Open your eyes.

There’s a gift I can give to you even though you’re not the gift loving type. It’s a small offering a single contribution a wrapper-free and bow-less box filled with something you never asked for but maybe you’ve always needed.
This is my gift to you:
I’ll be the eyes to see what you don’t and I’ll be the voice that fills the ears deaf to those things for too many nights and too many days that followed. This is my tribute to all you don’t see, to the parentheses around your smile and the way laughter slithers from your lips and curls the corners of your mouth like they’re tied to hidden kites flying in hidden skies.
Open your eyes.
This is to how your feet throw heat and warm mine and how the sensation of calm can literally travel from your fingertip to my fingertips and up my arms into my chest.  How the sight of you catching sight of me is enough to set my heart sprinting. To the sheer volume of that heart’s beating and the way it fills the room with noise like the sound of flags flapping in the wind, or broken songs beating through broken speakers, this is to all you don’t see,
Open your eyes.
This is to the sound of my name in your mouth the way it dances off your tongue and leapfrogs through the air to find me again.  To the whispers and the screams, and the muted mumblings of your tired morning voice and the words you don’t remember saying and the ones you do. This is to the heart that’s too big for your body and to your body that’s too small to hold all your dreams. To the ballet of beauty that fills the empty moments of your sleeping and the sunlight that paints your face to pull you from it.
Open your eyes.
I’ll be the eyes to see what you can’t the constellations of freckles and beauty marks and the forgotten scars from forgotten wounds. The hair that hangs like curtains over the windows of your eyes and the light that streams in from behind them from some other place better than here the beckons me to follow.  To the pace of your breath and the warmth of it on my cheeks and to the tracing of fingers on the valleys of my back.
This is my gift to you, and you’re not the gift loving type. A tribute to the details you forget to notice and picture they create. This is to you, all of you and what you are to all of me. To the me you help create and shape and heal and change for all the right reasons
at all the right times.
Open your eyes.

dreamer.

Remember when you thought anything was possible?

It still is.

For some, dreams are nothing but a fleeting wish, a desire for something out of reach. For others it's the reason we live. 

I'm a dreamer in a world of realities, but that does not mean my dreams will not one day become my reality. I simply push the limits of the confines of reasonable, and that is what makes this world beautiful. It is not the realists who create the new or discover the unknown, rather it is the dreamers that shatter the sphere of possible. Think of all the record-breakers, the renowned scientists, the inventors, the famous--they all have a little dreamer in them, and without that dreamer they would not be. I dream of traveling the world, capturing the memories through a 4x4 lens and crafting words and images on blank sheets of paper to later share with the world. I dream of helping those less fortunate than I to find a better life. I dream of finding the man of my dreams so we can support each other, and together seize our dreams. I dream and dream and while I dream I have to remember I have to take action, I have to work to make these dreams come true.

So today's the day I'll stop letting my dreams be just that---dreams, I'm now a dreamer determined to be a realist. 

What is the similarity between one who says, "I can" and one who says, "I can't"?...

...They are both usually right. 

Not all those who wander are lost.

Are you going to retreat in the comfort of being what you've always been, doing what you've always done, turning your head from the great unknown. Or are you going to step forward and venture to find new heights, new views. When you're standing on the ledge, you have the option to jump...there might not be a way back, but do you really want to go back. No. Bend your knees, summon your courage, spread your arms as if they are wings and accept the fact that you don't know the consequences, and sometimes thats okay. It's called a leap of faith for a reason. What's worse: wondering what could have been, or falling in a little dirt and having to pick yourself up before continuing this journey? 

No regrets, people. Let's do this.

Let's be the people that venture into the unknown and find something completely different, something new, something exciting. Don't let fear hinder your potential, and don't let someone tell you the limits of your potential. Sure we're going to stumble along the way, but don't let that keep you down. At least when we fall, we're still moving forward.

I dare you.

No more wasted days spent waiting for better tomorrows. I want my journal to be bulging with pages full of lovely things and precious moments worth remembering. I want each day of my life defined by something special. Fifty years from now, as I'm skimming through the words scrawled upon the pages of that dusty old journal with glasses perched upon my nose, I want to be able to smile and say, "Ah, I remember that cool November night.. he kissed me and I just didn't know what to do," or "That weekend I read that entire book in just two days." Or maybe even, "That was my favorite day of all. I just lounged beneath the sun on a frayed old blanket and just let the beauty of the world around me soak into my skin." One day, I want to read about the life I've lived, and I want it to be the most magical fairytale of them all.

Why not make today a day worth remembering? It's unfair to remember one day, and let another slip into the land of lost and forgotten things. If you find yourself sitting on your bed at the conclusion of each day with the silence of the night pressing against your ears and a mind filled with nothing but emptiness, you've failed yourself. Each day should be a day worth writing about. Each day should have at least a sentence to be remembered by. 

Scatter colorful drawing across your driveway, get chalk dust the color of rainbows on your eyelashes. Brave the thunderstorm with nothing but bare feet and a sundress; let the raindrops get tangled up in your hair. Sit beneath an ancient tree with a book, and read until your head aches and your fingers are raw from turning pages. Paint a picture with your toes. Eat a popsicle upside down.

With each new day, dare to do something so strange, so abnormal, so exhilarating, or something just so impossibly simple that it will be impossible to forget. And then, when the moon replaces the sun in the vast blue sky, and the stars twinkle ever so delicately above, let the words flow from your head all the way down to your fingers where they can be transferred onto the page of your journal. One day, your memories may be your greatest treasures. You get to create your own life story; so why not make it one worth writing down?

Over exposed yet never understood

Funny how, as humans, we tend to hear one story and link that single story to the entirety of another person. During our lifetime, we will never know the entirety of someone else. We will never know every second that they live, every trial they face, every thought they think. So why is it that we are so quick to judge others and categorize them according to, perhaps, this single story once heard about them?  The only person we can ever fully come to understand and know completely is ourselves, and, unfortunately, some people even miss out on that opportunity. People can talk and talk about one single person, and they can label them by one single story, people can pretend that they know everything about someone else, but in reality, we all live a somewhat secret life, we all have our own individual worlds with unique experiences, people, perspectives, and thoughts. We're all still human beings, that's true, yet we often compare our complete knowledge about ourselves to the partial knowledge about someone else. Sometime we think of ourselves having the hardest life, the best justification to be mad, the busiest life, the superlative-est in every situation-- we forget that others have their own story too.

//My number one pet peeve is gossiping. Gossiping does no one any good and all you're doing is taking a partial segment of someone's story and using it to define them. That is not fair. Think of how much better this world would be if we put aside all the prejudices, judgements, and rumors and just accepted people for who they are and tried to see things from their perspective.

 If I have learned one thing from life, it's this:
live in a way that if someone was to talk bad about you, no one would believe it.