Sixteen Small Steps to Happiness

1. push yourself to get up before the rest of the world - start with 7am, then 6am, then 5:30am. go to the nearest hill with a big coat and a scarf and watch the sun rise.

2. push yourself to fall asleep earlier - start with 11pm, then 10pm, then 9pm. wake up in the morning feeling re-energized and comfortable.

3. erase processed food from your diet. start with no lollies, chips, biscuits, then erase pasta, rice, cereal, then bread. use the rule that if a child couldn’t identify what was in it, you don’t eat it.

4. get into the habit of cooking yourself a beautiful breakfast. fry tomatoes and mushrooms in real butter and garlic, fry an egg, slice up a fresh avocado and squirt way too much lemon on it. sit and eat it and do nothing else.


5. stretch. start by reaching for the sky as hard as you can, then trying to touch your toes. roll your head. stretch your fingers. stretch everything.

6. buy a 1L water bottle. start with pushing yourself to drink the whole thing in a day, then try drinking it twice.


7. buy a beautiful diary and a beautiful black pen. write down everything you do, including dinner dates, appointments, assignments, coffees, what you need to do that day. no detail is too small.

8. strip your bed of your sheets and empty your underwear draw into the washing machine. put a massive scoop of scented fabric softener in there and wash. make your bed in full.


9. organise your room. fold all your clothes (and bag what you don’t want), clean your mirror, your laptop, vacuum the floor. light a beautiful candle.

10. have a luxurious shower with your favourite music playing. wash your hair, scrub your body, brush your teeth. lather your whole body in moisturiser, get familiar with the part between your toes, your inner thighs, the back of your neck.


11. push yourself to go for a walk. take your headphones, go to the beach and walk. smile at strangers walking the other way and be surprised how many smile back. bring your dog and observe the dog’s behaviour. realise you can learn from your dog.


12. message old friends with personal jokes. reminisce. suggest a catch up soon, even if you don’t follow through. push yourself to follow through.

14. think long and hard about what interests you. crime? sex? boarding school? long-forgotten romance etiquette? find a book about it and read it. there is a book about literally everything.

15. become the person you would ideally fall in love with. let cars merge into your lane when driving. pay double for parking tickets and leave a second one in the machine. stick your tongue out at babies. compliment people on their cute clothes. challenge yourself to not ridicule anyone for a whole day. then two. then a week. walk with a straight posture. look people in the eye. ask people about their story. talk to acquaintances so they become friends.

16. lie in the sunshine. daydream about the life you would lead if failure wasn’t a thing. open your eyes. take small steps to make it happen for you.

--via

“I’m not saying that at some point love isn’t staying up until 2am phone calls or stealing kisses when you least expect it, or instantly falling for each other’s favorite songs because it is, or at least that’s what the lead up to it feels like, but real love, is so much more. It’s going out at 12am to get something to eat for your wife who can’t get out of bed, it’s listening to them as they explode with vulnerability on your living room couch talking about how they were only so young when their parents passed on. It’s remembering how someone likes their coffee in the morning without asking—without ever asking, it’s visiting someone in the hospital knowing the last thing you want to do is see them in that condition, it’s wanting to be with that person despite everything, the future, the past, and everything in between, it’s the intimate things that you don’t even realize involve such intimacy, but they do, in secret, like the pinky promises you two made behind your back, to love one another for always, in the time you thought you were in love, when you were actually just on your way to it.”
--52hearts

“Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.”

--Kalyn Roseanne

a poem about wanderlust

i have known the taste of salt water,
and the smell of decaying forests,
and the cracks in hundreds of sidewalks.
i have loved the gas pedal,
and the airport concourse,
and the ever-changing time zones.
in all of these places,
i thought i could find a home in not having one;
i have chased the sun across the sky so many times,
not yet ready to admit,
you never catch up.
--topographe

always panting, forever distracted

in the sleepiness of night I feel like I can say anything. you feel good drunk in the dark. you feel good in my dreams. you are still swelling and ghosting while I am waiting for you. I’ve tried to gather greater amounts of strength than fifths of vodka or offering clumsy poems to lonely people.

