. On Signs .

I sometimes feel like we should all wear signs. Maybe yours is orange and hers is yellow. Green like money or black like loss. Dark red like lust. Blue for empathy and grey for apathy.

These signs would hang around our necks and they would tell others our story before we even open our dry mouths. 

A couple of words, scribbled on cardboard:

I am a liar. 
Love me.
I’m here to hurt.
I’m hurt.

It would just save us so much time. 
It would just save us so much effort.

It would just 

It would just 

It would just save us.

…

You could stay away from the cheaters. From the slaughterhouses and the butchers with blood still on their hands. 

You could stay away from the hurt. From the ones strangling, stuttering, and strumming on the stitches covering their still oozing wounds.

You could stay far, far away from the reckless. From the ones who tear apart happy endings like paper airplanes on windy days. 

You could stay away from the apathetic. From the ones that are indifferent in a way that will leave you begging on your skinned knees.

…

And the thing about signs is that they’re not permanent. They do not define you because you can take them off. Untie the ribbon at the back of your milky white neck, and feel it glide down your cavernous chest, and 

put a new one on. 

…

It might be sort of freeing, you know? 

It might be freeing to put 

I am a survivor and I will teach you how to be one, too -
I’m here to help you shed that feeling of forgotten from your shoulders -
I’ve already lived all of my bad days and yes I am quite sure of that because I’ve decided so -
I carry around burdens like a bouquet of dead roses and please - won’t you carry some of this for me -

in bold, bright letters across your cardboard sign. 

It might be freeing to write

I’ll show up for you. 

With a big, thick sharpie that smells like fourth grade, you could loop your L’s really wide, and swirl your S like you’re just learning the feel for your pen again, and 

wouldn’t it feel good? 

Wouldn’t it just feel so damn good? 

…

Would your sign call to the mistake makers, or
the harborers of hate?

The midnight runners, 
the afraid-he-might-leavers?

Would it beckon the believers, or the
chasers of Freedoms?

…

And when the dust settles, and when the moon shines in the inky sky -
And when you take off the day, when you settle into a bath so hot that it burns off the remains of every heavy sigh, every piece of quaking anger, or every gritty piece of loneliness -
And when you lay in bed and pray for the morning -

It’s then. Right there in that Neverland-Peter-Pan-Magical-Hour of time when you realize that when the sun shines again, 

You can put on whatever sign you want.

xoxo, B.