Since being at college and going through a major transition point in my life, I feel as though this is an appropriate poem to bring into play.
Reflecting on your past is important and healthy, but it's so crucial to be able to learn from it too. To just reflect without any further thought might put you back in the place you were when these memories were in the present.
Growing from your mistakes and seeing them as a lesson learned is very much a cliche. It's also very much a true statement. If you look at your past regrets as heavy, looming failures that are impossible to change, you'll dig yourself into a hole.
Every time a negative memory pops into your head, harp on it for a while but take more time to see how you can use it to your advantage.
Rumination can be a terrible, depression-inducing experience, so make the conscious effort to put it to good use. Think and get stuck on the same thought for hours on end. Feel the heaviness that makes your mind sore. But please, try to take something useful away from it all. Think about how that heaviness feels. Think about how these thoughts affect all the aspects of your life currently. Think about how you can form this pain into something good.
Sometimes it's extremely hard to move on from the past and to make yourself grow from the bad in your life. You get used to being at this baseline low point. It feels normal. You've accepted it. This is who you are.
However, contrary to popular belief, that is not who you are. That is not all you can be. You are so much more. You are sprouting and blooming and improving. You are more than your past, more than your mistakes.
Leave the unwanted past behind. Allow yourself to break from the negative memories and thoughts that still resurface. Let yourself renew and grow.
Four hours after you fall asleep
after opening your eyes to the sound of a ceiling fan
and the smudgy black of a bedroom at 5am
Plum juice dreams running down the back of your neck
mixing with the sweat of memories
Remember how he looked through your opaque walls
feeling nothing but his blood running cold
because he knew you found meaning in his name
while he found desire in the five letters of hers
as your own five letters fell from his lips
to be left on the ground he walks
The beckoning buzz of telephone wires takes you
through the window to your roof
where the sky is your skin
sprouting twilit blossoms
And where his three letters were planted
as seeds to stay ungrown
to savor what could have been
what stays underneath to possibly be dug up
when isolation overcomes rationality
Now blooming from the cracks in your palms
that once felt the cracks of his
flourishing and withering in one glance
Inflated lungs
with itchy eyes shut
under layers of syrupy moonlight
The wind is naive
taking seeds of uprooted remnants
but you’re starting to breathe again
