Poetic Paragraphs

Change

You're changing.

That's what your mind told you, the words soft in the quiet, haunting your nighttime thoughts like wraiths.

You're growing up.

And you unfurl across your bed, a flower blossoming in the dark, letting the idea roll around your mind like a marble spreading recognition in its wake. You are changing.

Because when you were young, you squatted close to the ground, smelled the flowers, knew the feeling of dirt between your hands and failure between your fingers. You were small, and the world seemed large.

But you built yourself up. You tried harder, and slowly, your hands inched farther from the soil.

You reached for the stars and caught only air.

But air isn't dirt, and that difference meant something that you didn't understand. The improvement from before brought you to a level you hadn't explored, and you felt the wind on your face, the sunshine on your skin, and told yourself to enjoy.

The dirt wasn't far below you, and you could almost pretend like nothing had happened.

The memories of childhood are soft to you as you lie between your sheets, twisting and turning and searching for something you can't find, like you can discover the key to success in your bedcovers like the princess found her pea.

You're still changing.

And you know it. The things you do now are not the same as you've done before, these actions more sure, your hands more experienced. You have learned to run on this earth, the dirt passing beneath your feet, your hands reaching for the clouds.

But success still seems far from your fingers, and suddenly your hands are filled with schoolwork and pencils and pens, your hands stained with ink, your mind stained with knowledge.

You begin to forget the smell of dirt between your fingers, the feeling of wind in your hair. Your fingers are accustomed to paper-cuts and pain, your mind to the strain of memorization and understanding.

You do not run, but your head sprints, your fingers tumble, your words falling from your mouth and tumbling onto endless papers and tests.

Your existence is validated by red marks on test papers.

The stars don't exist for you anymore. Instead, you reach for an A+. 

(When was the last time you reached for the moon? When was the last time you looked at the sky? You much prefer the ceiling of your room.)

And here, in your bed, soaked in darkness and steeped in quiet, you are reminded that you've changed.

The shadows pat your back, familiar, comforting, but you aren't comforted.

You roll off the bed, feet first, steps soft on the rough carpet like you're tiptoeing on a cloud, ready for it to give at any moment. The silence feels transparent as rice paper.

You undo the house alarm, the beeps intimidatingly loud, ripping holes in the rice-paper silence, but you're out the glass door, on the other side of the screen, and nothing can touch you now.

Only the scent of soil, of dew, the feeling of wind on your face, the touch of moonlight on your hands.

You've changed.

And you know it.

But every time you jump, your feet come down firmly in this earth. Every step you take, your legs will return to the ground. You reach for the sky, whether it be a sky of grades or a sky of goals or a sky of dreams and stars that run from your fingers. But no matter how far you reach, how high your arms extend towards the unspooled galaxies in front of your eyes, your feet will remain on the earth.

You've changed, but you haven't, because at your core, you still feel the dirt between your fingers.

No matter how fast you run, you will always touch the ground.

The person you were then and are now coexist, arms reaching towards the sky, feet firmly rooted to the soil.

And the place where the sky and earth meet is you.