Facing consequences is not in your horoscope.
But loving and living a poem is worse than a lie, it’s a trap and a trick. Writing on a typewriter is all well and good before you realize your fingers will stain and the ribbon will jam and the words will smudge. Nostalgia grabs you with a glance, and you think the past is magical with its delicate tinted lighting, instead of the less flattering reality.
The very word, “poetic” is enticing. It’s not even the poem you want, you just want to feel the words and the smoke and the runaway living to trace patterns into the tissue on your heart. A tattoo on your soul you’ll think was a stupid idea in twenty years.
You want to capture tiny moments and pin them under glass like butterflies and beetles. Lying in fields with the breeze just so blowing around you, hair teased exactly like you dreamed, and having someone to say “I love you” while you cloud watch until sunset. A handful of time’s sands and you’ll treasure them until they make you weep with longing.
These are things I sometimes think about because they seem perfectly flawed. Tiny coffee shops with worn, warm furniture and having the faint smell of thrift stores forever imbedded in your clothes. It’s a feeling that gives you the right to secret smiles and makes autumn feel like the beginning of the world. Dead leaves on your doorsteps and feeling how graceful and heavy your limbs are. It’s alright that I’m depressed, because it gives me the pain I need to create. My pain is of the past and gives me something to write about. My eyes and hands speak like a Hemingway novel, all simple truths in plain tones. I live in the generation afraid of it’s future, so we are entirely addicted to the past we just happened to miss in the transition.
(via thegothicalice)