God, it’s so sad when the people don’t feel like poems anymore.

In high school I scrambled after them, waited and watched, fell in love with people who had no idea it was in me to be so brave. And what a dangerous thing it is to want someone against all the odds, right? How I listened tentatively to every person who poured secrets in hallways they didn’t know I was listening in. I could count on all your hands the strangers I’ve wanted to kiss.

But this isn’t about them. It’s about the things you’ve said to me in secret when you were younger, waiting for this world to gobble you up, spit your love out like sunflower seeds in summer when the days go on and on forever. How I like the way you move in your sleep. I like the way you touch the ends of my hair sometimes when you’re thinking about things I’m trying my hardest to figure out without asking. I’ve never wanted someone so much all of the time. Tell me this could chip the moon, this could send shivers down the spine of all those saps we ever loved before. Is it lonely to chase after things that you can only get so close to? tossing wishes into wells, these are the things that break days. guilt and moments you can’t have when you want them most, this is the stuff in jazz music and hope, the stuff that makes poets and fills notebooks. Tell me, could the chaos ever accept you too?

--Ashli Wood

careless in our summer clothes,

Together, we wrote a letter: “Dear August, our muscles are tired.” Standing in the doorway, I caught the last glimpse of July, lazy heat hovering over the parked cars like restless ghosts. Sometimes, mostly when it’s early (or when my headphones can’t save me), I think about all of the people we’ve been with one another. All of those colors that bled us dry, turned us muddy like watercolor water. And in the knee-tall grass with your hands behind your back, I knew there’d always been something between us akin to the wonder that keeps the stars apart (forgive me if I’m paraphrasing). The yellow pins slowly stopped singing, but that’s okay. This was all delicate and harsh, like smoke rings I wore like proud diamonds even when they turned my finger green. I am writing a letter with all of those high altitude thoughts—the ones that made my fingers twitch as I moved backwards through time. But about July, and whatever came before it: I am waving goodbye. Ushering in the change that comes ahead with childlike calls to the backyard. Let’s be barefoot. Let’s give up what we know, not to have it taken away but to abandon it. “Dear July, you were a red herring. Dear August, here we are, please keep our roots from doubling back. Please keep us safe like a kiss on the corner of the mouth. Please don’t write us all off just yet.”
--jenna2step

Tonight on the car ride home I leaned myself forward so I could see the stars better and turned the volume up while simon and garfunkle were playing. started yelling out the lyrics to “only living boy in new york” and felt really lost and really alive for the first time since high school. The other night I wrote about how my father is a man of minor miracles - realized today that I’m a girl of minor fiascoes. Thought about how I held you last week. It was the first time I ever held new life. I never knew what that felt like before. It made me nervous, thinking about what I was holding. This tiny little thing. God, you were beautiful. You were perfect. And it’s fucking tragic to me how these words lack the strength entirely to convey the feelings I’ve got criss-crossed behind them. Started to cry when I thought about the holes in your heart. Wondered if they were big enough to hold things like your mothers voice, the sticky sunlight of morning getting caught in the wax of the wings you left behind, the sound your grandmother made as she cried on the drive home. Or if maybe they’re too small for things like that. If maybe the only things they can hold are tiny handcrafted secrets I spend my days trying to build out of the dirt. How sometimes I find myself desperately trying to enjoy a moment, but my body feels to heavy for it. Like my heart’s stumbling all over the place, hands fumbling, thoughts all water-colored and messy. Trying so hard to notice the beauty in ordinary moments, to enjoy things slowly and without effort, admiring people who live so easily. I see some lovers making out by the lakefront, hear a boy playing guitar on a bench, make up a fake constellation out of some left-over stars and I’m trying to tell myself “enjoy this. you’re young and the world still has the ability to be lovely sometimes” but it’s like the feelings keep falling all over the place. Like they can’t get comfortable, breathing heavily under me. I try so hard to take things for what they are and love them even in their crookedness, in their almost poetic way of never being like I thought beautiful things were supposed to be. But my body’s just to heavy for it. Too clumsy to sit still for a goddamn second and love some moment serenely in the quiet symphony of summer’s eternity. Maybe you’re not the only one with holes in your heart burying quiet thoughts your mouth can’t even whisper yet.

