origins and new wishes

the girl who inspired me to write this blog told me her mama used to put letters into her lunch box. and i remember thinking, i wish my mother loved me.

i wish my mother packed a lunch box for me. i wish my mother cared whether or not i ate food.

i wish my mother wrote letters to put into my lunch box.

i wish i had a mom.

the girl who inspired me to write this blog no longer speaks to me. she has her own trauma, i have mine. we were friends for a little while. she went on her own adventures and as far as i know she is doing fantastic, amazing, living her best life. i am happy for her.

thank you for inspiring me to write this. thank you for letting me revisit this, all these years later. thank you for sharing some school days with me. for showing me what a happy childhood might look like. what it looked like, for moments. however scarce.

to my mother:

i believe you when you say you did your best. i need you to know that your best was not enough. not even close. thank you for trying. i hope you get the help and healing you need, too. i hope you are okay now. i hope your other children are still on speaking terms with you. and if they are not, i hope you understand why you are alone.

to all the motherless daughters:
we raised ourselves. i hope you make it. i hope you live. i hope you learn how to mother yourself, and i hope you grow up knowing that you are worthy and deserving of unconditional love and compassion. you are worthy of care, of kindness, of respect.

i hope you learn how to give love that is unconditional, and not masochistic. it looks similar, but there is a difference between unconditional love and masochistic love. love will sometimes hurt, but not always. love cannot be earned, only freely given and received. you cannot love someone who is hurting you and stay with them. love them and yourself enough to leave them. it does not serve you or them to let them continue to cause you harm.

give the love you hope to receive, and know that you never have to earn it. you deserve it because you are a person. you deserve for your existence to be celebrated. be glad you are alive.

i am glad you are alive, even if we never meet again.

my new wish, my only wish, my always wish:

  i wish for everyone to treat everyone with unconditional compassion from now until forever backdated to the beginning of time

The llamas.

Because of you, for a whole year, "llamas" was my favorite word.

The wish.

What I wish for every time I make a wish, is just for only good, kind things to ever happen to anyone ever again for the rest of forever. For things to get better, for everyone. For no more suffering or hurt or pain.

The staying.

It's so easy to run away. It's so hard to stay.

I miss you.

I wish that I could be there to rescue you ever time you needed to be rescued. I wish that I would hear you when you cry for help, and always be there to come running. I wish I could save you when you don't even realize you're in danger.

Make it not true.

I wished for all of the sad things to not be true.

The shortness of life.

I didn't want to say anything. I just wanted to reach out, and hold your hand. I didn't, I wasn't brave enough. Life is so short, too short to not reach out and hold your hand.

Even the mountains seem less tall.

I remember first stepping into this town. I had a backpack, a pair of shoes, and a lot of dreams.

Now, the trees seem smaller. Even the mountains seem less tall. And my feet feel farther away.

I hope you have the experience of growing out of a place, and needing to put on your walking shoes. And I also hope you'll never have that experience.

You exist.

I just want you to know, you are wonderful. I'm so glad you're in the world.

Occupy.

Stand up. Speak out. Stay warm.

The wishing well.

Do wishes really not come true if you tell someone what you wished for? Where did that superstition come from? Did someone make a wish, keep it a secret, and it came true? I wonder if wishes you tell people come true.

It seems more likely to me that if you tell people what you wished for, it would come true. The more you talk about it, write it down, think about it, the more likely it is you'll be focused on what you wish, and you'll make it come true.

Right?

A big house.

I wish I had a big house where we all could live. One day I will. And whenever you have nowhere to go, and you're scared, you can come stay with me. You can stay forever, if you want.

Our tragedy.

I can't tell you to appreciate what you have. You've never been without it, how would you ever be able to understand its value?

I can't tell you that it's possible to miss something you've never had. There's nothing you've never had that hurts so much it's like a hole in your heart. You've never been nostalgic for places you've never been, and you've never missed people you've never known.

You will never understand, and that is your tragedy. But I can't know what it's like not to understand, and that is mine.

Money, love, and freedom.

I wish we could all get paid to do something we love and would do for free.

Secrets, again.

I hope that all your secrets are wonderful things, that you can't wait to tell the world, and is hard for you not to say.

I hope you don't have any dark secrets or sad news secrets.

Mostly, I hope you don't have to keep any secrets.

Patience.

I'm not very patient. I don't know how to be. And the closer I get to whatever I'm impatient about, the less patient I get.

I hope you have patience. It makes waiting far more bearable.

Mistakes.

It's ok to make mistakes, as long as you grow and learn from them. Some people never will. Don't get angry about it. Smile to yourself and think, how much I'll grow, and how much they'll never know.

Wish.

If I had only one wish, I would wish for more wishes. And if I couldn't wish for more wishes, I'd wish for the ability to grant an infinite amount of wishes to other people. And if I couldn't wish for that either, I'd wish for a cessation of all suffering for the rest of forever and backdated to the beginning of time.

Trust.

"You can tell me anything," people say. "I won't judge you. I won't think any differently of you. You can trust me."

But people are people. And they can't know what they'll do or how they'll react.

Home.

I want to go home.