Riddle

I am death. I am life.
I am everyone. I am no one.
I killed your parents, yet I gave them new life.
I am smart and funny and beautiful.
I am nothing more than a speck.
I am loved. I am hated.
I am my own worst enemy.
I know how to read, or at least how to listen.
I sleep, I eat, I live.
I will do more if I choose to.
I am of no accord, but I mean the world to someone.
I am never alone.
I am obvious.
I am who you think I am.

Crush

I loved her, but it was forbidden.
Drink it up, or break it down.
The dove has a broken wing,
and my spirit is failing.
Pinned down with no where to turn,
I think of the one I long for.
Beaten and dejected,
I will have my revenge.
I will destroy them.
I thirst for it.
Never forget your first.
Don't even try to forget.
It tastes too sweet,
even if the pain is too bitter.
Drink it down, or break it up.
It was forbidden, and so I loved her.

Thirteen Squared

One day two days ago, three thoughts popped into my head. For four years I had been working hard so that for the next five or six I could work even harder. Why was that? I remembered back when I was seven, life was so simple. My hardest decision was which of my eight dolls I should play with that day. I thought, that day, that I wanted that back. Nine months ago, I wasn't even thinking these things? What had happened? Even to go back ten years, back to when I was eleven, would be better than where I was now. Twelve more days. That's all it would take and I'd be done and moving on, but on to what? What happens on day number thirteen?

Those were my thoughts: feeling lost in the present, a memory and desire for the past, and uncertainty for the future.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and counted to twelve. I used to count to eleven, just because most people count to ten, but soon even that started to seem unoriginal to me, so that was why I increased it even more. I need those extra seconds, just like when I was nine years old and needed eight extra seconds to finish the races after the other kids. Maybe I didn't want to go back. Sure, I had plenty of dolls and toys back when I was seven, but what was I doing, really? Now that I think of it, even when I was only six years old, I wanted to go back, back to before I was five or even four. Back to a simpler time. There were only three things I needed back then, and really three things I need now: to love, to be loved, and to know what love is. I already have two of them. And maybe it is worth the rest of my life to find the final one.

Winning

Whenever I win or lose at any kind of game or competition, I ask myself, "Why?" The answer when I win is almost always: "Because I cheated." When I lose, the answer is: "Because my opponent did a better job of cheating than I did."

I can do anything I want, unless someone tries to stop me. And no one ever tries to stop me until after they've already realized what I'm doing and by then it's too late. The only time I can be stopped is when someone who is already just like me is going up against me. I know what I want, and I take it. That's what winners, what cheaters do.

I will always be this way; I don't think I'll ever change. I used to think I was unique, but I have come to realize there are many like me. I've met them. The only time I really have fun, really see a challenge, is when I'm going up against one of them. This game we play, it has whole new rules. You can't win unless you cheat, but cheaters don't always win when there is more than one of them playing.

There is no room for ties or compromise. Someone has to come out on top, and more often than not, it's me. There are people who have given me a run for my money, though. I am not someone who can't be impressed. But every time I am beaten, I learn something, and I grow stronger than before. Each defeat makes me stronger, and as I grow stronger, I am defeated less often. One day, I will be invincible.

But what is invincible really? How do I know when I've reached supremacy. Because no one else can win against me? Perhaps I have just not found a worthy opponent. And if there is a worthy opponent out there, I want to find him, because if I defeat him, I am one step closer to being unstoppable and if he beats me, I am still one step closer.

I learn; I grow; I do whatever it takes. One day, I will rule this nation, and then, the world. And it all started as a game.

For Your Own Safety

Words.
Written with you in mind.
They tell you to slow down, calm down, and be safe.
Be safe.
Isn't that the way to be?

They say rules were made to be broken.
Were bones made to be broken?
What about feelings?
Do you need help to keep your own self safe?

[Probably more to come... I was going to write more and lost my train of thought]

The Return

He sat alone at the small, round, mahogany table in the corner of the bar. This particular table was usually reserved for any pair of gentlemen who wished the ogle the serving maidens in relative secrecy, but there was no ogling coming from it this night and as much as the town didn't seem to appreciate what this man and his companions had done for them, the bartender at least appreciated this man's pain enough to not ask him to move.

