Lessons From the Kissing Booth

I caught myself there, painting demons and unicorns on my walls, sleepwalking my way into disasters of my own making and following the unlikeliest of outcomes right over cliffs. The heart wanders where it will, of course, but every now and I again I wish that it would take the rest of me along with it. Sometimes I try to outline the shapes our days hammer into our hearts, all scratched and dented and ringing from the blows, to see if there's secretly a jigsaw puzzle in there. Sometimes I am almost brave enough to fit my hands around your edges, to walk out from the shadows and look right at your bruises though I am still afraid to meet your eyes. I want to tell you that I know all about the dread that takes root at the end of the night, the flames we just can't help but touch, the miracles we need more than air.

Late nights as the hours drag on it turns boring, looking for all these answers under all these stones, panning for gold when all I'd rather do is sleep, tightrope walking when all my training is in rodeo clowning. Still I'm sure that the only real option is to thrust our hands right into this fire, even though the outcomes are almost always to either burn badly or turn to glass. Especially since the alternative appears to be learning to ask for what I want instead of around it, which is a longer drop than from that tightrope and a sharper burn than from those flames. Better the demons that I know than the answers I can't anticipate, even if it is the coward's way out. I'll work my way around to the right side eventually, although by then I may very well have missed what I was looking for.