you’d like to think you’re a
mystery, someone who holds secrets
in the depths of their eyes—
you know, one of
those people.
and sometimes the world is
cruel and hopeless and
lonely—
so you write about it in your
poems and songs and
stories, pretending to be more
tragic than you actually are because
lies are liquid-smooth and swift and uncomplicated
and the truth is full of jagged
edges.

the truth is that you are just an
insignificant little dot
on an insignificant little planet
in an insignificant little galaxy
in an ocean of dots and planets and
galaxies.
the truth is that everything you could
ever do has been done before countless times,
by dots far bigger and more
interesting than you—
that you are terribly, irreversibly normal,
a speck on a small planet
spinning millions of times faster than
you can even imagine.
the truth is that there are things in this universe
far bigger and more interesting
than you—
and once when you were young and silly and foolish
you tried to fly,
jumped off the roof of your too-small
paint-peeling house and broke both your ankles—
gravity, that dragging inescapable
chain.

but normal is a bitter pill to
swallow, because when you were a
little girl dancing in moonbeams you wanted
to be a ballerina,
a doctor,
a foreign emissary,
an enigma,
a billion other fragments of dreams that
never quite came together to form a
definite reality—
only to wake up one morning and
realize that even in your dingy apartment
surrounded by your torn, weathered paperbacks
thousands of miles away from where you began
in the wildest city you can possibly think of,
despite all your fantasies of leaves dancing
in the autumn winds and the crash of the
ocean on rocky cliffs and a
lost, broken, wild, unpredictable, cataclysmic, tormented soul,
you are perfectly mundane—
but you keep on trying to be an enigma,
because even when the vastness of this universe
tears your glittering heartbreakingly-flawed
persona to shreds,
when you were little
you wanted to be a ballerina,
a doctor,
a complex, beautiful, red-lipstick-smeared riddle,
and you have always hated
the thought of being
ordinary.

so you tell your liquid-smooth-soft-easy
lies and you bask in your self-imposed silences
and suck yourself farther into
this black hole you have formed for yourself—
because the truth is full of jagged edges and

anything, anything at all,
is better than being

nothing.