The man had come into town a few hours ago with four other companions, the only people in the world he had been close to over the past 15 years, but at this point, even they had left him. They had all come expecting a glorious and joyous return and instead they had been greeted by emptiness and the occasional guilt. They thought they had wanted greater companionship, but after the way things had gone, they all decided they wanted less. And so each man, friend, adventurer, whatever they had become over the past 15 years, went his own separate way to find his own forgotten place in which to seek what little solace he could find.

This man chose this bar, far less unchanged than the people he had once gathered with here to drink in celebration or anguish or just because they could. Only now, he was alone and forgotten at this corner table that was the same as it had been 15 years ago but which he had never even sat out until now. He had never wanted to be hidden until now.

He was playing with a thin layer of dust on the table when he heard footsteps coming his way. He looked up to see a girl walking his way, he would have guessed her to be no more than 14 years old, but since she appeared to be six or seven months pregnant, and was no being looked upon by anyone else in the bar with shame, it was likely she was at least a couple years older than that. The next thing he noticed after these observations of the girl herself was the flagon she was carrying outstretched towards him.

"I didn't order anything yet," he said as she sat the mug down right in front of him.

"It's okay," she said. "This one's on me. You look like you need it." She just stood there, gazing at him intently, if he were more focused he might even have said lovingly, until he finally felt obligated to take a swig.

"Very good," he lied, for the taste hadn't even registered enough in his brain for him to determine if it was good or not.

She nodded and sat down in the chair across from him continuing to stare. She looked like she wanted to say something, but didn't quite know how to begin. Something within him jumped, and he felt a strange compulsion to want to help her, and as he sat looking back at her, trying to ascertain how he might do so, he felt an even stranger pulse of recognition looking into her deep blue eyes.

"I know you," he said simply.

The girl smiled, such a beautiful yet sad smile she had. "Yes," she said, placing her hands nervously on the surface of the table, "you do."

"You, you were one of them out near the street when we were walking by," he said, more excitedly than he should have. "You were sweeping your porch and you stopped to look at us when we walked by."

The smile dropped right off her face and she nodded, leaving her head in the downward position to stare and the nearly empty surface of the table. He didn't seem to noticed the change in her demeanor.

He frowned. "Why did you look at me like you did?" he asked.

She looked back up at him, trying to not look as heart-broken as she was feeling. "Excuse me?" she said.

"The way you looked at me," he said. "I didn't think of it at the time, but now, I think, it was somehow... different than how the others looked at me, almost as if you actually felt something about my being there."

She nodded. "I felt," she said, "that all the others ought not to have forgotten you."

He wrinkled his brow in confusion at this. "And you?" he questioned. "You didn't forget us? Were you even born when we left?"

She glanced down at her hands, which were fidgeting with one another, apart from her control, on the top of the table. "It doesn't matter if I was or not," she said. "No one should forget anyone who was once such a close part of their lives or the lives of others close to them."

He sighed heavily. It was clear this girl was just feeling guilty, perhaps about something entirely different. He doubted she even knew where he had been and what he had been doing over the past 15 years, and for some reason, whether she wanted to hear it or not, he felt compelled to tell her. "We were saving the world, you know," he said.

She nodded, still staring at her hands and willing them to stop behaving so badly. "Yes," she said rather morosely, "so I heard."

"It wasn't an easy task, you know," he continued, feeling compelled to take another swig of his drink, "and all we really wanted in return was for someone to remember and appreciate us."

She looked up suddenly, her hands stopped moving, and she seemed again as if she wanted to say something important, but instead all she said was, "Go on. Perhaps if you tell me the story, I can be the one to appreciate you."

Her words shocked him so much that he could think of nothing else to do but to do as she requested. And so, over the next several hours and nearly a dozen additional pints of ale, he told his 15 year story as succinctly as he possibly could. It was only when he got to the very end, and was very, very drunk, that he thought to go back to the very beginning and touch on the wife and child that he had so painfully left behind.

"She didn't even recognize me," he wailed. "And she didn't miss me, even if she had recognized me. She was with another man, had married him not five years after I left."

The girl grew somewhat annoyed at this, but he was to drunk to notice. "And what of your daughter?" she asked. "What was her reaction when she saw you again?"

The man shook his head solemnly. "I have yet to find out," he said. "My wife did not tell me what became of her, and I was too heart-broken to ask."

