I found all these things

I found all these things, all these pictures, essays, poems written and notes scribbled, from years past to days ago. They’ve been buried and overlooked while my handwriting changed form and shape across the years, they’ve waited in past while I learned new lessons, but now they’re in a box by my bed, neatly organized into folders and stacks of thought. Five years, all here. These are my thoughts and this is my development as a human being from immaturity to insight. Has a lot changed?

Each essay, each picture I pick up and analyze has a distinct wave of memories tied to it -- a conglomeration of a wave of dysphoric emotion. These years, what happened? The contact proof sheets from photography bring memories of intense physical pain and pill-popping logs, of sunny, nostalgic days and ultimate peacefulness in the darkroom. They bring me memories of Coldplay on my blue CD player and developer chemicals on my hands. I stayed in that darkroom for hours at a time, and I remember nothing else from 9th grade than rolling up my sleeves and clicking exposure times. I’ll try to fix you, fix you.

The essay from 10th grade in neat, quaint, stoic writing evokes the translucent purple water bottle. 2 liters a day. 3 diet pills a day. White unknown substance. Hope in chemicals.

The frantic, knowing scribbles from 11th show what it was like to be buried in literacy, in minute societal observation and elusive connection. It was a time of brilliance, of insanity, of sitting on curbs and hiding prescription pills in gloves. I’ll look back on this spot, I thought, as I slipped another pill into a woolen finger. The sun was also shining and my high-tops tap tapped to the rhythm of academic delinquency, oddly rebellious and appropriately out of place. Tap, tap.
It’s all here. Calorie counting, modeling agency names. Observations and metaphors jotted down on lined paper and forgotten.

And years from now, with my college diploma in hand, will I really look at this box again, fold back its flimsy cardboard sleeves, and feel the memories of a distant teenage past? It’s where I came from. This was me. These were my thoughts, hopes, dreams, preoccupations. In a box. I’ve never wanted to be boxed. So this is irony, tickling me its final goodbye.

Microwars

Lying in the grass, eyes closed, thinking of the perfect string of words to put onto these next few blank pages. Wondering about my fear of pronouns. Fear of pen ink that doesn't want to be read. Fear of passages that will remain daft and vague, unreadable.
So many trivial fears when what should be crossing my mind are wars, death, sacrifice, and the ultimate human truths that everyone strives to conquer.

I used to write in beautiful, brilliant eloquence, embellishing clarity with ribbons of adjectives, nouns, verbs with color. Now I can only say things straight-forwardly, logically, plainly -- what I wanted, wasn't it? Logic? Well, now I've got neither. How's that for being careful?

I wake up from failed writer revelation and talk back to the blades of grass, mediocre sayings. A wasp, comparable in size and in intimidation, stares back.
"Come closer; I dare you." Its eyes, outmassing its body, tell me. I open my own lazily and watch the creature (though I can't stand wasps and am deathly afraid of them) move from blade to blade relentlessly; its terrifying body seemed no bigger than mine all of a sudden, and when emerging from the field of greens and of sun and lonely summer evenings...

It moved painstakingly and with great caution; its valiant efforts seemed so futile, so hopelessly in vain, so sadly pathetic and brutally lost. And it wasn't a matter of intimidation anymore, and certainly not fear, when the yellow-specked legs fought for standing on the lowest blade of grass.
It had no direction. It turned from me and wandered painfully away, turned around and looked me deeply in the eye again -- a warning?

But what use, and of what merit, is the warning (and perhaps all of communication) when we're outnumbered by so many obstacles bigger than ourselves? Why fight, why crawl, why move from blade to blade, grassy field to grassy field, in search of the smallest, faintest, wasp-yellow speck of direction?
Maybe it knew when it got there.
Maybe I'll know when I get there.

We kept looking at each other, kept our speechless and actionless fight, until it decided enough was enough and aimed its course directly at me. Still terrified of wasps, I knew I could crush it and pilfer its life quicker than the green sea would, but I didn't. I was comfortable in my grassy spot, with just the right amount of sunshine, that I could easily silence its aggressive eyes with a swipe of a hand, of a foot, of a book. It would be gone, and I would be left alone again, enjoying the solitary tranquility of the summer evening. Alone, again. Fears, again. Waiting on words, again.

That's the goal, isn't it? I'll watch people come and go, but I'll have more interaction with a struggling insect than any human being.

I move. Of all the self-imposing, powerful, and establishing actions I could have taken, I move to a different location.

And that's the truth of it, isn't it? Of peace, of wars, of violence, of love, of civility? All there is left to do is move.

I don't want your wars and your primitive, mediocre, bloody settlements -- save your screaming children and your dying women in favor of something you are just as capable of doing -- not with your pride, but with your mind.

Save your wars for an era devoid of logic, of reasoning, of compassion; save your brutal might for protecting those who call for it; save your destruction for diseases that evade it.

Just breathe fresh-cut sun-soaked grass and think about what it means to move.

Civilization's here. We're waiting for your progress.