Category: Musings

garden(‘butterfly’ + ‘moth’)

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

I think of butterflies the way I think of flowers. Delicate, colorful, beauty unyeilding. Unfading. Paper thin and fragile, the flicker of wings a small miracle on a rough and painful world.

I love the butterfly with the weary eyes. The butterfly with the tiger stripes. The butterfly that looks like an oriental fan. The butterfly that is all black, with pink and red, my favorite colors.

We tend to agree that things like flowers and butterflies are beautiful. Though all have different colors, patterns, shapes, they are beautiful. We don’t always agree that people are beautiful, though all have different colors. Patterns. Shapes.

The flowers that come in mounds of blue, or pink. The tiny petaled flowers that form bunches the size of a fist. The dainy white with the striking aroma; the perky and cheery cactus flowers.

I don’t love many outside myself, and I don’t find myself beautiful. I’m a different color. Pattern. Shape. I am paper thin and fragile. I am delicate. I am not unyeilding. I am a miracle in this rough and painful world.

I don’t love you….

I won’t love you….

I am afraid to love you. You are a different color, pattern, shape. You are perhaps a moth with a massive wing span, weary in color and hard to find. You don’t strike me with the fear of you withering, of your wings being weighed down by the rain.

You are not delicate. You are unyielding. You are a survivor in this rough and painful world.

Together, we are still paper thin, but stronger than separate pages. You love light and I love flowers. You crave the sun, I crave luring fragrance. I float around through life. The wind coaxes me, owns me. You stand, sturdy, unyielding.

I flutter from flower to flower. When does it end for me? When all of the petals fade? When the current pulls me in? When I catch a ride on the wrong lily pad?

Perhaps we’ll let the flutter of the wings of a butterfly decide for both of us.

End of Song

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

Tell me to stay

Push me away

Tell me you care

Never be there

Hold me close

Shun me the most

Time after time

Like a song out of rhymes

Repeat the same verse

A dozen times

Time after time

Like a song out of rhymes

Repeat the chorus

Wear out the lines

Want me in the dark

Leave me in the light

Unshackle my heart

Unburden my nights

Come closer

And feel from miles away

We’ve gone on too long

Put an end to this song

Strawberries in the Winter

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

Strawberries taste like summer, with a sweetness that gives me visions of green strawberry fields

With bright red gems glittering with the morning’s slowly dissipating fog

And fragile white, round-winged butterflies fluttering through the miles and miles of sweet strawberries.

Tasting a strawberry in the midst of a winter, I wonder how far we roam to find strawberries in a place so cold

Across the country, through the snow, to the other side of the world where it isn’t below zero

Or maybe just a little down south, where the porch is warm enough to languidly rock and watch the trucks drive by

Through day and night, to bring these strawberries out of the light and hope they survive.

A journey up the coast, to where the sun doesn’t shine and the earth is too cold for strawberries to grow

They taste like another place, or another time, as I’ve witnessed summer before with my own eyes:

It smells like the green leaves of the strawberry, tastes just as sweet and sounds like cicadas

Feels like sweat on my forehead, my bare feet on sand and a cool salty wind with an ocean wave cadence.

I wonder if strawberries in the winter taste just as nostalgic as pomegranates in the summer

To fully validate the irony in that I only miss one when I’m with the other.

Your Shadow

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

He screamed at a shadow to get out of his way.

Perplexed, she said “Why shout when you could walk right through me?”

He shrugged. “I want to be heard as much as you want to be seen. Now we’re both satisfied.”

So she remained by his side forever to dance before his eyes, and he whispered his dreams to her in the dark.

The Red String of Fate

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

The sorrow that burdens your heart makes it tremble, a quake whose vibrations even I can feel. It courses through the earth with a magnitude so strong, I feel its tremors rumbling in my chest. It’s unfathomable that something as small as a fist, when broken, opens as wide as a rift in the ocean.

But know that this love you feel is not only pain, as love is what allows me to share it while the earth shifts violently beneath our feet. Know that love is not a heavy iron chain, but a thin thread that can span miles unravelled. With this thread, follow with unwavering steps your aching heart. Only she knows how far away the other end is tied in a safe knot, impervious to any sharp edge.

Beware the whispers of fear in your mind of the trepidation in seeking it out. Bate your breath and only listen for the truth, whispered in a timid secret on a cold bit of wind. The chill that dances over your spine at its carress – that is a truth made only for you. Do you feel it? If yes, don’t turn back lest you be turned to stone. Don’t chase it, or it may run from you.

With your eyes, and with your weary feet, slowly follow that thread of fate. Lay your lies in the dust of what’s dead and desolate. Love, not because it will not hurt you, but because it’s what makes you who you are.

