In spite of the bitterness that drips from my lips with every hour that I’m subject to the masquerade of my own compassion, life isn’t miserable. Though memories slip from my fingers like tears on my cheeks, I’m really quite fine.

Every day, I perform my threadbare tricks underneath the storm of banality for an audience of one: my shadow. Yet, with the arrival of each morning, I always wave the moon goodbye. I never beg her to stay.

I love the moon, but she doesn’t love me.

The sun does, though. Embraced by her radiant buoyancy, the entrusted potential I bear each day is a reminder—a reminder that I am uniquely profound in the most avant-garde way.

Though I trudge through sludge, contempt with grudge, I am an exhibition of prolonged prosperity. Budding and unrealized, my mind eternally weaves spindling stories and ideas and prayers—day in and day out, to the bank and back.

Every day has been a story—not always one worth telling but always worth living.

As essentially ugly as roots are to a tree, the stains on my tapestry weave woes as winsome as they are worn. Decadence would not exist without the concept of surplus or flood. 

Moon and sun, I try.

Day and night, I learn.

Yin and yang, I grow.

My history is enveloped by the motley mixture of my moods, and though it pains me to say it, I’m just like everyone else. Though my indescribably individual existence radiates from my very soul, I am as lost in these times as anyone else, and if I am a part of ‘together,’ can I really be alone?

This terror and distrust of tomorrow and today are indicative of our instinctive tendency to believe that negativity is something to be blamed for. Negativity is not culpable, and problems are neither the victim nor the villain. 

It’s all just evidence. Perception is an illusion, and the haziness of black-white judgment is the source of all grey areas. A moment commands attention and respect, and its outcome is neither decided nor contrived; positivity and negativity are just possibilities, but memory is a constant that hides in the shadow.

As I continue to weave my tapestry, I’ll remain acutely aware that ugliness and beauty are not synonymous with positivity and negativity. The intricacy of the appearance of my trajectory is just a reminder of my efforts.

Whether my memories are skewed negative or positive, they’re my memories, and in each moment, I simply was.

I don’t want my chronicle to be recorded verbatim because I’m not living to be accounted for; I live for myself.