Here Now

Went back to alex on friday for some family and friends time, when all I wanted to do is sleep in late and then go have pancakes with the boy. But the sun was shining with a stunning blue sky, and if I tried really hard, i could pretend I was ten again in this haunted house, and this day was just another careless spring morning, where nothing changes.

But things have changed, and I knew this when I sat on the stool in my room, reading pages and pages of scribbles and enigmatic question marks in the notebooks I cherish most in life.

If the house were ever on fire, they would be the first things I would save, all my writing, all my sudden bouts of genius at four AM after too much milkshake or breaking heels off shoes from too much dancing, or too long a night spent watching someone in someone else's arms...

There are words trailed off the corners of the pages into the unknown, and I wonder what it was that gave me a fever so strong, my hand kept writing, even when there was no paper left to cover.

But some fevers are better left unremembered, especially when I read the books from when I was sixteen, and i wonder who this girl is who writes these complex words of misery and almost imbalanced despair. What was wrong with me? Why was I like that?
How could I be so cruel?

"I know I'm not beautiful" I wrote again and again and again and again, and now I flinch and realise that's why I was so harsh, that's why I let the fever take over and write things that made my friends worry years later when they stumbled upon them, asking me if i'm ok, but secretly wondering if i'm anorexic, suicidal, insane,

and now,

much later,

I know this girl is no longer me, maybe just part of a memory of how messed up my teenage years were, maybe just a reminder of how self centered and ungrateful i was for the healthy body and heart my God gave me.

Now i am very grateful. More peaceful. Able to look in the mirror in the morning without flinching, to laugh out loud without choking, to look at the photo of that beautiful boy without crying, to read my old writing, remember the fever, and say "Thank God I am here now. And no longer there."