Chili Pepper Sundaes

    “I hope that someday I have something to offer someone else. Broadly speaking I would love to have something worth giving the world, but also something for just one other someone too. But mostly just something for anyone.”

    We all have dreams. Even if we don’t know what they are or can’t remember them. And not a single person dreams of being nothing, of being no one. No one wakes up in the morning desperate to be worthless. It just doesn’t happen. Even people we look at and judge saying they have no ambitions, even those people dream of something. Whatever the dream is, whether it’s as timeless (and absurd) as the classic “American Dream” complete with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, or as far fetched as owning a fortune 500 company that operates in 355 different countries, or as simple as waking up tomorrow, the dream is out there. And if we tore apart these dreams into their most basic parts, their simplest pieces, we could reconstruct each and every one to be exactly the same. We could make it simple, have everyone carry it around on a note card in their pocket or write it on a trillion t-shirts, either way they would all say this; I want to be worth something. Or better yet, even simpler; I want to be enough. Because that’s what everyone is trying to do. We’re all running around like drunken monkeys trying to mean something. It’s what keeps us up at night, it’s why we work overtime, it’s why we join the PTA, why we go to college, why we do anything at all. We can give it 100 different names and describe it 10,000 different ways, but the bottom line is we’re all scrambling, searching for a reason to be alive, to keep breathing, to matter. The lucky ones won’t ever realize this, and will keep living, keep working towards something they cannot name, having no idea how blissful their ignorance truly is. As for the rest of us, we should just all go get t-shirts with this scrawled across the front: I Want To Matter.

“Give me a purpose, or let me die.”

It’s funny how a place can change so much, yet still be almost exactly what you left it. I have returned to the place I grew up, to find my closet taken over by my sister’s wardrobe. The family dog; who had always been my dog, as a dog can only have one master still sleeps in my room, but does not come as quickly when I call, and sits at the foot of another when he once sat at mine. My father struggles to see me as more than the 9 year old who saw him at his weakest, while dealing with the adult who has appeared in her place overnight. My mother fights to unify herself, to bury and accept the past all at once, while still opening the hole above her chin and yielding it like a weapon, then attempting to put a band-aid on a severed limb. My sister attempts to trudge forward wholeheartedly, but not abandon who she has been. I return to this place trying to cast off all that I had been in order to make a space for who I wish to be, but still I find myself molding to fit the space I tried to leave behind, ever the chameleon.