Tag: existence

Poetry, Unbound

Let Me Be Myself

Carrie Villarreal
This was the result of a creative writing exercise I did while attending a conference in Amsterdam this April.  It all points to identity and the things we desire if we could just drop the social pretense and requirements and be ourselves.

Let me
wear jeans for professional dress.
Don’t teachers teach better in jeans?
I heard that was true,
and if not, it should be.

Let me
just sit down and cry,
release the expectation that I have
all the answers even though I sometimes
don’t even know what I want.

Let me
etch “Carrie was here”
into the glass ceiling
and shatter it
as I dot the i in my name.

Let me
forget the shame
of bad decisions past
and prevent them
from haunting my quiet moments.

Let me
speak my mind
even if I lose my eloquence
and revert back to the girl on the ranch
doing a man’s work.

Featured Image: Pixabay – “Ranch” by skeeze (CC0 Public Domain)
Musings, Prose, Unbound

The Smallness of Us

Carrie Villarreal

There are these moments when I picture myself benevolently aged, a bittersweet smile of the past playing about the crow-footed corners of my eyes.  What I wouldn’t give to have a conversation with her.  The woman who weathered storms.  The woman who brought storms.  

What would she think of me with my self-pity and social angst?  

“Child,” she would say, sipping Zinfandel through her favorite My Little Pony mug a lover from long ago gave to her, “It is not the darkness in the life of an artist that creates art.  It is the hope that the darkness will end that helps the artist create life through art.”

I would cast a side-eyed glance at her, but since we occupy the same mind and body, she would guffaw at me and kiss her teeth as she knocked back another swig.

“It’s just like that story we loved as a girl and would always cry at every time we came back to it.  You know… the one where the guy crashes his plane in the desert and meets the alien boy and he tells him this story about a fox and a rose,” she would prattle on.

“Le Petit Prince,” I’d sigh back.  “Everything that is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“Exactly. Except there are also scars the eye cannot see, but that doesn’t mean we let them pervert our heart,” she’d sagely nod in the annoying way old people do right before she takes another gulp which causes Twilight Sparkle to mock me with her smug smile.  “Like this wine.  The fruit of which is sweet from the vine but fermented can leave a bitter aftertaste both in the mouth and in the actions taken under imbibed persuasion.”  

Adding punctuation to her words, she would put the mug down and lean forward in her chair, donning the doggedness that my mother wore when you knew she was right, when you knew she didn’t bring the storm but was the storm, “We must savor the delicacies of our lives, no matter how bitter.  We must not take for granted the world within the smallness of us.”

In response to Daily Prompt: Savor
Featured Image: Pixabay – “Storm” by Free-Photos (CC0 Public Domain)
Musings, Unbound

Hollow Year

Carrie Villarreal

What is existence?  How do we construct its purpose?  When we do manage to wrestle some menial sense of direction, how do we know it’s not something contrived, something shoehorned in in the last moment?  These are questions I have been wrestling with, and they’ve only become more prevalent and urgent in the past couple of weeks.  

When I was younger, I had many ideas about what I wanted to be when I grew up.  A marine biologist discovering the secrets of the Marianas Trench.  A paleontologist filling in holes in the historical timeline.  A secret agent protecting the world from untold doom.  An astronaut and first woman to have her baby on the moon.  What grand dreams!

I also wanted to be a teacher.  I wanted to be one since I was in kindergarten.  It was the safe dream, but it was my dream nonetheless.  I made it happen and loved every minute of it.  Until, I didn’t anymore.  Don’t get me wrong.  There are still days when I believe that I’ll only be alive if I work with young minds.  Then there are the days, even after eight years, where I sit in my car during lunch and cry.  It used to be these days were few and far between.  Now, the marks on the calendar tell me this is more than just a passing phase.  This is where I am, that bittersweet moment where you know the dream is ending.

So, I ask again what is existence?  How do we construct its purpose?  Do we define it by what we do?  Do we define it by who we become?  Do we define it by those we keep in our life?  Do we define it by family?  Do we define it by those things we have left undone but intended to do all along?  Really, I think all of these just ring hollow through the years.  Really, I think the answer is there is no answer.

Perhaps, it’s because the summer of my life is tending towards fall, and I have no real harvest to speak of to bring in that I am asking all these questions.  Perhaps it’s the impending winter days which seem much shorter and the nights much colder that I am seeking to rekindle some truth to keep me warm.  Perhaps, I should take the wisdom of a student who passionately interrupted our discussion on the fallibility of mankind in “By the Waters of Babylon” earlier in the week with “Miss, it’s too early for an existential crisis!”

In response to Daily Prompt: Construct
Featured Image: Pixabay – “Hollow” by Daswortgewand (CC0 Public Domain)