Everything Stays

I sit at the granite island in the early afternoon; unsure of what I should say.  I never know what to say, I never know what I'm supposed to do and I'm just pretending.  I'm only nineteen; I'm not mature enough to know how to be a good person, right?
I've decided to stop using that excuse.  Nineteen is a bullshit age in a bullshit world and it would be a little less bullshit if we all stopped using our ages as scapegoats.
At this point, I'm just trying to make it through the days.  My world is a haze of never-ending stuff; kids and work and dishes and pancakes, rivers and sunburns and cooking and my mothers hands, broken bottle-openers and scorched lighters, fireworks embedded in my skin, painting and submarines, octopuses and rashes, blonde hair and wasps, hammocks and porch swings. It's too much, it's all too much, but since when is anything ever manageable?
I couldn't manage my siblings; they just thought I was a bossy little girl (true, unfortunately).
I couldn't manage my depression without a therapist, without meds.
I couldn't manage my life schedule without my mother.
So here I am, just trying to get to that point in the day when I can collapse, sunburnt and spent from telling children what to do, from figuring out their plans and food and sunscreen, finding the towels and cats and getting them to wear their seatbelts.
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Bri told me that there was peace in everything.  I think she's right, in a way. Or maybe she's not, who knows.  But it gave me a small comfort, and these past few days, were the eye of the storm that is currently my life.  Albeit, a few days isn't a very long eye in the wake of four months, but it was something, and I knew it when I saw it.  I grabbed it and soaked it in and everything was better, just for then.
If there's one thing I've learned from my myriad of mental health problems, it's that you just have to take today.  Yeah, yesterday probably sucked, and yeah tomorrow probably will too.  But if today isn't so bad, or a small moment of today isn't so bad, you take it.  The kids might start screaming in the next few seconds or you might run out of gas on a highway, but that tiny moment can make a world of difference.
We all need those eyes, in the middle of storms.
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Blood//Bones//Ribs

A moon carved out of cheese, the curve of your lips

the scratch of wax paper, softness of your pillow

the shape of your nose, accumulations of cat hair

penguin sheets, a too-loud fan,

Stripped to their atoms, piles of my bare bones;

all I can think of is you.

It doesn't matter who or what this is about; all that matters is that it exists.
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"ever so slightly, daily and nightly,
In little ways, when everything stays"

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.