In ankle socks and denim skirts, I learned to feel. I am six, and I do not recall a moment before the one I am currently living. The world was mine, laying on the wooden floor of a bookstore my father loved. I would bet him, as I walked through the door of my personal palace of whim, that I could read two chapter books by the time the tired man on the speaker announced my palace was closing.

And he would smile and say, “ice cream?” and I would return, with my eager, six year old eyes, “ice cream." The deal was sealed. This is how I learned to feel the treasure of good company; through the smell of burning bookstore coffee and the eyes of a man that believed I could do anything.

I admired the way he flipped through the pages of books with his middle finger; always something big and full of architectural diagrams and measurements. I admired how something so simple, pages and book binding and word, could crack his tough exterior and expose a man who still believed in whimsy. This was his palace too.

In a twin-sized bed, small enough to squeeze a tired mother and sleepless daughter, I learned to feel. Reciting the same two prayers every night, I distinguished them in color. The one she made up, where she made me thank my grandmother Estella, was yellow; pulsing from the sky like the setting sun.

The other, the traditional “Our Father”, was a still blue; giving the setting sun a place to rest on the horizon. She would sigh in between words, each one evidence of her exhaustion while I would ask an infinite number of questions; each one, she did her best to respond. When the pauses stretched into longer time intervals, she would slide her body from underneath mine and rest her lips on my face.

Long after she closed the door, and I raced infinitely in my mind of infinities, I would say my own prayer; this one in a pulsing white; this one in poetry. Through my mother I learned prayer, and through prayer I learned the stubborn art of bleeding words in rhythmic stanzas. And through that, I learned everything.

I learned to feel through piano riffs in the dining room. How the pressure cooker whistled, harmonizing with Claire de Lune. Eighty-eight keys, eighty-eight different echos is my chest. Because it’s all in the chest, you see. Music is felt through the chest.

I can not tell you how many times I have been trying to learn a song, and I somehow manage to hit the right note, and suddenly the sound ricochets from my baby grand and into my damn chest. Imagine this: the house silences; the pressure cooker no longer sings along; there is no other sound in this entire universe but the one you just managed to create.

It is then when you understand that feeling can be done in so much more than tears and laughter, but also in “C” sharps and “B” flats and sighs, so many sighs. Woven together to crack collarbones and set fire to the house.

In decrepit cars with peeling paint and songs sang in unison, I learned to feel. What does it mean to put someone’s life before your own? That selflessness to me is nearly tangible. I touch it in these car rides, surrounded by people who see me for who I am rather than who I am trying so desperately to be.

I learned to feel through friendship; the act of latching your happiness to another human being so deeply that suddenly your lives vibrate in sync. I understand that not all are given this chance and for that I am grateful. Because it is the moments where I am standing beside highways with them, watching how the western sky turns from blue to deep crimson, that I give myself permission to exist; that I sigh and say to myself, “you grieve too often. You can call these people your home.”

I am a writer. I write because I find a deep solace in words that can not be found through speech or action. Words are anchors, holding me firm on the surface of all things beautiful; reminding me that although the world is ravaging and temporary, there are still things to be seen, things to be felt, and things to be hoped for.

Whether through palaces, melody, prayer, poem, or people, I have obtained the ability to feel the world with such intensity through words that now nothing is ever small. I must empathize and describe and search for beauty and pain in everything. This is both a burden and a blessing because not everything can be written.

And in these past several years I have learned the ache of leaving pages blank. I have learned the art of allowing myself to enjoy and accept without hyperbolizing; because as humans, we want to relate and be a part of something so much bigger than ourselves that we find ourselves creating an infinite amount of nothings into somethings.

We take our feelings and cram them into every corner of our lives that it becomes all-consuming. Bookstores into palaces. Prayers into poetry. So I am here to give the unpopular opinion that not everything needs to be turned into art. Something's are better left the way you first experience them because from big feelings, comes the inevitable after shock of big pain.

We grow so immersed with our emotions and the emotions of those around us that we begin to construct elaborate societies from glass; so beautiful but so easily destroyed.

I learned to feel by carrying around a small notebook at the age of 13. In it I would jot down all the day-to-day happenings that I found to be “poetic”. Bullets and bullets of ordinary daily occurrences that I somehow managed to make spectacles of.

[I.]

the sound of rain hitting the metal pipes above my bathroom

[II.]

Two teenage girls who were having a full conversation at Kohl’s in sign language

[III.]

The man who comes into McDonalds’s every saturday and orders a sausage mcgriddle and a hazelnut iced coffee for his wife

[IV.]

Reading the last line of a book

[V.]

Watching the sunset from inside a moving car on the highway

This is how I lived. I became so obsessed with my craft that it I was incapable of producing a normal thought. Metaphors. Syllogism. Symbolism. Personification. Paradox. Poetry. Poetry. Poetry. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t handle normal human interactions; I was consumed by my own thoughts.

And this, dear friends, was the perfect conditions in which my sadness could thrive. I was allowing myself to grieve, and to grieve for no reason. It was positive in the sense that it made it easy to empathize with the universality of human suffering, but it was negative in the sense that I suffered, all the time.

And with that I come to the conclusion that glass societies are beautiful, yes, but are safest when admired from a distance. Like a storefront filled with porcelain, you never want to go inside because you never want to risk breaking anything. Don’t let this be your life.

Scrap the bulleted lists of words and words and words, and the half drawn blueprints of fragile skyscrapers and blood sketches, and give yourself permission to live, and to live without the burden of feeling the need to suffer in order to make your life purposeful.

Once you take a step back and do this, you will be taking the necessary steps to protecting yourself from your feelings. And as a result: you, as a human, will be more productive in the world, and you, as an artist, will fill the world with more beauty by being a part of it.