Malingering

~ Lauren Nicole ~ 2 Comments

I tip toe over broken glass with the same meticulous pace that I distance myself from a broken heart.

One and one don’t always align, and I fear the sound of shattering from a pair mismatched. Like magnets, only the opposite sides attract, but when pulled apart, a bit of myself leaves with you each time.

Under planetary bodies, rising sun and waning moon are no match for the tides that move me pensively in your direction. Were you any more poisonous, I surely still would long for just the slightest taste and suffer the lasting bitterness.

The home of your arms is lined with brambles so shallow they only pierce my skin. Alas, my buoyant heart rests at my surface to bask in the heat in your eyes – vulnerable for those thorns to pierce.

With closed eyes I meander around sharp debris, heart still aching, hoping that things will change. The scars haven’t faded, the pieces of me have not regenerated, and though in my latent pace I hope you return to me, I know that I’m shamefully malingering.

My Theology.

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

I believe in an attentive ear that seeks the somber sound of crying in a dark and sightless night. The truth in hearing and believing a life beyond one’s own beating heart is a religion of its own. If faith is mandatory, I’d rather believe in the pensive mind that yearns for justice; a law not written by man, but inherited millennia ago from the sky.

As you believe in God, I believe in a love for life so strong that no small flower be set to a flame. My deity is the beauty of an unkempt green valley, and the dandelion seeds that form clouds upon the horizon in a hot summer gust. As you believe in angels, I believe in the mindless creatures that roam the world with hope in their hearts of falling in love – those silly things are so romantic, they brim with more hope than could ever be discovered in a mine filled with diamonds.

Your belief in heaven is comparable to my belief of a sunny afternoon under a pale blue sky, somewhere far away from the city where I can hear the cicadas and the bullfrogs. There are no gates here, just a noisy silence that raptures me in a way that no psalm ever has. I can read catharsis from the cumulus clouds, or hear a chorus in the little things that live in the loam. What we have in common? We both call our heaven our home.

But what about hell? Well, I don’t believe that exists as long as there is another day. For there are days, nights, weeks and months that I lie awake with teary eyes. There are days that I wish I could simply stop my heart-beat on demand. The heat under my skin is comparable to the literature that describes the underworld, I suppose, when I feel this insatiable need for something, for anything to bring a chill to my fiery anger, or my branding sorrow.

Although I know that it won’t be for ever. Each time I watch the clock, and the arrow hits one minute prior midnight, I know that shortly there will be another day. As the seasons shift their way around the cyclical conundrum that life is made of, one spring day I’ll see my deity, one summer day I’ll fill my heart with hope.

Even in the season of the dead things, the fallen leaves remind me of the hearth of a cozy home. Though I may brood alone, I know that 11:59 is the truest worship time. Idle and fatigued I bide the time, the sixty seconds that always drags my atheist heart out and gives it a moment to practice religion – one second at a time.

A Wish on a Waning Moon

~ Lauren Nicole ~ Leave a comment

The softest of footsteps move down the hall, impossible for me to hear were it not for my vivid imagination. Curled up in satin sheets, daylight winks through the slanting blinds and stripes the bed with molten silver. Throughout the crack beneath the door, I spot your toes pause outside, your hand on the doorknob although the hinges hang open.

Why don’t you come inside?

My mind spins and my heart hammers until my stomach aches. How long do I have to wait? Time has me frozen here, my knuckles red from gripping the bed covers so tightly.

The door is open….

Yet the handle doesn’t twist. A shuffle against the dark wooden floor and I don’t see your shadow there anymore. I’d lift my head, but I’m paralyzed, still as stone in the crevice I’ve embedded into the mattress.

You don’t have to stay for long.

A cold sweat works up my face. I just need to move, just a little bit. To part my lips and cry for you to come back.

But I can’t….

I have no voice, I make no sound that your ears are capable of hearing. Is it because you don’t want to hear me? Because you don’t love me at all. I know this, but still, I’m warm and I have a beating heart. I bleed and I feel. Just tell me that it’ll be alright. Hold me one more time. Give me something to feel.

I fear that I’ve turned to stone, and time will no longer wake me in the morning. I’ll never move forward. I’ll never be somebody. I’ll never hope again.

The light through the sheer curtains pools onto the floor. Shadows move, but I can’t. I’m paralyzed. I’m a shattered doll. I’m a broken rose. I’m an eyesore.

In a world without warmth, I’m frozen still, too cold to move. The day is waiting for me, the sun fatigued, and yet I haven’t budged from my pillow. My skin is stuck to the cloth with tears like hot glue. My pained breaths echo through the room.

I just can’t move.

And until I do, I’ll bask in the rays of an eternal noon. The stars won’t come out to consider my fancies. My wishes float idly toward the ever waning moon.