to chase something beautiful

The first time my bare feet touches the soft, dewey grass of a spring day, my heart takes flight. I become the person I was always meant to be.

I tend to chase beautiful things, recklessly, carelessly perhaps, but man, when I see, feel, and experience something new and beautiful, I explode with the stars captured in the night sky. I feel equally held and entirely weightless, free to be one with the darkness and the light.

My words feel as though they are being swallowed by my pain. As if there was no space for them to fit and survive but the gaping hole that has become my beating heart. And I follow that heart. I listen to it through all its confliction and pain and achiness, I’ve chosen to follow it, to trust that it will guide me to a soft willow tree overlooking the water, painted by a sky of stars. When I am left alone and heartbroken, I tend to question what my heart was thinking and why I let it do all the talking. But to choose to ignore the desires of my heart seems like an even bigger betrayal then letting it lead and letting it bleed.

I have always felt things to their highest capacity. As though all the joy that exists in the world is pouring out my smile and my bouncing feet. As though all the sadness in the world is cracking my knees in half and splitting my head in two. I thought for a long time that this was some sort of weakness. That my intense and extreme emotions are what lead me to even greater pain. But I’ve learned with the seemingly endless times that my heart has been broken, that my ability to express and feel, to endure the coursing, heated emotions that rage through my blood, I have a greater capacity for love. That even while I live with a heart full of hurt, I always end up chasing something beautiful.

I have loved and trusted and comforted my heart on the best and hardest of days and it has led me to the highest mountaintops, where streams ripple among the edges of coarse rocks, and birds soar without any reservation. Those are the places my extreme emotions guide me to. So while I sit in pain and anger and exasperated rage for what my heart led me to, I still trust that to chase something beautiful will open up yet another world where my eyes will see the brightness of greens and my fingers will feel the cool of a spring, my hair dancing with the breeze that carries and guides me onward to the bright and the beautiful.