Erin Beckett | + Follow Poet |
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Notes of a Twenty-Something-Year-Old

I wonder if some part of me was running,
while I gathered up my thrills in wanderlust;
scattering them like dust to the fire, that feeds a lazy afterglow.
The Adventure of Wonder. The one I embellish just a little,
because that time away is my big trophy 
full of glitter. I can't hardly reach in without distortion.

My portion of that place was different than I expected-
a beauty exceeding the dreams
I'd constructed from photographs, but it was tamed and balanced-out.
Tugged under gray skies like a great god asleep in some hidden cave
beneath a thriving city.
And I made to-do lists daily, as I'd done in college to ease the pressure
(with specially constructed spots for sightseeing)
And some days when I wandered off to little Irish villages,
I looked for better places to stuff the notes 
of future plans. (I found them everywhere)
I found them even in the glare of the rocky cliffs that stood naked
to Atlantic winds. And I shoved them in and went off
and saved them inside my tiny travel-friendly lap-top, which I took
even on days that I felt like a god,
because no one I knew would ever walk the same places
I had. I grew up and I grew proud
and then lost it again, when plans
collided with the world that was. And the cycle repeated;
It still does.

And when the day finally came that I descended 
hazy-eyed from the journey of dreams, I felt the same 
as the day I left. That familiar blend of joy and thrill
and anxiousness, that leaves my chest tight for days.
Weeks passed before I grieved.

A dancer in Leeds once told me: 
sometimes all you need is a new pair of eyes
not a destination. I believed her,
and I still do.
And I'm happier too, when I see the faces
of the ones I'd missed; the memory of something lost still fresh.

But then there's that other feeling,
the one I let take me across the Atlantic
like a stranger with welcoming eyes (that somehow seem familiar)
that has me writing everything down, arming against disaster.
Only now the notes die faster. 
I wave them off hoping in the future (when that twenty-something year-old 
sense of urgency dies, or transcends into realities of peacefull coping)
I can use them as a witness to myself, and they'll tell me nothing's lost
in the breakdown. Everything just comes and goes. 
And whether we've never had it, or we have it all,
I think I'll never know. There are those things
we must learn to let go.

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