The Next Best Thing

writing on nostalgia, on breaking cycles as they form, on discovering how things you thought you knew, like cursive, have been altered by every set of hands that has touched you in the last few years.

writing on having new feelings and trying to learn from the past without giving it the power to grip your heart and squeeze it to bursting.

writing because you are forcing yourself to write, to learn your own mind, to make conscious what your antagonistic brain pushes down below eye level before it can be acknowledged.

writing because you always want more, more of everything, and you don't ever look for more in the right places, and maybe this is where more will be, or at least where less will feel like enough.

writing on feeling like enough, or, more often, not feeling like enough.

writing how you think and how you wish you could speak; on the phrase "radical honesty" because it looks alright in ink but sounds like a knife on a ceramic plate, and feels even worse.

writing when everyone else is asleep, because sleep doesn't come to you when called anymore, and writing feels like the next best thing.