--Ashli Wood

I'll play you some songs that'll change your life.

"I doubt that parents have an inkling of how deep a child's love goes. It is more thorough than adult love. I loved not only my parents: I loved their love."

--Josephine Humphreys, 'Rich In Love'

“When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.”

--Alan Watts

“I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.”

--Charles Bukowski

“I’m attracted to the extreme light and the extreme dark. I’m interested in the human condition and what makes people tick. I’m interested in the things people try to hide.”

--Johnny Depp

"My dad’s a gruff man, sarcastic in tone and short with dialog. But he’s also a man of minor miracles. Quiet in their presence but grand in their wake. He told me “C’mere and I’ll play you some songs that’ll change your life.” And they did. Not in obvious ways, but carefully. Quietly and entirely."

--Ashli Wood

“Learn to be quiet just as you learn to talk, because if talking guides you, being quiet protects you. By being quiet, you attain two characteristics: you are able to take knowledge from those more knowledgeable than you, and you are able to repel the ignorance of those more ignorant than you.”

--Abu adh-Dhiya

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

--Robert Louis Stevenson

“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.”

--Ella Fitzgerald

“You won’t do it at the right time. You’ll be late. You’ll be early. You’ll get re-routed. You’ll get delayed. You’ll change your mind. You’ll change your heart. It’s not going to turn out the way you thought it would. It will be better.”

--Kate Moller

“This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.”

--Rumi

“I feel like your life is sort of always a battle between safety and freedom. You know: do you want to throw yourself into something head first, or do you want to be cautious?”

--Florence Welch, Nylon magazine

“Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”

--Oprah Winfrey

"So therefore I dedicate myself to myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger- because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being."

--Jack Kerouac

“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

--Franz Kafka

all these words are just a matter of time

This is our handmade hope. We brought it up from the dirt. Listen up tulip, this won’t be easy. Your hands will tremble when they’ve got nothing to hold. And all the things you love will find better ways to out run you. Do you want comfort or remorse? I can hear your ribs calling out, I can hear your voice getting caught between the bones - Our lips so close saying “I’m ready” - are you sure? You’ll never feel this young again, buttercup. No more coca cola, heat wave, bottle rocket, making out in the backseat of someone else’s truck past your curfew, no more loud and wild secrets to uproot you right where you’re standing. Can you see the storm brewing down the road?

This is what happens when the world doesn’t feel like flowers anymore.

Been building our moments into chandeliers out of shadows and glass beer bottles. Trying to bend the sound they make when they clang against one another. Trying to make it something like summers when we were younger and you could wake up without that ever dancing wonder of where you’ll be by tomorrow. That god awful gorgeous gleam of naivety. That milk pale place between one sound and another. You idiots, don’t you know we can’t just forget about these things one day? They think we’re scared when really we’re just experts at putting our hearts into things without people noticing. Home-grown experiences and chasing after the crooked parts of ourselves we see in strangers. We are broken and strange and wonderful. We are selfish and lonely. We are brave, we are sad, we are home-bound, closing our fists tight around one another and the words. God, the words never were enough, were they? Just keep saying my name, just keep telling yourself we’ll goddamn burn before we fade away. We will keep trying to dig ourselves into something that the memories and the feelings can’t drag us out of. The pine trees kissing the sky, the porch swing, the flowers, all our fears braided around them. Keep telling them “if you cross me, I’ll get you” keep saying “be kind, be strong, be true”

but that quiet corner of you always thinking about our collar bones missing loudly the way it used to feel when stars could fall into them if they wanted. I’m ready if you are.

