This one’s a little blurry..l

VIOLA? YOU'VE OUTDONE YOURSELF AGAIN!

Those are my poems. Those are my poems. Those are the things I am most proud of and my most prized possesions and you went through the poetry threads and you found them. How did you even know? You found my poems and you found my heart and I know I've already said thank you in more ways than I know how but this just hit me straight in the feels.

And I think I like the first one more, but that might just be because it's scanned, and if you're out of ideas, I can gladly answer questions or something to help you along, and you've done five but no pressure; you could stop here and I'd be overjoyed. (I used "and" way too much in that sentance.)

It's also your birthday! So happy birthday! Have a wonderful next year of being alive and I hope to know you for many more yet. So here's sort of a combo birthday/thank you poem. (I'll try to write a baker's dozen more, if you want me to. Please tell me what you think.)

you are electric

you energize me and after i read your words

and after i see your art i feel like harnessed lightning;

brilliantly capable.

and i swear after talking with you i could write a dozen Shakespearean sonnets i could weave a golden filagree i could breathe life into rich ink i could

change the world with you.

and you have no idea how much you mean to me,

to know that there is someone like me who likes me

out there,

specifically someone who is funny and smart,

professional and quirky and creative and impossibly brave,

who could i could carry on a converstaion with for hours,

who is willing to spend time

(real time!)

making art tributes to me 

(me, a mostly confused thirteen-year-old romantic hyper bookworm)

is an expirience that will always be a highlight of my life.

you are my standard for friendship,

you bring out the best in me,

you inspire me to keep creating,

you make me want to buy a ticket to fly to wherever you live to wrap my arms around you,

you wonderful miracle you.  

I meant to post this last night (and the night before that), but here it is today:

*does the dance of not having replied to someone for over a week*

You’re welcome! Gosh, I’m saying that about as much as you’re saying thank you. Thank goodness the meaning stacks. I’m very glad I knew that poetry is important to you, too. Also, I’ve definitely said it before, but your poetry is fantastic and I love it. 

Yes, that’s exactly it! Thank you, thank you, and thank you again.

Thanks! I feel like most of that was unintentional; I just kind of tossed it out and wrestled it into a pretzel. ...Great, now I’m hungry for pretzels. Pretzel is a weird word. Weird word for a weird thing. Anyway. (Yes. I was at school, so I tried to keep it under control, but I did cry. It was towards the end, when everything had come/was coming to a head—I mean, the whole thing is full of power and emotion, but those moments with her mamí and the notebook, and then everything surrounding them, just. Yeah, I cried.)

Refracting, huh... hmm. Wow. I suck at public speaking. It’s easy enough when I’m alone or only with a few people, but as soon as there’s more than five others in a room and they’re all paying attention to me, I get spooked. ...Oh, I bet you didn’t notice, but I hid a Ronit & Jamil cover in the library one, sans text. The Grishaverse covers are mostly black, so they’re indistinguishable from generic ones, but there’s a couple of them, too. 

Oh. Me? Well. Uh. It kinda changes. I see myself as existing in the “lately”; I try to write in my diary every single night, so I’ve gotten used to seeing things in a pattern of one day at a time, with the most recent ones being the clearest, and the few surrounding whatever ‘now’ is as the most important. Something that I didn’t realize until my mom said it is that I’m headstrong, but I’ve identified with cats for a very long time. I have two, and for a while I thought that anything they did, I could do too. I didn’t believe I was a cat at all, but other people thought I did, and this is turning into a story you probably don’t want to hear. Anyway. I’m more or less the way I describe myself for ski lodges and picturings; I value elegance and strive to be respected, but at the same time I love to laugh, and I’m always looking around for anything interesting. I can be nosy and noisy and lazy and weird, flighty and nervous and childish and dense. Sometimes I think I treat everything with nearly the same level of sincerity, which is some but not very much. I believe that no single person has the capacity to hold/be/know/do everything, and that just about everything one can gain comes with something that will be lost, though losses are not always cause for mourning. No one close to me has ever died. I’ve always lived in the same town, though I moved to a different street when I was six or seven. I want to be a shapeshifter like Nymph, and I want my mind to work something like that, too. I want to be better at everything. I want to live for over a hundred years. I want to do everything in my power to make the world better, for myself and those I love if not everyone. Today I’m listening to Somebody I Used To Know and Speeches by Walk Off The Earth in my head and on my phone, and relaxing a little because the weekend is coming and I’ll have time to do my homework. I’ve been watching myself from an outside perspective here and there. A couple days ago, a stranger at the train station asked me what the greatest gift to humanity is (I froze in indecision, and he said it was baby Jesus). The next day, I told him I was agnostic, and he got me to agree to ask the Christian god three questions and send me three people with the same exact answers (I did, even though I still don’t believe in him, and so far he hasn’t even sent one), kept saying wouldn’t it be cool if there was an omnipotent being who knew you out of eight billion people (it would, but it wouldn’t make you special). I’ve also been trying to work up the nerve to talk to this one kid who’s almost always there. Last night I felt like I didn’t have time for anything, and now I feel like I do. I begin to act strangely when I’m tired or stressed. I always act a little strangely, though. Now and then I (think of when we were together) feel like a living caricature. I love my hair. I love my hair to bits. I love everything, and I want to learn more. I feel kind of weird talking about myself this much. I’m going to stop now. I haven’t said everything, but I also don’t think I can (or maybe even should). 

That is beautiful and I have no words (I have some and I’m gonna say ‘em). This is what I was talking about, this is what I am always talking about, this is beautiful and I already said that and it’s still true. I have to draw this. Give me a minute. Yes, yes, yes. I want to see this place you’d take me, I love our connection and how you see/express/describe it, I love the multifold and panorama I am experiencing. Dandelions? Yes. I’ve blown my dandelion seeds all over the CB, and so have you, and I think we’ve found quite a great many of each other’s—or they found us? ;3 Aaha, okay, drawing. Yes. Have you ever read Savvy by Ingrid Law? I love the way you talk about my magic, my magic and me, it’s exactly right, it’s perfect. I want to draw that, too. I’ll draw both. Savvy is about a southern girl whose family all has magic quirks that they have to learn how to control, or ‘scumble’, and the girl’s own power, awakening as she stows away on a bus with a bunch of other kids to go see her father in a hospital. I always think of magic as being like it is in the book. All my thoughts are coming out messy and raucous, cheerfully cacophonous, bountiful and thick, springing in a thousand directions and growing like plants into every possibility as a leaf, and I want to keep them all. Yeeeesssssss. Okay, I’m going to draw now. 

It took a little longer than a minute. 

Also I haven’t posted enough here in a while, so have some sketches. I know this’ll give away what’s coming, but it’s long overdue.

*pokes head in nervously* I don’t want to intrude, but yes, I admit I’ve kind of been eavesdropping, and I just have to say: this thread is really beautiful and sweet and so is all of your art and poetry and your connection and I very much ship you guys as friends. That was all, I’ll leave now. *tries to slip out quietly* *trips over something* *runs out*