I wanted to visit the Alamo.
I wanted to see the cracked down walls, I wanted to walk where they had walked.
Christmas still vaguely lingered in the air, and they said they would take me there since they hadn't been and history is such a large portion of my interests.
I wanted to visit the Alamo.
I made excuses to not go. "I'm sick" or "I was going to hang out with my sister" or "You live here now, I'll go with you next visit". Somehow those tided them over until my plane ride back home.
I wanted to visit the Alamo.
They knew I had great plans of pictures and acquisition of knowledge and that this trip would only add to those if we had just gotten in the car and driven the hour to go, but I was too scared.
I wanted to visit the Alamo.
But you were too close. And you scared me away.

I've changed, I've grown.
I've come to realize that words in and of themselves do not, in fact, mean what the dictionary pleads. Oh no, for those of us brave enough to venture out and discover our true selves on our own, it is easy enough to divine the truth of the situation.
Promises, yes, those; as a child they meant so much. I promised I wouldn't walk on the stone bridge by myself because I knew my mother wouldn't want me getting hurt, and I promised never to be there after dark. But I've grown. I've changed. I've made a conscious effort to become mature in ways other children I played with never cared for, because it took work and wanting to mature instead of a foolish desire to ignorantly play for the rest of their days.
So I can now walk to the bridge, and after dark too. I can enjoy the moon drifting over the river water, and I can appreciate the lull of the quiet night air. I promised to be good and not go or do what my word meant I couldn't.
I'm older now. Situations have changed. I'm strong enough to swim without my father's hands, and tall enough to stand in the water on my own.
Why would a mother hold her daughter to a promise made in a situation that no longer holds true? To do so is to be confining and cause stress and pain.
A daughter should be able to swim if she wants to.
If not allowed, how will she ever learn to fly?

sometimes I wonder why i bother because sometimes it's so easy to just hold it all in, you know, like a tidal wave that pulls back so far that the power it finally unleashes is more pent up and crazy, but that's the thing see i don't want to unleash i don't want to destroy i want to create i want to feel i want to be i want to hold in my hands the way to keep myself whole my identity my very being that i keep trying so hard to find in other people and realizing i have to make myself but it just pulls me down when i know who i am finally and realize that i want to give part of that away but i cant i cant i just want to slice off a piece for you to keep safe and away from my impulses and fears but somehow that's too hard because if you saw how repulsive the real me really is i think you'd honestly run and hide and i don't know if i could take that not here not now and maybe not even ever just simply because you're too far in now you're too huge a part of my life to just up and leave and since the decision lies in my hands i'm so torn because i want you and i want you to stay but inside is all the tearing which i thought had been let go you said you had let me go like i had let you go it wasn't a matter of being able to but rather of giving the other person the leave to begin again, to not be selfish and let them start over and she took it from me and i don't know how to keep going because i'm still ******* in the past and trying to lasso the future and how does the correspondence even work when i just want to live but can't because i see it every day and think of that every night and the two just don't mix like oil and water they pool away from each other and that's frankly the only reason that i can't claim right now that i am or ever will be whole.

it used to be so easy to just
sling whatever emotions i had
onto a blank page.

now it seems there are too many
for me to possibly try to push them
into a sentence or two.