felt wrong not to swing

i know a boy who changed a part of me he’s never even seen. we were sitting indian style on those wood floors, listened to them creak like poetry in between your words. we sat in awe at the way your hands could say the things your voice could not. you smelled like weed and we tasted like beer. you turned the lights off and played music for us in the dark, said you didn’t want us to listen - you wanted us to feel. i’m always meeting people who are trying to get me to feel, like i don’t know how and they can show me the way. you spoke like you had the secrets of the universe. we all want secrets. we all follow anyone we think has the secrets. i knew a girl once with a broken heart. she used to make me come up with poems off the top of my head. i’d just end up telling her all my favorite words. i’m always giving people adjectives even though they’re all looking for verbs. one day she didn’t hurt anymore. and i stopped telling her poetry when she got so lonely she thought she would cry. i know a lot of people i fell half in love with once. i can’t remember most of their names. it doesn’t mean they weren’t important. sometimes the most important things in this life don’t need names. sometimes strangers can see us in ways no one else ever could. i hope you all know this feeling. if not now, i hope you find a moment where the experience strikes you. i hope you are startled by this life sometimes. i hope sometimes you look up at night and realize, even if just for a single second, there is an entire universe out there - and you are apart of it. you are apart of this. we are a part of this together. i hope you find the courage to keep going when you want to stop. i hope you find the strength to lose it all and start over again. sometimes i start to think that we’re just lights everyone can feel and when we hit a certain shadow, when we find a certain color, we bend into them and make this world apart of us in a way it was never supposed to be. what a happy accident it is to live, you know. what a happy accident this life is sometimes. like some handful of colors you never thought would go together.

--Ashli Wood