There was silence for a moment. The girl drummed her fingers a bit on the dusty table. She looked around at the mugs strew about them, then took a deep breath and leaned forward as much as her pregnant belly would allow her to. "I think," she said in a near whisper, just loud enough that he could make out her words, "that she never would have stopped loving you and thinking that you would return. And that when you did return, she would buy you a flagon of ale and sit there listening to you all night while she hoped she could gain up the courage to tell you as much."

There was silence again as the drunken old man sat there blinking at her, trying, in his inhibited state, to understand what she had just said to him. A few eternal moments passed and then she leaned away from him again and stood up. "Thank you, father," she said, stepping forward and squeezing his arm affectionately. "I know you did what you had to, and I appreciate it, even if no one else does. I always knew you would return, and I never stopped loving you."

There was no more pausing to look at him when she finished this statement; she simply released his arm and walked away. He sat there shaking from the alcohol or her words or the touch or all of these until she had faded away into the smokiness of the bar. It was not until this moment that he thought to jump up and shout, "Wait, come back!"

All this elicited was hateful stares from the other bar-goers who had forgotten he was even there and had wished to keep it that way. That beautiful young woman, his daughter, was no where to be seen. She had seemed too young to be his daughter, but he saw it now, it was as clear as every thing else in the world was not. Those eyes and that hair: she had been just a baby when he left her, but those things were just as he remembered them, if only he had remembered them sooner.

With sobs slowly starting to shake his body, he slumped back down into his chair and allowed the other townspeople to return to whatever it was they had been doing. He didn't care. For the first time since he had returned to this place, he was able to cry, and it wasn't because others had failed to remember him, it was because he had failed to remember her. All the pain he had felt, he was sure she was now feeling, and in his current state, he could think of no way to make it up to her. He simply let his head drop hard on top of the table and let his body shake in misery as the tears turned the thin layer of dust to a thin layer of mud. Everything else was forgotten at that moment. All he wished, more than anything in the world, was that she would return.

Return (,Waiting for)

I was a young girl when it happened, a very young girl. I barely remember what my father even looked like; I have only vague recollection of an unshaved face rubbing against my soft, baby-like cheek and bright blue eyes gazing lovingly into mine. I was just over two when he left.

As I grew a little older, perhaps four or five, and began to wonder what had happened, that was when my mother reassured me, told me that my father had gone to save the world, but that these things took time. She told me he had gone off to be a hero. At the time, I thought it sounded like praise, but in retrospect, I wonder if she had been just a little bitter. She had loved him, I know that, but I wonder how much you would really continue to love someone who chooses to leave you with a baby girl on the vague notion that he is required to "save the world."

By the time I was eight or nine, my mother stopped lying to me. When I asked if my father was coming home this year, she finally told me he wasn't coming back. Now you have to understand when I say she stopped lying, what I really mean is that she started telling me what she believed to be true. I never stopped believing that my father was going to return.

When I turned 13, I was told I should start thinking about finding a husband. I wanted to ask how my mother had found my father, but somehow I knew better. I knew she would make some comment about not wanting me to find a man who would only leave me, if she made any reference to my absent father at all. Based on the fact that she had remarried the year before and was pregnant with her new husband's baby, I was pretty certain she had forgotten him all together.

As it turned out, I didn't have to do any searching for a husband since he found me. He started courting me just a few months before my 14th birthday and my mother was thrilled. He was a good, hard-working man from a respectable family. I wouldn't say that I loved him, but I at least appreciated him, and I felt I could grow to love him. I could see why my mother wanted me to marry him. He was clean-shaven, brown-eyed, and seemed to have no aspirations of saving the world, nothing like my vague and almost forgotten memory of my father.

I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow, I ended up happy. My husband was a good man; he provided for me, it was clear that he loved me, and just as I had thought, I had grown to love him. I also believed, still, even after all these years, that my father would one day return to meet my husband and his grandchild who was now on the way, and it turned out I was at least partially right.

I was 17 and pregnant when the strangers came. Five men dressed in beaten clothing and covered with mud. I was sweeping our porch when I saw them walking through town. I knew I had never seen them before, and yet they felt familiar. It wasn't the familiarity that struck me though, it was the pain. They didn't have to look at me for me to feel it, but one of them did anyway, and my heard nearly skipped a beat when I saw his beaten face, rough beard, and bright blue eyes. Could it really be that after 15 years the father I barely knew but loved anyway had returned?

All I could do was stare. He sighed and looked away, and I know he wished more than anything that he hadn't returned.