Reading over my ridiculous amount of blogs, I realize that I have often fallen so in love with an idea or ideas of something and how it should be. School. Family. Growing up. Life.

Love.

When I was a little girl, I used to pretend that I would marry Barbie one day. And Skipper. And Ariel. Sometimes Belle, too. Not all at the same time, of course, but at different stages. As I grew older, I realized that Belle had the Beast, Ariel had Eric, and Barbie had Ken. Girls loving boys, not loving girls. But I loved them. I wanted to be Kimberly, the Pink Ranger. I wanted to love Tommy, the Green Ranger, then the White Ranger, but I mostly just loved his ponytail.

There was a Hispanic family down the street from my mom's house. We knew their family because my mom's husband, the man who made me call him Papa, knew them. The family separated, and the girls who lived there moved away with their mother. I missed the girl so much, but she came back sometimes on the weekends. There was a play area in their basement where we liked to play house together. Her name was Ellie. She was beautiful. She was my husband, and sometimes I was her husband. I held her hand, and after we put the kids to sleep, we would crawl in our tent and she would kiss me.

Life was easier back then, even though it really wasn't. I spent a lot of my childhood and even most of my adulthood hating myself for being so attracted to women. Love, as my father so adamantly reminded me during every election, was between a woman and a man. Marriage, he told me, is only between a man and a woman. Do what you want, but I better not see or hear about it. That was his motto. Somewhere along the way, I decided to stop arguing and just hate his political views on everything. If my father liked it, then I obviously couldn't.

One awful, cold winter day, in the middle of a writing assignment on Metamorphosis, it hit me. It was a smack in the face, even though I had been flirting with the idea for as long as I could remember. Love isn't a cut and dry definition, nor is anything that really matters.

Over the years, and even until that awful, beautiful winter day, I forced myself to look only at boys. I had no problem with gay people. In fact, I liked them more--probably because they were being who they truly were. But I heard the word love, and I told myself, "Boys, Kat. Fall in love with boys." So I tried. I made up these insane scenerios in my head where I would "love" and marry a boy, and then he would let me see a girl on the side. (Yes, I am insane).

I also feel so very far in love with the idea of this perfect love, that I forgot who I was.

This year has been a year of throwing out old definitions, and building new ones. Not getting caught up in cycles that drag me down, but looking forward to the new cycles that make me think of who I want to be (thanks, Discovery). And the person that I have become as a result is actually someone I like to be around.

My past definitions have held me back for so long. So many ideas, thoughts, feelings; But I am not my past. I am here, now. And I will be someone with a future.

Half past twelve, and yet I'm still tinkering away, fiddling with the keys beneath my fingers. Type a few out, delete them all. Type a few more, backspace until the page is blank again. Words possess no meaning if you don't mean what you write. Words attempt to describe the feelings that are so incomprehensible, almost to the point where they are indescribable. The gut-wrenching, sobs that infiltrate your lowest lows would not be so gut-wrenching if you didn't understand joy. Not just happiness, but joy.

That night when you cried yourself to sleep on the floor of your bedroom, wishing you had somebody there just so you weren't alone. Somebody. Anybody. But Somebody. That night, you understood alone; What the words lonely means. You remembered the pain, the anguish, the loneliness. You felt it hovering for days until it finally fell upon you like a shroud of darkness.

Where does it come from? This darkness. It haunts and tears and rips at your flesh like a lion, hungry for the weak. The vultures have not forgotten to come and nibble at your bones, pecking away each scrap of flesh that might still be stuck to the bones. You lie naked, nothing left but a few bones. Night breaks and you are left alone in the hard floor, shattered. "Hold on," The sun-dried grasses whisper in the night wind. "Almost there," the overhanging cliff tumbles as a few pieces of muddied rock fall off the edge. The air becomes cool, wet with moisture, you can feel it leak into the cracks of your skull. "It's okay to cry," the ominous clouds sweep in. Lighting strikes the tree nearby, and you wish you could curl your bones into a misshapen ball. The rains come next, the ones that often pass over this arid land. The torrential downpour soaks the land, beating it for being so cruel to itself. Beating it with love, begging it to be careful.

The night comes to a close, the crying skies have shed all the tears they can. As the sun comes up, you feel as drained as the clouds that lingered for hours. But the ground is moist, the tears from above sent like a gift to begin anew. Your bones, broken and shattered, lying on the once dry ground are no longer your own. A seed from the tree struck with lightning has managed to take root right where you lie. Though the seed takes time to grow, it will. It will flourish and become a new piece of you that was once ravished by starving animals.

Sometimes it helps to know that when those moments of emptiness invade your soul, there is an end to the empty. The bad, the darkness, it kills. Haunts. Or shrouds. But it is after these moments when you know that without them, and without the rain, there would be no sun, no smiles, no concept of joy.

That night, that awful, dark, empty night on the bedroom floor you never would have guessed that your face might later attempt to fall off from smiling so much. And you never would have heard it then, either. And another shroud of darkness is sure to find you in another way, or maybe even in the same way.

But there is always, always a seed.

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