Do you ever think about all the lives you could have had? Or could be content to have? Going to grad school with the boy you met at your restaurant with brown eyes and long brown hair. He’s moody; in a band. The ways and consistency with which I fall in love; that’s the only dependency which I can count on in life. Or maybe the older Italian divorcee that always sits at table 23. Again, those brown eyes, his Converse, his ease and relative aversion to excitement. Maybe the way he repeats the words you say in his accent. City boy, from Rome. Where would you live? What ways would you waste away your youth with him? The sex might last for a good 5-8 more years. You’d be mid-thirties, feeling stuck but living in a perpetual Italian visual romance. City on fire. Your soul doesn’t blow with excitement when the summer wind hits you in Rome. The colosseum would still be breathtaking if your breath weren’t already taken by cigarettes and forgotten dreams. Wanting to move back to the states but feeling the discontentment when you see your friends in BMWs and you’re still riding around in Camaro classic. All your luxurious sensibility could afford. How grim! Who’s to say you wouldn’t be a famous writer and cinematographer. After all, he’s a cinematographer. Why do you always think the worst of your talents? You pull stories out of air, but your work ethic is somewhere between slothful and elephant on a blue sky savannah day. Your love of breezes and beaches can’t seem to translate into produced work. You can’t seem to revise, only vomit. What kind of woman are you? Optimistic still; I can’t tell if it’s foolish or determined. I can’t tell if it’s half-assed or courageous to keep trying again. If the formula is so simple, why do so many fail? The same obstacles that have always existed exist. There’s always someone younger. This obsession with youth. Forget about it. There’s always someone lighter. This obtuse, focus on colorism. Forget about it. There’s always someone louder, more braggadocios, more grandiose. This constant comparison. Forget about it. Point out the one thing that never fades, and hang to it. What is it? Even photographs of photographs fade, lose pixels over time as newer pixels are added, become dated, like 80s living rooms and leotards with big hair. You can be the star of one galaxy, or you can outshine them all for a blink of a second that turns into a light year, it’s all simple it’s all up to you. You read an article today, about wasting talent. Your fear is the McDonald’s double cheeseburger immune to age, time, condition, sitting in a doctor’s office for 20 years, sitting in your stomach acid 4.5 months later preserved as ever. Don’t be toxic to yourself. Just breathe. Breathe and float in the saltwater at Miami Beach. Remember the feeling of the sun on your face, stinging contrast against the warm ocean and all the time you spent alone, wandering to and from home, tropical gyal, chopped hair, coconut songs bouncing off your lips and wafting through the space around your being as those stilty legs carry you from adventure to journey and back home again in time for Lost.
