I miss the moon. I miss feeling liquid life
coursing through my veins. I miss happiness stealing the breath from my lungs.
And I miss you.
Once upon a time, a girl stood at the edge
of her world, and stared into the distance. She was starved for a dream,
breathless from not knowing what she was fighting for.
The thing I best remember is feeling the
ground underneath my feet. I didn’t care about the blisters, the sunburns, the
sweat, or exhaustion, or the weight of my ragged backpack. As long as I could
feel the ground wearing away at the soles of my shoes, as long as I just took
one more step, everything would be okay.
And the fucking roads I walked. You have no
idea. They stretch on endlessly, reaching deep into the sky, on and on and on
and on and on.
I felt invincible. I had the sun in my
veins and the stars in my heart. I was writing a story with my steps—my story.
Everyone and everything were characters, I was living my story, writing my
life. And, if you really want to know, that’s how I survived. Because survival was the story I wrote.
Time after time, in Spanish, in German, in
Croatian, in Polish…but mostly in broken English, people told me I was brave.
People told me to be careful.
Somewhere along the way, I think we
forgot what careful means. We forgot what beware means. We forgot how to live.
The closest thing to life we get is j-walking or slipping on the stairs, and
all the while, the parents and politicians and professors drone on and on and
on, and the authors and actors and directors drone on and on and on, and we are
suffocating, deteriorating, dying, drowning in information but starving for
knowledge, bombarded with lessons but ravenous for experience. Experience that
the world tells us is too dangerous to try.
Beware. Beware the murderers and
psychopaths, the rapists and thieves. Beware the liars, the manipulators.
Be aware. They exist.
Be aware. They are not the world.
I want to
scream. I want to walk up to the mindless masses, walking around this campus in
their hunter boots and barbour jackets, squealing over their drunken
indiscretions, tearing their hair out because of a psychology test, crying over
their boyfriend or girlfriend. Don’t they know? Don’t they know that none of it
matters in any way? Not when the entire world is at their fingertips. But they are
content to sit. But so am I. Well…not content. Not by a long shot.
