The wind blows away the last remnants of your scent. I am unable to move, knowing that this moment once disrupted can never be returned to.Too soon it will be a memory belonging to the past. Life never stops moving forward. The passage of time is relentless. I know this and yet I cannot bear to let you go, not yet at least.

You try so hard to look like you’re not trying. It would make me laugh if it didn’t remind me of how I used to be.

Just sitting next to you when you smile is enough to make me happy.

step follows step

hope follows courage

set your face towards danger

set your heart on victory

-Gail Carson Levine

We create our own destinies. Whether they be great or small all dreams have the potential to become reality.

You can’t always protect the people you love, but you can be there for them.

The life that we live is the legacy we leave behind.

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
—your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers…

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner’s daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
Peeler’s wife. Smell me.

~Michael Ondaatje

For the first time in a long time I have no complaints. Or at least feel like I have nothing to complain about that would garner any sympathy. School’s great, grades are up, absences down. I’m writing again. My smile has substance behind it. I’m laughing because I want to rather than for the sake of keeping up appearances. I’m being honest and telling the people I love how I feel, everyone but my parents. Of course things are never perfect; sometimes I feel empty, there are days when it hurts to keep up the facade. But there will always be negatives and although it is often said, I do believe that life is what we make it. We can choose to see the glass as being either half empty or half full.