--Ashli Wood

moonlight in an orange grove and vanilla ice cream cones

Everything feels like it’s overflowing. Like I’m chasing after the things that fill up each day and I can’t keep up with it all. Do you know this thing I’m talking about? I have these almost black outs, selective memory and freak moments where I don’t know how I got there. First I’m bike riding on the lake front thinking about that boy I wrote for and how he had night terrors, I see him walking down these grand empty rooms with old sheets covering the furniture. I’m hearing the bells of other bike riders, smiling at a tiny little black girl picking flowers on the side of the road and then the next thing I know I have a brown bag full of groceries wandering some aisle in whole foods, and then I’m throwing up in the lot next to Acadia, asking the french man how much he’s selling his post cards for, singing at the top of my lungs with you when the windows are rolled down on high way forty three, crying in my parent’s bathroom when no one is home and I don’t even know why I drove there in the first place. I keep finding myself in random moments and losing myself in the mess of living uncontrollably, helplessly, smiling even when I feel out of place, listening to people talk because I have nothing to say and I don’t believe in small talk. Handing out cigarettes to the homeless musicians on Decatur, waiting for you on the stairs like a goddamn child, wondering what kind of things you write about without me, if you still believe in the same things or if maybe they out grew you and the sad days you spend trying to out grow them. How me and Billy were holding those sticks out in front of us when we were exploring the abandoned homes on parker chapel road and it was the first time in months that I felt so good. Effortlessly happy. The smell of that newspaper from 1928 and when we snuck into that thin dark hallway to read all the restricted material in the library. And then I’m smoking a cigarette on someone else’s steps, I’m sitting in Warren’s passenger seat with my feet on the dashboard and a good song on the radio. Now you’re holding my hand and telling me how small I am. Like I don’t already know. Like I don’t feel it all the time. Like it’s not pressing up against me, mocking me, pointing out stars bigger than I am. But that’s okay. I take what I can get. And my ribcage rattles when the feelings grow louder. You can hear it like old cities breathing curse words and dog woods. If you listen carefully you can hear the ghosts of everything I’ve ever been. Are you listening?
--Ashli Wood

RAIN

Suddenly this defeat.

This rain.

The blues gone grey

and browns gone grey

and yellow

a terrible amber.

In the cold streets

your warm body.

In whatever room

your warm body.

Among all the people

your absence.

The people who are always

not you.

I have been easy with trees

too long.

Too familiar with mountains.

Joy has been a habit.

Now

suddenly

this rain.

--via

What better way to surface strength than to find yourself in someone else, so we peel back layers of one another's skin to see what's beyond the smoother texture, so we pick through parts of each other's brains to learn where the storm is coming from. Because I learn how I seem through the reflection in your eyes, because you learn how you speak through echoes in my ears. I am a soft atmosphere with a red hot core and it may burn your fingertips or singe your tongue, but it isn't about the destination, and you are an endless list of legends and biographies with a sharp edge and I may cut my corners or bleed myself dry, but it isn't about the rivers and streams, but the ocean.

You see, I am pulling out your hair to find the skin underneath it and I am testing the waters to see what breaks you, and you are softening the conversation to see what sends me to sleep and you are brewing up questions to see what makes me boil over

and it's quest fiction, and this is the call to adventure and I am tired but I am willing, so I am plunging. Do not catch me, do not cradle me, for I desire to see how far I must fall.

--Alexis Mire

I'm still here

That’s you, drops of water and you’re on top of the mountain of success. But one day you start sliding down the mountain and you think wait a minute; I’m a mountain top water drop. I don’t belong in this valley, this river, this low dark ocean with all these drops of water. Then one day it gets hot and you slowly evaporate into air, way up, higher than any mountain top, all the way to the heavens. Then you understand that it was at your lowest that you were closest to God. Life’s a journey that goes round and round and the end is closest to the beginning. So if it’s change you need, relish the journey.

