This year all but disappeared. Bought in to fairy tales, but Sleeping Beauty just kept score and tried to sleep more. --Matt Nathanson; Kiss Quick

This was hard to write with Take On Me stuck in my head.

I dreamed I wrote a song in my sleep last night.

My best friend and I signed up last minute for an open mic/battle of the bands type thing, and showed up unprepared. We had to perform three songs.

I started hitting some beat on a folded up card table and just sang anything and everything. It became a wonder of a song, stripped down to my vocals and the beat I created, a phantom piano somehow chiming in. It was completely impromptu and it went on for at least six minutes. And it was, in that moment, as grandeous in beautiful simplicity as Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody is in complexity.

And when it ended the crowd was amazed, one band much closer to fame than us even remarking "Can we try that song?"


And I woke up feeling unaccomplished and lacking.

I've forgotten creativity.

My sophomore year of high school I took a hiatus from life and stewed in the books I was assigned to read for English and the pieces we wrote and the character complexities for the book I've still yet to write. I observed the world and scripted it, in notes to myself or musings. I swam with creative fish. I forsook participating in reality.

I've started doing the opposite. I'm so absorbed in the moment, keeping a keen ear on conversation, reworking my humor to be the quick spit-fire it used to be (it's more fitting for improv), realizing that my life is founded on the choices I make in these days...I'm trying to do it right.

And I've forgotten creativity.

I felt so unaccomplished and lacking because I used to do things like that; not compose brilliant songs that would rake in all the Grammys, but I used to write lyrics and simple tunes in my head. I used to create with my mind constantly. And don't get me wrong, I still do that. I've come up with three improv characters this weekend alone, but all the tried and true methods I used to employ I've somehow discarded with the trash.

And I'm not complete anymore.


That's one thing I've been learning a lot of lately; completion. I need theatre in my life, I need elaborate creativity that an audience or reader only barely scratches the surface of. I need words, words, words. I need to be happy. I need to be with someone who knows he wants to be with me. I need to clean my room. I'm discovering all of these things I never thought would matter that are now suddenly more important than remembering which song they're playing on the radio.

I was concerned that I've been out of commission these past two months; that since November I've written two notebooks full and at least forty blog posts on creative/personal things my mind sees fit to craft. I was concerned I haven't been channeling that spirit at a time where I should have felt so very much.

And maybe that's a sign these roads were never right to begin with. Maybe that's a sign what crept up on the path wouldn't complete me. Maybe we have to live mistakes to learn.


**

(I wrote this Friday):

Remember when we thought we knew
And it would slip in place like fitted shoes
Worn with years of walking, moulded to our arch?
We fantasized and dreamt and planned
For years and things without our hands
As though we had exception to make of ourselves.

And then the courses shifted short;
We stood aghast with ill report
That life could so destroyed become.
Foolish acts of foolish minds,
Disbelief falls fast in kind
That mortal men can plot a fate
Assured from the starting gate
And all would be a bliss, a bless,
A simple unchallenging test
For happiness to come.
That God would take the easy road
And let us carry less a load
To ease the journey home.

There's beauty in intricacy,
Art in surprise.
We'd give it up if it meant smoother skies?
Or strive to be complacent, set
In the plan that God sent
And learn in whatsoever state I am,
Therewith to be content.

**


I like how clouds have shadows. And how like Peter Pan that can't manage to catch them. No amount of sewing could bring a cloud near enough it's shadow. So they drift gracefully in a cerulean sky, smiling at me and my camera with the full memory, pulling apart angel hair, casting dark spots on the patchwork.

So I live in a meadow; a stationary existence, watching time pass with the faint current of the sky, amazed and afraid at the limitless expanse above me, beyond this air ships and the seal that keeps them earthbound. And the sun keeps shinning, and I keep acknowledging it's there, and the clouds cover me moment after quiet moment, and the light dims but persists. The light always persists.

And even clouds have dark sides. Even clouds have shadows. Even clouds can block the sun.

So good can't always be good. Every cloud has a shadow, whether it casts over me or not. And there's nothing that can stop the way they wander.

They say when one door closes another door opens. I find it equally true to say that we fail to see the best doors open as we spend our time staring at the door we think we want, waiting for it to swing wide.

Not What I'm Looking For

I wait with the window open. I am Wendy, looking out to the second star to the right, waiting for the inevitable moment when Peter swoops in again.

The trouble with Neverland is that time is not an entity. I could have grown old there without growing old, returning to this skyline to find the window shut and locked, the Darlings long dead, tenets boarding up in our converted family home. I wouldn't be remembered, all who'd ever thought to keep the memory of me now lying in gilded boxes in the ground.

I could stop waiting, lock the window to Peter's selfish, untimely return, hang my hat on the notion that he'll never again grace me with a thimble.

I'm not the sort a boy like that wants.

Still I keep the window open, still I refuse to shut out the option that perhaps, someday, I'd rather be in Neverland. Still I prep myself for the day my daughter will take the room, to undergo the right of passage that is heartbreak at Peter's hands.

We are attracted to the impossible. It is impossible for me, as aged as I have grown, to be yet so taken with a young boy. I want vivacity in maturity, not the boyish games he played with my heart. I don't want to have to battle to gain my footing. I want someone who would grow with me, in love and age. Peter can never be what I need, waiting by the window. Peter can never mean to me now what he meant to me then.

Peter is my past; a beautiful, wonderful, unbelievable moment I shan't ever forget, but as much as Peter would be the same, I would be all the more different.

I wish to progress, to grow, to gain experience and knowledge and send my lifeless body to its gilded box a more defined person than when I entered it, and by perfection take it up again. I could not bear the purgatory of Neverland, to keep the beauty of heart, mind, and complexion of youth, but to lose the magnificence of accomplishing eternity.

Peter only offers a part. Peter brings a blissful idea of childlike happiness forever, one I always questioned why I never kept, why I set it aside with the burning urge to go sojourn in mortality and grow old and grow up rather than stay. It would have been easier. It would be elegantly better to lead such a freeing life of carefree play and discovery until the end of time. But to abandon my purpose, whatever that divine being intended for it to be, to sell my soul to the devil in slothful, superficial intent, would be a life I could never lead.

I hadn't intended to lead it to begin with. I came to be at this window by forsaking the idea of an already plotted course which my hand could neither stay nor stray.

I inhale a breath of crisp winter air falling past the gently shaking curtains in the breeze, my hand shaking as I pull the window shut, questioning for one last moment if I truly want to deny the option of returning with Peter to Neverland. I follow through; the breeze stops short.

There is no future for me in Neverland. There is no tomorrow in the past. I am no better off than a pillar of salt if I look back