on the things they don't teach you in school.

at the age of twenty-one a famous american playwright with wide, strong hands will cup the back of your neck and in that instant illuminate sex as the space between absolute control and weak knees. let him. 

and then at twenty-six when a man pushes your hair behind your ear for the first time in your life, enjoy it. 

as you grow and mature the things you once valued will change and fall away. but they'll make perfect sense to the eight-year-old-version-of-yourself. and that's just as it should be. 

as it turns out, semantics is important. words have meaning. and slight shifts and small subtleties between the things do make a difference. 

don't trust anyone who doesn't know the meaning of doppelganger. or ellipses. 

one day you'll live in a neighborhood where a man walks around with a cockatoo on his shoulder and a woman on the local train eats a payday candy bar by pulling the large peanuts from her mouth and flicking them beneath her train seat. you'll wonder why she bothered to buy a payday? why not a snickers or three musketeers? this will be an appropriate question. 

one day you'll lose your favorite earring to the crevice of a man's couch. it'll be worth it. 

you'll find that water and trees and mountains and sand will satisfy you in a way that concrete sidewalks never will. and that's okay. there is a time and a place for both. 

you'll wake one morning, a product of all you've seen and done and known and you'll find yourself restored. childlike wonder in tact. the courage of your young self in tow. the deep-rooted belief in the beauty of all that's to come. and you'll continue on. because it's from there that you begin.