--charlotting

blown out candles

i would like to wake up one day and say “today is the day i will not be afraid to start over.” i’m so afraid at being bad at something before i’m good at it. i’m so afraid of embarrassing myself, at not being good at something i love, something that could have made me happy. so many of us choose other roads because the one we had been following was vague and compromising. because it meant we had to make mistakes in front of people. it meant we had to show everyone that we are not intrinsically good at the one thing that makes us happy. it meant we might have to stop and start all over again. it meant we had to be vulnerable. and nobody likes being vulnerable. because it’s so much better to feel safe. but at what cost? there are a lot of mistakes i’m terrified to make, but there are a lot of mistakes i’m terrified are going to cost me more if i never make them. if i never risk it all for something important to me. if i never do the things i wanted to do just because i would be really fucking bad at it for a while. i don’t want to be afraid anymore. i don’t want to be terrified of shame anymore. i don’t want to hold back just because people might not think i’ll make it or because it might not mean anything to them. i don’t want to waste anymore time being afraid of all the things that could have been right for me. the things that could have made me the person that i wanted to be. this is our only shot. don’t you get that? this is our only shot to be happy. we have to make these mistakes. we have to embarrass ourselves sometimes, we have to do what we love even when nobody else loves it back. and sometimes it’s going to be really fucking hard. sometimes it’s going to seem really hopeless. but we have to never be ashamed. we have to never be afraid to start over. we have to, don’t you see that we have to? because if we don’t then all of our dreams mean nothing. this is our only shot.

--Ashli Wood

perfect timing.

one day i will find the right words and they will be simple

It begins and ends with and without it. he wrote that sprawled out on the floor of my room. I convinced myself that new places would stave off old ghosts. I was wrong. I run and they follow. I hide and they find me. I speak slow and carefully hoping they won’t catch me. they can hear me whispering. I leave and a part of you comes after me. chases me. holds me in the palm of the darkest parts of you where i don’t dare try to look. knows me in places where words cannot go. don’t forget this yet. it’s still midnight and the feelings are young, new born and helpless. don’t forget that morning when all our moments snuck between us, found us soft and whole in all the wrong places. found our wide open spaces where nothing else could reach. but i’ll love you until my hands bleed. I will love you in ways that only the crumbling streets of your country would understand. as willing and openly. as brokenly and goddamned hopelessly. i write these poems about abandoned moments we tried our damnedest to share. i write about warm and sad souls that thread together when no one else is looking. I write about things I have known and things I still don’t. I write about people I have burned holes through hoping I’ll always have a place to hide my hands when they start to shake – when I can’t shake this fever, when I can’t shake these ghosts, when I can’t escape these words so I hide them in the notches of your spine. i keep them tucked beneath your voice box so every word you say is said with a piece of me. i keep carrying these secret things we all try to save for someone who’s hands are strong enough. are your hands strong enough for me? sometimes i stay up late at night making knots on strings. i make one knot for you and one knot for me. people do the strangest things when they’re lonely. and i know that these goddamn knots will never reach each other. i know there will always be these great gaps between us, rivers and winds between us, bitter roads and disconnected moments between us. i know. but i like to think that at least we’re both apart of the same string, right? so one knot for you, one knot for me, and i don’t mind if there are other knots between us sometimes. as long as we’re apart of the same string.

--Ashli Wood

You let me drift off at the tips of your fingers.

