Wrong

I am still childish in many ways. I know I shouldn't see people as flat. I know I have to imagine people complexly, as many-faceted and unknown and beautifully broken. I know people don't think the things my brain jumps to attribute to them. People are nicer than I give them credit for and meaner, in the best ways. I am not a good judge of character and I am not good at admitting it. I rely on myself instead of being God's vessel. I want to save myself, but I can't. It's already been done.

I feel like I'm living out the middle of Ella Enchanted, but I am my own curse. I am the spell that keeps myself from being happy but, similarly, I deem it necessary to hold back. I am too young to be loved. I am too old to be loved. I am too tired to be loved. I am too restless to be loved. I am too beautiful to be loved. I am too ugly to be loved. I am too wonderful to be loved. I am too horrible to be loved.

This is the only way in which my life resembles a fairy tale.

Not Yet Begun

I have this itchy, tickling feeling inside. I want to wiggle and stretch and yawn my way out of my own skin. I want to rip free from my withering body. I want to fly.

Twenty two years is a long time. I should know more than I do. I sit, blinking widely at this screen, wondering if I will ever do what I've thought of for so long... play, pray, sing, change, climb, dance. Live. Love. Be.

Sometimes I feel so young. Small. New.

Today, I am old. Broken. Crazed. Wild and waiting for the next great love to take me away from myself.

My heart is a tiny thing, like a "speck of dust in a giant's eye." It is fragile and, as if to prove my words, damaged beyond human repair. I think I can risk more of it and share more of it and show more of it. I think I should. It might be good, for me and for everyone.

I'll try, for the sake of that inner tickling, that divine poke I feel, right between my ribs. Maybe I'll fall, but maybe instead, I might just shine.

Why Nicholas Sparks books do nothing for me...

Yesterday, I finally figured it out. I could say that they are poorly written, ill-conceived, riddled with tropes and clichés, predictable, purely escapist, and not interesting and I would be right. But that is not it.

Sparks' novels - which he hilariously and delusionally believes are incapable of being placed in a genre category - are flat, sensationalized stories of what love would be if love had nothing to do with real people, real pain, and God. They take us to a place that exists only in the daydreams of lonely, frightened teenagers who have known nothing better than the white-people-nearly-kissing "love" that Sparks has to offer because they have yet to experience love at its richest and deepest and best.

Every time I see the movie trailer for Safe Haven, I roll my eyes. Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel flit across my TV screen, meeting and staring and barely controlling themselves and running and kissing and wailing and on and on and on in a spectacular show of what Nicholas Sparks thinks love is.

The idea that a single woman and a single man in close proximity to each other must fall in love, because that is what is done. The idea that every woman is looking to be "saved" from a lonely life of spinsterhood and protected from her father, an ex-boyfriend, the world. The idea that every man needs a six pack and a Georgia tan to go along with the woman he can't take his eyes off of, not even for a second to, like, go to the bathroom or drive to work or go to the gym to keep those abs looking fine for his lady.

The idea that the tragedies of life (the BIG ones - death, cancer, war - all used for the furtherance of this one couple's glorious, wholesome relationship) will bring them together in a way that no one who sees them could ever forget. Nothing can ever compare with their love. It is the pinnacle of everything, the masterpiece to our horror show. The Romeo & Juliet to our Bonnie & Clyde.

I see that and I can't help but think that there has to be something better. There has to be something more.