I didn't think I knew what I wanted to write about, this week, until I began staring at my keyboard and watching the thoughts in my head form words, connecting the keys with invisible lines; do you ever do that?
Or do you ever look at those cross words on Facebook and they claim the first three words you see are the three words that will describe how your 2017 will be for you. It's silly, but it makes you wonder, and you begin to think about all of the reasons that your life could fall apart, or if that guy would just text you back, maybe this year could turn around.

I don't know where I was going with that.

The three words that came across my mind were "was," "keep," and "lost." Just words, just three simple words, and if somebody told me that they would determine what my year would be like, I'd find it a little foolish and completely vague, but, like any other person would, I have thought about what these words mean to me. Why are they so important to me?

Was

I was once a lot of things. I was a little girl, I was naive, I was a weird kid, kind of an outcast, and completely unaware of the world around me. I was also a girl full of light and magic. I saw no evil in the world, in people I passed by; I once told a homeless man in New York City that his kitten was beautiful, without a second thought of what he would say or do (of course I was scolded, afterward). I was a girl who put everyone before herself. I'd buy a friend or a boy I was with food before myself, even if I was starving. I was something...

I think I was the sunshine a lot of people needed to help blossom.

People change, including myself. The people I would break my back for don't think much of me, and I'm not even sure what their favorite foods to order are, anymore. I think the magic is gone. The reality of adulthood has finally settled into my bones, and the weight of the world has turned the stardust into...dust.

Keep

This one is interesting. I tend to keep a lot of things. I keep a lot of emotions, thoughts, and needs bottled up inside, when I was once the girl who would pour her heart out to anyone, expecting that anyone would clean up the mess I made, as I would do for them. I keep a lot of people close to my heart that I have been proven to time and time again do not reciprocate. I keep a lot of promises to people that are just a distant memory, hoping that, maybe, one day they'll remember the girl with the sparkle in her eye who promised forever.

I don't know.

There's a lot of things that I keep. My brain is a hoarder of all of the memories I have collected. I can't seem to find a scrapbook worthy to store my thoughts into, so instead it's a mess all over the floor, and I try to concentrate, but I'll keep drifting back to the day on that bridge when we threw those keys into the river...

I keep a lot of things.

(they're not there anymore).

Lost

I think we all feel a little lost. I used to think I had it all figured out when I was sixteen and carefree. I knew exactly what I was going to do with my life, where I would go to school, where I wanted to live, and the amount of children I was going to have. It's so funny how this all changes once that high school diploma is handed to you and those steps out the door are your first steps into reality.

I began to feel lost when I let the opinions of those around me persuade me into changing my major. I felt lost when I ran away to college three hours away to escape the chaos that was going on in my home. I felt lost when I lost a loved one whose spirit, I swear, is made of the same as mine. I think the past two years have been a jumbled mess. A map of a girl walking in circles, and pulling her hair, and crying all night long, and asking God, "when is it going to get better?"

All I've ever been is the girl with magic in her eyes that buys people food

even when she's hungry.

Lost. I've felt that way for a very long time.

But the girl who is sunshine when others need to blossom, will continue to radiate. She will reach out and touch even the saddest, most wilted dandelions.

Because even though I'm lost, and I keep the pain of decades bottled up inside, the girl I was does not have to stay in the past.

Here's to 2017.