I want cathedrals, strong and tall, to write my story on. I’ll write yours too, in my tiny and tall handwriting, deep like the Grand Canyon and right there to fill the gaps where mine goes missing—the places I forgot to take it all in. I crawl into my own head where everything looks two shades darker, and don’t pull up the curtains of my eyelids to let the light in because once it struck me blind and dumb, and I got scared. I don’t want to settle back down in the throne of my foolishness. Once you met me there and pointed me to the daylight and I’ve been wandering ever since, sun-stung and following awe like I could catch it and keep it right in my pocket, there next to my heart. You let me drift off at the tips of your fingers—you spoke me to sleep. Now the canary in my throat is always singing a yellow tune, because of you. And my fingers weave futures absentmindedly, my mind wanders ‘cross oceans and up mountain passes where I thought I’d meet you. I measured the steps, and turned on my heel to scribble it down for later, I mapped it for you strong and clear, napkins, novels, dashed lines to draw you closer—a place I thought I’d will parallel lines to cross. They were close, I thought, and then they drew away from each other. I think they were just scared when they heard something unfamiliar rattling towards them, which I’ve learned how to sense from a mile away, because I’m very much the same. But I mapped it for you, dear. I measured, I turned, I crossed the x’s and lassoed the moon to light your way. I’ll meet you there, I think. I’ll show you where and what I wrote, and the places I left open for the second sunrise, the third. I measured, I turned.

--jenna2step

empty and warm

for once i don’t want to talk about remembering. i want to talk about being. i want to talk about breathing. i want to talk about seeing and feeling. i want to talk about questioning and believing. how sometimes i can feel things changing right beneath me. how sometimes i have dreams of all the people who i have lost. that’s the tricky thing about loving someone. it doesn’t always stop when it should. when a soul dies or a person moves on. people expire but the feeling doesn’t. it lingers, phantom-limbed and without argument. you try to hide it in places you hope you’ll never look. but it sneaks up on you. it wakes up next to you. it curls inside your arms and you hold it like the way you’ve always known. i want to talk about some of these things i never say. some of the things that have too many gaps to try and fit my fingers around them and show you in between my careful palms. there are these dark places i try not to go because i’ve been there before and it’s not always easy to leave. there are these stars i see sometimes and i wonder what they’re thinking when they’re patiently staring back at me. how many wars have they seen? how many gods and kings, how many nameless feelings, how many people have they watched fall to their knees hoping for a sign that these lights missing their arms will never give. how many moments have they burned through. have i been burning too? if there is a heaven and a hell will i only spit on them both and take another road? what have i been burning for? i see them, moonstruck and raw. they wink happily, indifferently. through genocide and poverty and inequality. through hope, through young love, through those gorgeous little moments we all forget when we get too old. i try to be angry sometimes, i try because everything starts to feel so fucking hopeless. but i see these stars on cold nights and i wonder how something could be so beautiful and brave. i wonder how lucky i really am. i have so much time to learn how to love everything in life before i get too old. how rare and wonderful it is to be this young, to be this healthy, to be this free, to be this alive.

--Ashli Wood

i awoke and at times birds fled

i know the house you grew up in isn’t far from here. i don’t go there because i know it’s filled with ghosts. i write about you a lot and you don’t even know it. it’s hard sometimes. to say things i know you’ll never hear. i know a lot of things. like how to break a fence so that you can sneak into someone else’s pool. i know how to put it back together again quickly when it’s almost dawn and their porch lights just flickered on. i know how to pull the tail off a crawfish just right. i know that venus is the brightest planet in the sky. i know some things first hand. that the first thing you forget about a person is their voice. that sometimes you make wishes on people like they’re lost stars. how you find yourself alone at night starting to hope that when they finally fall to the earth you can collect them in the ruffles of your skirt. but sometimes they burn out before they even get that close.

i know that these knees i hold are only nineteen years old. but some of me is older.

you told me once that you loved my eye lashes and the face i made when the boys were yelling in the street and i was mystified. i’m always mystified. when real life for a fraction of a second actually feels like real life. like i know one day i’ll die and never get these things back. how sometimes summer can make a moment sizzle right before it fades.

you always sizzled just before you started to fade.

