The Champagne Soapbox

I clean my mirrors down to a clear image, being sure to treat it carefully because it shows a reflection of me. At my most desperate times, I would get up from my sunken warmth to look into that mirror and see a deserted mind. I would walk back and forth in the mirror in some socially relevant outfit to make sure the heels could last through the night. I hate being perceived, but I need you to perceive me in order to understand that it’s okay to be a million different things at once. I carry my cat to the mirror and see if he knows what a reflection is. As of recent, I tend to stare at the mirror just to disappear within myself. Kind of like how you stare at someone you think you might love. Hmmm. I look back at the reflection just now recognizing it’s alive, again, just older now and considering that I’ll devote my life looking after the younger versions of her. It’s so funny too, because I feel like the younger versions of myself had only worried about the older versions: writing down a list of hobbies in case I forgot to have free time. With all this worry, I’m worried that no one is worried about the one who is presently doing the worrying. Should I tap on the glass and remind her?

Anyways, hello. I haven’t talked to you in a while. Life is a lot. Everybody needs you, then nobody needs you. Wake up the sun is going down. Stand up, you did too much, just sit down. Only open your mouth until you know what’s coming out of it. Want to see Nirvana but I don’t want to die yet. Want to hear God but she won’t speak to me yet. Want to be me but I can’t figure her out yet. Still. Ugh. I’m too extreme – wanting to know what scratches the deep parts of people’s brain and asking why they won’t tell me more about myself. We’ve only been dating (never been on a date) for two days, can you tell me what you see? It’s okay, I look at myself and reduce it to what I pay to keep it alive sometimes. A single bed and single bath. In the middle of a place I didn’t grow up but made home and consider running away from again. A concrete block built in 2017 to shove someone into for the corporate earning, for that person to work for the corporate earning, and live life completely yearning for more growth.

If I grow: is my reward a house, a backyard of sand, and a dog your cat hates who can run in said backyard? Do I also get a boy who I fear I love too much? I found it easy to lose the love I had for myself by finding it in other people, at least the version of them that lives in my head. Oh to have your feet warm and to feel your head rise with the silent breaths of that boy you agreed you loved the same as yourself. Kids (maybe) who have your eyes and similar insecurities. The rushed plea to heal those insecurities before they discover them within themselves too. Rocking chairs and road trips where you look at the clock enough to obsess over the memory of you sitting on your couch in your first apartment alone, wondering if it became true.

Hi. I haven’t met you yet, but I think about you all the time. I bet you have the same emotional dispositions, yet have become perfectly satisfied. You have my wrinkled eyes and insecurities that you are secure about. Nirvana is a state of being. God created the idea of being. How is it being, being you all the time? A silly thing about the universe is that it gives us the opportunity to imagine that scenario (manifest), live the scenario (look you made it), and take advantage of the scenario (what’s next). We spent most of our time imagine ourselves in different scenarios when really all you we doing is guessing ignorant bliss. You must learn how to keep walking with uncertainty; to avoid spoiling the universe’s gift by trying to guess the next one.

Sometimes it’s exhausting for me to do the work to feel like myself again you know. I do something “so bailey,” and I contemplate for a few days why the action is so reflective of me. “Bailey is the type of girl to call boys beautiful or pretty.” Everyone won’t stop talking about doing the work and the amount of water you need and the early bird that needs to get the worm too. All you do is experience and heal and experience and experience because you healed once and that one mental breakdown you always mention when you’re drunk has become your shortcut to an easier life… however, you will still wake up with a hangover and think “I thought I worked on that already.” lmaooooo

I’ve accepted that I will never stop healing. It’s because I will always want to keep experiencing.

Do I have to keep treating my inner child and future self differently when they all look like the same reflection? Even if we don’t see them happy, we have this infinite imagination to picture them being that way. The body keeps score, but the mind always wants more. You’re existing between a perfect plateau of experience, so specific in showing microscopic milliseconds worth of highs and lows and leaps and bounds in growth. And why do we grow? The universe is expansion, you are the universe. Keep growing through the minutes. Stop growing up too fast. Is it too late or did we take a different route? I hate this road, and this car keeps getting older, and the billboard in the rearview said “nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”

The universe sends us exactly what we are ready for at the exact time we need it in our lives. I truly believe that, it’s like the only thing I devote myself too – like a thesis for life. I wouldn’t be 23 if I didn’t mention that it also sends us exactly who we need, and it takes them away. It sends us exactly who we need when we didn’t know they were coming back too – which makes you question if it’s up to you to heal or if the universe will force you to do it anyway. Ignorance is bliss, to live is to find bliss, so why do we try to find so many meanings to something so intricately simple? Being is easy, living is harder. In the most wabi-sabi way, I’m trying make peace with the emptiness at the core of human life by overfilling it with so much happiness.

To live with the universe is a treasure, genuinely. Maybe I’m just a #lovergirl to get emotional about how lucky are we to learn each other, and love each other, and kiss each other, and feel each other, and see a glimmer of humanity in each other. To connect with the universe through other people and find that same humanity in yourself. To look into the same souls you forgot to remember again, until you do remember them again, and realize you will never forget them. God I miss you already, always. To people who I’ve seen experience all emotions, to people I hold hands with, to people who let me the opportunity to count their pores, to people who I’ve listened to sigh, to the greens and blues of the world living in black and white.

Put both of your hands out and grab the hand of your youth and the hand of the oldest you. How critical it is to balance yourself within the present and not have them drag you back and forth. I look in the mirror about a month later (now) and feel complete knowing that I’m a balance of so much unknown and too much known. Being the same girl I’ve carried through life, I guess with some over-saturated soul that will last me past this lifetime. Time is limited and yet endless, take it in by second and heal everlong.

I wrote this because I was cleaning my mirror. Do you ever just sit and stare at yourself, not because you’re doing your makeup, but you can’t believe you’re alive? You like wait … it’s not just me, it’s the universe (at least, just 5’4” of the universe). Adding to what I said in the last blog: although there are so many versions of yourself you have yet to meet, try not to forget about the one living now.