greek tragedy

We turn temptation into reality in the heady night air. The cherry wine loaned from pantries that aren't ours comforts our evening sorrows, and we hoard every other drop like it's gold and we're Golem. We flash adolescence with every smile, as close to happy as any of us have ever known. Starlight cradles us and the moon rocks us in place of the magicians that didn't quite raise us. And we all understand that curiousity is an innately human trait so we hardly bother to brush off the feeling of l'appel du vide when we get too close to the edge of the building. It's not romanticism; it's a coping mechanism. It makes our poetry turn into three pages, single-spaced, no paragraphs that would make our old English teachers feign sickness to get out of grading it. So yeah, we all burned out in eighth grade and have been resting on Hephaestion's last laurel for the last half a decade. All Icarus, all falling. Clutching frayed rope with no end in sight, we cling to hope because it's all we've got left. Buckets of broken dreams are dumped out as we catch moonlight in our open fists, and it stays there. It's not curious or waiting for the perfect opportunity to fly away. We all know the feeling of being the weakest dragonfly in the garden and having your last hope be a closed fist. Our sentences are too long; our minds too rampant with excessive pressure and fear, and- I'd like to go home, but the last beam of sunlight shoots Apollo's last-thrown discus over the horizon, and we all inhale because, god, if that isn't breathtaking. Like getting punched in the gut, we all clutch our throats and stare. Such a pretty view to cry to. Our hands, ashy and frail and always shaking no matter the circumstances, look like searchlights trying to find a rhythm that dancing to doesn't feel like a last surge of energy from a terminal patient. The intrusive thoughts overwhelm the beat, but we keep swaying until the sun rises, casting shadows on our cheekbones and painting the world golden. It's times like these that make dying irrelevant because on the bad days when it seems like the only fair option on a multiple choice question, the afternoon rendezvous that turn into midnight memories make the universe crystal clear such that we all realize that process of elimination dictates it is a fool's error. On the good days that follow, we can barely remember why the sadness set in, and if we can, we realize that the happy days far outnumber the bad ones.