Chances

In school, I am always told that mine is the generation that will make everything change. We are on the brink of something big, and it is our time to make things better.

No pressure.

We learn about the philosophers and the writers, the Angry Young Men that lived and wrote and died before us. We study them in class now, and for a moment, in my plush lecture seat, my heart races and my blood rises and I feel the push of revolution deep inside me. I know what we will do. We will write, and talk and we will be a voice in the thousands-year long conversation of the undying young. Our voice will carry in to the textbooks of our great-grandchildren, and people will hear our words and feel the rushing call to words as we did. And then, the lecture is over.

My ideas, the plays and words in my head still tug at my as forgotten children do. "Will you not show me?" they say, "Will you not let me live?" It aches. It aches and pulls too hard to let them die and float away. Some days I try to give them life on the page. Sometimes, they are half-formed, tragic. Little wretches I have forgotten to love. I am sorry, beauties.

When assignments and groceries occupy the time and my world, I let them go. And I mourn them. Sometimes the sadness is crushing. My stillborn thoughts.

But, sometimes, they stay. They live and thrive in a deep corner of my self. So, stubborn, they push out of my head like Athena and INSIST on being real. "WRITE ME! I AM ALIVE. Let me live." And they push out of my head and force pen to paper, fingers to keys. And I am the flute that the wind blows through. The music is never mine.

And sometimes, they push into every corner of me and I become a new being. They slip into my skin like a glove, and I die. I leave my body. I am no longer what I ever was before. I die, and I go, and there they are. And when it is over, I fall back into my skin, cold.

I am never trying to take chances to make change. And I am never striving to be the new voice. But sometimes, the voice holds my throat still and sings a note through my lips.

I am the flute that the wind blows through. The music is never mine.