2. A Definitive (Poetry)

-Sixty-

A Book Closes, Another Chapter Starts:

The end of an era in growth on the path for the woman to become 

One book ends with only more pages to be written in a new one

Tomorrow brings a new day, a new year to run 

To break and crawl and learn and grieve

To peel back the skin I was born in again and again to feel 

Humans are silly fragile things

Made so strong

Breaking each other only to put the pieces back together wrong

Until we learn to build on our own

To create our own foundations and let our friends paint the walls.

The end of creation and the start of a rebirth 

A new person in newer skin forever on the search

For the meaning that there is no meaning at all

To live my life in a way that sees me fail and fall

Only to stand up once again just as tall

To keep photographs of the memories of bruises on my knees

When all that replaces them is fresh skin

Striving towards cleanliness always even if it means beginning again

Growth is not linear and my story never will be

But trying will never be a burden because I can still see

That no matter how many times my skin becomes unclean

Bruised, cut, damaged, changing the shape it's been

I will always find a way to make the dirty spots me. 

So here, to a year, to friends and heartbreak

To making enemies and rivals,

To giving up and fate

To forgiveness and pain

To burning and sympathy 

To new friends and beginnings 

To loving old ones and learning to love me, whoever that may be

To drunken nights and sex and liquor and feelings

To immaturity and growth, to fighting and ghosts

Lingering between the walls finally expelled from my house

To memories not forgotten but placed on the shelf

To memoirs of the past not bringing pain

To becoming a person of love again 

To a whole fucking year of growth. 

To a whole new person.

Every moment made worth it by the tears stained on my aching cheeks

Strained in place by a smile that will not evade me

Pride in my strength, pride in what comes my way

What's done is done, and what's yet to come will come,

And I will be ready, heartbreak and healing and all

Love and failing and the fall

To rise again and again

What's done is done, and what's yet to come will come

And when it does,

I will be ready open arms 

With a pen in my hand ready to write it all

The end of an era in growth on the path for the woman to become

One book ends with only more pages to be written in a new one

(But I will always, always write in the margins between).

Love always, 

Jessica. Kate. Martin.