Mermaids
August, 2019

Lately, happiness has been hitting like flashbacks.

Like, the air takes me to the southeast coast ocean,

but the sun is so california.

Those bushes are the same ones outside my house,

and this road rash looks just that one time on Virginia Hills,

despite colloquial gravel.

Running around in a field is so elementary.

And free!

I’m with my friends on a family vacation to my grandmother’s.

I’m still bathing in the warmth of a car ride even though I’m the one driving.

Music has attachments that allow me to travel through place-time.

I’m dancing on a dock, and a now a deck, a country apart,

like they’re cut from the same tree.

All in the room I haven’t left.

The one I believe to be in too long,

because lately,

happiness has been hitting like flashbacks.

And I want the mermaids to swim all this way from Norfolk to sweep me off the mountaintop I’m stuck on.

I’m feeling myself everywhere but where I’m at,

and does that mean to head on or go back?

I thought maturity was supposed to make sense.

I’m more convoluted than ever.

Pinpointing trauma shouldn’t be the way to remember life.

I want it to be happiness,

like I want now to one day be a nice flashback,

but that’s not happening and I fear the joy in this era will be forgotten in pain.

Because I can relate today to that, and that’s why I look back,

like I want my future to be like the past,

so reminiscing is active.

So today has to be what I can look back to because later on,

what if I run out of shit to remember?