it’s hard not to cry when i think of thompson road in the passenger seat of that car you stole and your hand rolled cigarettes with their ashes floating out the window. i was electrified, i was terrified, i was young and that lonely highway didn’t mind. you were blue eyed and lovedrunk. i was fascinated. i was wide eyed and willing. i was whole and now i’m wilting. but i’m still fascinated, i’m still wide-eyed, i’m still reeling. i’m still pulling at what pleated pieces of you i’ve got left in the bottom of my pockets

because you found me and you changed me.

you were summer storms, you were swollen and sunburned, and i followed you where ever your lightening decided to strike. sometimes i tell people about you like it doesn’t hurt. like this isn’t hard. like it’s just lint, just loose change, some backyard apologies, some long lost stars we tried to collect in our collarbones once, some bottom of the ninth summer we forgot by the fall. we dug our selves a grave, took everything this world gave, never regretted a goddamn thing, we loved like it couldn’t break even when it did.

seven years. i only had you for seven years. but i did not cry. i did not mind. i was mesmerized. i felt something. it’s gone now, but it comes back in flashes. you dancing in the kitchen, getting lost in destin, the tangles in your hair, the long drive from texas, when you let me fall asleep in the space between your shoulder and your neck, when you told me i made you feel safe. you’re gone now. you’ve been gone for a long time. but i know i felt something. i didn’t cry because i know for the rest of our lives that at least once there was a moment in the middle when we felt something.

--Ashli Wood

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

in the morning through the window shade

there are moments in this life that are exceptional and rare. and i know we had too much vodka, but the water was so warm, the night felt so good on our fingers. everything was crooked but sometimes it’s easy to pretend it’s all okay, it’s all alright. so we leaned against the edge with our hands cupped next to our eyes. you looked like summer, with that lonely gleam, with that half smile. you said “on the count of three we’re going to look up and forget everything.” you always do things like that. take any chance to kiss regret goodbye, to leave this life behind. and after that i heard your voice but couldn’t make out the words. all i could think of is the way you held my hand underwater once. the way the stars were wet and brave. shook above us in that fucking sky we’re always trying to touch. and when i heard you shout the number one i got really scared. i felt so goddamn ashamed. because i wasn’t ready to forget. i wasn’t that brave. i wanted to remember when you told me secrets in the backyard. the way we all waded in the water with these thoughts lit up like sparklers. how you made all of us love you but it was never enough. and it always fucking hurt, this life always fucking hurts, but i am dazzled by it and i can’t help but hold it close. i can’t help but want to live even if i don’t know why. i can’t help but love this life without effort sometimes, if only for just a second, for just some cracked and crooked moment. this is hard for me. it’s hard to not be fascinated and scared when you know that your last chance to live is also your first. and all of a sudden you’re already shouting “two” and i’m thinking about the snowballs in the chinese take out boxes on plum street and the way the sun light pressed against your neck, and how your eyelashes were so close to mine. i’m thinking about the water splashing against my face when we sat too close to the waves and i laughed at the sky but all of a sudden i felt this surge of emotion and just started to cry right there. i had to turn quick before you saw and knew that i was really this fucking broken, that i was really this ugly. that i feel so many things at once and sometimes i need to know that i’m not the only one. that other people feel so fucking crazy and alone sometimes. and then you’re whispering with our mouthes barely above the water and all i can see is you crying in the theatre and all i can see is the way you looked at me when i told you that we’re all just burning buildings. but now you’re telling me about the tumor that they found in your head and i’m trying not to listen but then you’re shouting the number three and for a second, for just a second, i really did forget everything. and i was just warm water. i was dust in between the stars. i was something without moments, without thoughts, without a stupid little life, without a crooked little heart. and the second i snapped back i saw your face. and i was trying not to cry, because if i forgot everything i would never know that there are moments in this life that are exceptional and rare. i would never know what it was like to love something so fucking much that it doesn’t even matter if it’s not yours. all you know is you cannot, under any goddamn circumstances, ever let it go.

--Ashli Wood