what are you?

if I were to ask you

what are you?

would you understand what I mean?

would you try to translate the question into something more common, and answer with your name?

I am Olivia Smit.

Would you tilt your head and ask me for confirmation?

I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean?

or would you understand?

Would you close your eyes, and consider,

think really deeply about what you are, all the parts that fit together into one big, broken whole...would you understand that you are individual pieces of identity that defy mathematics;

when added together, you are more than you started with.

You cannot divide your identity into slices of life

compartmentalize who you are

but you can always multiply

and grow.

Would you answer me, meeting my gaze, starting with a list and then peeling back the layers and diving a little deeper

I am eighteen.
Canadian.
Woman.

I am confused.
Excited.
Scared.

I am stressed, every heartbeat sending a thumping pain through my temples, a constant reminder to open my mouth and breathe. I am the kind of person who forgets things like oxygen when my brain is too full of the future to worry about the here and now.

I am quite possibly a little bit backwards.

I am the girl who wrote a letter she never sent to an eighth-grade boy who wasn't as perfect as he looked...

I am still thirteen inside, and I thought things would never change
but they did
and I wasn't ready,
still waiting for the happy ending I thought I was promised.

Because I am the kind of person who still believes in happy endings.

I am so close to....to something, to the future, to new and crazy things, so close to an opening up and changing of life.... and so far from understanding what that even means.

I am caught, inexplicably
inextricably
entwined
with both the future and the past, and somehow I have lost the line that divides the two,
living not in the moment, but in a moment

when I was two years old, my sister was born,
I rode a bus for the first time, and out the window
saw stars --
someday will a child of mine make the same journey
and be more in awe of the evasive pricks of light
than they are of this strange new person?

Maybe now is just remembering then

I am empty inside of all the places I have not gone,
a void that does not fill me but stretches me
to make room for the things I have not seen
and the people I have not yet loved.

I am a blank page, and I can feel myself tensing
with every heartbeat,
wondering who will pick up the pen first
and what they will write.

it is a happy emptiness
called

Possibility.

xx
Olivia

P.S. I know I have spent the last few posts being all like, "CHANGE ACK" but I promise real live posts are coming soon! Including why I didn't go to prom and what I did instead, which includes getting stuck in the roof of a car and also lots of bug bites.
P.P.S. Not actually permanently stuck in the roof of a car, as is evidenced by the fact that I'm typing stuff in my computer and not being turned into the first ever human/car cyborg combo. Just in case you were concerned.
P.P.P.S. I feel like it's been forever since I blogged even though my last post was only a week or two ago. HOW ARE YOU ALL?? Please share.