fireworks resemble flowers

(photo credit;  Anoop. Click to view full-sized image.)

Happy belated fourth of July. You should assume, whenever I wish you a happy anything, that it's belated.

I should have a poem in my pocket but I can't find it, so I'll throw you an excerpt. From that long-in progress novel, the ancient one with yellowed pages.

It hurts to be told that no matter what you do, some things, they just won’t change. 

Nobody ever told me this. I never really admitted it to myself. I’ve seen people hurt by it too, from a little girl whose doll’s just broken into a thousand unseeable pieces, crying fix it, even when those pieces have been thrown into the trash, to my grandmother, who liked to pretend that her daughter was still alive, but who would still visit her grave and whisper rest in peace over and over, like a broken record. They all had it there in their stomachs, unsettling facts that tried to whisper away what they really wanted to believe, that everything would be okay, but they never quite brought it up and stared at it, bitter taste of bile and yesterday’s not-quite-digested dinner all together in front of their eyes. Really though, they could be told again and again, vomit, and they never would unless they truly wanted to from the bottom of their cores. Willpower. It’s what they all needed, acceptance, grim or euphoric or in any form, to keep walking on. 

And then, sometimes, there’s guilt with the acceptance, the kind of guilt that’s that is paired with the true statement I am the only reason that something is wrong; sometimes, it’s that undigested thing. A person with perfect and rounded ethics would tell you digest it, accept that you’ve done something wrong and face the consequences. But if you’re a person with perfect ethics, there’s probably no chance that you’ve done anything that can produce that kind of guilt, so you wouldn’t know. The guilty though, they usually vomit it and wash it away without looking. It isn’t easy, because if you’re the guilty person, there isn’t really a wrong and a right. A guilty person wouldn’t have any stark preferences either, because usually, both choices come with a half freedom; either way, in some way, you’re trapped. 

So I wait for the end to come and take me, full fledged chance for acceptance, acceptance of an end that will stifle this fork that is a decision. But it doesn’t come.

Sometimes, just acceptance isn’t enough. Sometimes, there is something you can do. 

__________

More Tahoe pictures later. 


love, 


Julia