My Bite Of The Apple.

The waves and the shore have become one and the same for me. Separating only to come together, time after time: there comes a point where the given becomes the taken and you can’t even tell who has rejected whom anymore. The dark side of the moon pulls your tides while you still relish this concept of control; of power. Every drop of water sucked back into the oceans—into the same old skylines—carries with it grains of sand; a memory of the past. Like it’s even necessary. Like you won’t get sucked into this force propelling you back to this strangely familiar solid ground.
I don’t understand what is so hard about the concept of letting go. Eventually, you revisit all the same spots regardless of you fighting the riptides, whether you’re conscious of it or not.
I have spent the past decade caught in this vicious cycle of crashing against the shores of sanity only to feel the ground give way beneath me & water rise above my head again. I didn’t understand why this was happening. I fought so hard.
My dad once told me, from his years as a lifeguard, that to escape a riptide one has to swim parallel instead of directly against it. Fighting gets you nowhere. Fighting will confuse and exhaust you. Recently, I’ve had to learn to go with the struggles I encounter with my life. You don’t face them head on—I’ve had to continue breathing and experiencing new things.
This isn’t my natural style. I was born a fighter & a stubborn child. I was unfortunately born very brave—I dive head first into my own problems and weaknesses with the best of intentions but ultimately become my own undoing. I forget to live.
I left school to deal with myself. I quit my job to deal with myself. But in the end, all the “healing” in the world won’t earn me a diploma or money. There comes a point where you have to enter the world again.
So, I’m leaving Delaware. My problems will follow me, but I can solve them while building me a new reality: in fact, many of my anchors are directly connected to my fear of trying new things.
I’m scared, but it is the first real, beautiful thing I’ve felt in so long. I recognize it for what it is—an illusion, like the one of safety inside my own mind—but I can ultimately swim alongside it. And come to realize that the happenings in life are an undertow I can’t control—I will beach myself from time to time—but my willingness to whirlpool in it is entirely up to me.

Some songs resemble your own life so well that it almost scares you; and you can understand your situation so much better in the moments that you listen to it. Tiny Vessels by Death Cab For Cutie is one of those for me. I had always loved it because it was beautifully written and a pretty song, but now I can relate to it on a deeply personal level. I can already tell it’s going to become a marker for this time in my life when I look back.

This is the moment that you know
That you told her that you loved her, but you don’t
You touch her skin and then you think
That she is beautiful, but she don’t mean a thing to me
Yeah, she is beautiful, but she don’t mean a thing to me

I spent two weeks in Silver Lake
The California sun cascading down my face
There was a girl with light brown streaks
And she was beautiful, but she didn’t mean a thing to me
Yeah, she was beautiful, but she didn’t mean a thing to me

I wanted to believe in all the words that I was speaking
As we moved together in the dark
And all the friends that I was telling
And all the playful misspellings
And every bite I gave you left a mark

As tiny vessels oozed into your neck
And formed the bruises
That you said you didn’t want to fade
But they did and so did I that day

All I see are dark gray clouds
In the distance, moving closer with every hour
So when you’d ask, “Is something wrong?”
I’d think, “You’re damn right there is
But we can’t talk about it now
No, we can’t talk about it now”

So one last touch and then you’ll go
And we’ll pretend that it meant something so much more
But it was vile, and it was cheap
And you are beautiful, but you don’t mean a thing to me
Yeah, you are beautiful, but you don’t mean a thing to me
Yeah, you are beautiful, but you don’t mean a thing to me…