Finding Daisies

by Jessica Jocelyn

I find that you get louder when you don’t really have anything to say. your volume is your compensation for your inability to communicate.

the thing is, as a child, I always wanted to play fair and the rules became my favorite part. but this is love there are no rules and no one ever plays fair.

I saw the texts with my own eyes and still you told me that it didn’t happen. your word was enough for my brain to tell my heart that you were telling the truth because no one can gaslight me better than myself.

I didn’t find her face very appealing but it was really her heart that made her ugly.

the scariest part of losing you is my memories of you fading away almost like grains of sand slipping through my fingers. and the more I try to grip on to them, the faster they seem to go. maybe if I write them down, I can hold on to them forever.

life is not a sequence of straight facts but a string of experiences. when things happen to us- it’s hard to make a clean decision because too many factors come into play. the people who came and brought either love or hate, the lessons they taught you from the outside looking in it’s easy for others to give advice based on facts, but they aren’t playing with the whole deck of cards. they don’t have the experiences that go with it so, when someone tells you “oh, I would never… I would definitely do this instead!” it’s all useless because they weren’t there and you can’t navigate a situation correctly if you’ve never been there before. rather, put your hand to the mirror and tell that girl “it’s okay, we’ve never been through this before and we will do better next time.”

you may take me as your love, but I am not your mother. I am not here to provide you with what she did not. I am not here for you to punish her through me I am not going to stitch up the unhealed wounds she left, give it a kiss and send you on your way. I am not going to teach you how to be a man or teach you the meaning of consequences.

you need to come to me already whole. I cannot give you any pieces of me, there’s none to spare. and finally, I am not here to prepare you on how to love the next one the right way. you aren’t allowed to practice on me.

you have to sometimes be touched in all the wrong ways to discover how you’re supposed to be loved.

love yourself first irrevocably, unconditionally. the rest will fall into place.

when I die, I hope I can simply turn into colors so, you can still find me in desert sunsets, the ones you can’t quite describe or maybe the glitter in freshly fallen snow before anyone has touched it.

when you finally find your voice, not everyone will like it and some may not stay. your voice will draw lines in the sand and those lines will create boundaries. those boundaries will end up protecting you from the people who benefitted from you having none. never lower your voice again