Born into change and tragedy.
Forever seeking stability.
Building so many castles on so much quicksand.
Insecure in this ill-fitting body,
Tree escapist
People are hard and books don't lie.
Or leave.
So I climbed as far up as I could.
Diving into the words.
I followed the ice and snow to lands fantastical.
Candy skies and talking trees.
A fawn eager to please.
A man who just wanted to go home.
A detective solving the impossible.
Fighting back with love.
The It never stood a chance.
Quantum unicorns and the Dashwoods
Miranda and Prospero and Ferdinand.
Treasure Island and the Black Arrow
Curdie and the Goblins and cleansing rose fire.
I'd stay as long as I could.
Until my mother started to call for me.
A small flashlight joined the books as fall arrived.
Books were safer than people.
Than boys next door who wanted kisses.
The girls who just wanted to play house on the playground.
In rainy or snowy days, when I couldn't escape up the tree.
There was the top of the fridge.
Because no one ever looks all the way up
And if you're quiet, no one will spot you for hours.
If the lights in the kitchen ever got too much
The linen closet's top shelf beckoned.
Door closed and flashlight on.
Cozy and dark and quiet.
Books were less confusing than people.
Even books that required a dictionary on hand.
For all the grown up words I didn't know yet.
Books gave you space and starships and magic rings.
Books never made you feel stupid for not understanding.
They're great secret keepers, Books are.
Wishes for the Coming Year (and Decade)
Wishes I have for the coming decade.
So one of my people gave me this prompt and it is kind of a doozy. For a multitude of reasons, I am not one generally given to thinking about my personal lifespan in anything other than a year or so ahead of wherever I am at the moment. I’m still amazed I lived to see my 30th birthday. This is, of course, hilarious, given that my chosen major and life passion is history so I’m well familiar with the passage of time and thinking in cathedral time. My only possible explanation for it is that I am a Crusades/Renaissance historian primarily and so I’m accustomed to applying that thinking to the past and not, you know, my present/future. So it massively threw me for a loop when I realized that we’re not only at the end of the year but at the end of a decade. Time is also this weird nebulous concept. It feels like 20 years has passed between right now and this past January. So yeah.
This post is about wishes.
Wishes are super magical things. They are desires and dreams and worries given form and sent out into the great ether. Wishes get transformed into so many tangible and intangible things. Like, if you are looking for the magic inherent in the world, it’s wishes, ya’ll. Trust me on this.
My personal wishes come in weird formats, ranging from the excessively minor to the staggeringly huge.
However, for this next decade, I think the thing I am wishing most for is to be happy.
Uncomplicatedly happy more often than not. This year and decade has done a hell of a number on me personally and also on so many of the people that I hold so dear. So yeah, I want to be happy. Or rather I want to be in a place physically and also mentally/emotionally where that’s something that my brain can latch on to more readily. Depression, anxiety, and chronic pain are no joke, but things have gotten better this decade. I want that to continue.
I wish for the world to be a safer place for people like me. I wish for it to be safer period.
I also wish that someone would come up with a better method for managing auto-immune conditions. Despite not really thinking I’d make it this far, I really want to see 40,50, and 60. Beyond that, too.
So my hopes and dreams and wishes for the upcoming decade come down to health, security, and happiness. For me, my tribe, and the world.