I Am Paper

I heard my heart break before I ever felt it start to crumble.

Like a whisper in the wind, as soft and powerful as any purpose, I strained to hear the message only meant for me.

My heart felt like sand between my fingers. The more eager my fingers became in trying to hold on to it, the more difficult the feat proved to be until all I could feel was it slipping away completely.

Sometimes the smallest of wounds are the ones that we bleed out from.

This paper like cut in my existence was just another blip, but the damage was profuse.

An indiscretion placed on another's conscience can still cost us our own peace and can make us question everything we thought we knew about ourselves. It makes us feel like we do not know others at all and shows us the damage that others are capable of inflicting. Our hearts are fragile like a flower petal- light enough to be carried away with the wind or crushed in the palm of the hands we asked to hold us.

How can it be that something we had put so much value into yesterday feels worthless the next.

That is how I feel.

I feel like a discarded napkin.

I was once useful and needed and I cleaned up all the messes that were never my own.

I’m all used up. I no longer serve a purpose. I am tossed away like trash.

Trash.

Like a plastic bag blowing in the wind, directionless, aimless, only certain in the uncertainty of where I will end up.

Blowing around in circles on cold pavement, listlessly floating upwards until I am caught.

Caught in a tree, caught in my own feelings. Caught.

I am stuck and I yet all I want is for someone to take me into their hand, hold me, give me a renewed purpose. Remind me that I too am important, that I too matter to someone.

I need to be grounded, I say quietly to myself.

I wonder to myself, how can a world ask so much of you and offer you so little in return?

The world, a place so unforgiving and full of moments that make us question our own sanity. A lifetime of moments that alter everything we ever thought we knew in just a split second.

How do we find the courage to move forward at all?

It is love.

It is faith.

It is our soul telling us we aren’t finished writing this story.

The experiences we have in this lifetime are just pages, part of a much bigger plan constructed to remind us that pain we feel does not break us.

Pain becomes us.

Pain makes us human.

Pain connects us to all others and in one shared breath whispers- "you are not alone."

Pain reminds us that we are alive, and that we can change our story and choose our circumstances just by altering our own thoughts. Human beings are powerful, we don't always give ourselves enough credit.

Yet still I am trapped.

I am stuck somewhere between love and sadness, dreams and expectations and the reality- I cannot find my way out.

I am buried beneath mounds of dirt and I crave the sun just inches beyond my reach. The sun waits patiently just above the ground I am smothered by. I almost feel the warmth of the dirt underneath my finger nails.

So I begin to shift…

I embrace that I am no longer a napkin or a plastic bag but I am now paper.

Anything can be written on my skin.

I am paper.

Years after I deteriorate into dirt people will remember the words they once read and I will help new growth to blossom and begin. I may not become a garden but I can offer a foundation for others to bloom. I can make the most of this circumstance that offers me so little nutrients.

I have changed who I am simply by what I think myself to be.

I am paper in a world full of trash.

Like one simple piece of paper covered with words that become timeless, I will give back to a world that has only ever taken from me.