I couldn't recognize you even if I wanted to

Strange to see a picture of someone who, just recently, was like burning sunlight on my skin. His face looks different, hardened, the boyishness turned into a sharp army scowl. His hair is neat and pointy, his shoulders stiff and high. He's becoming himself, but I wonder where the softness is. If it will find its way back to him.

I took a picture of myself today before I left for the arcade. There's a little part of my eyes that lights up like a great big LED when things are going well, when the wildflowers are blooming and old magpies are courting each other by the bus stop. My crooked little smile has found some permanence, the days of the 'bitch face' are really behind me. The hardest thing for me to do is to be unrelentlessly kind and patient. Patient that life will wash over me and I will follow the tide like my mother and father, patient that I know love and can show it in my heart.

Sometimes I lay in bed and I can feel the presence of somebody who I don't really recognize, somebody from my future who waits for me, out somewhere. It smells like cinnamon and tall dew-laden grass, it looks like crisp lab coats, tiny little canines poking out of a smile. I have never met him. But the knowledge that he might be real, or at least - at least I know what and who I want - is comforting. The comfort that it fills me with makes me want to sleep soundly, deeply, to better myself and my REM sleep cycle.

At this little crossroad of my life, it is all censorship and blurred faces. I don't remember what you look like, and I don't even know who he is. It is a great big mist that swallows the plains around me, it is springtime warmth creeping up my cheeks. Of course I am alone, but not lonely.

My arms still ache from the pounding of drumsticks, the static electricity buzzes when I take my baseball cap off my head, my ribcage and tailbone still distort and crack and fizzle when I revise flashcards at my desk. But the sun is shining. Isn't that what matters?