Her 10
Chicago
Absent
Over the years I became the definition of detached.
I became the shell of a person that wanted to look as interesting as the amount of numbness she felt for everything around her.
I spent too many of my days alive while not truly living and I wasted more of my time behind a facade than a picturesque home with no walls.
So I was never truly present within the moments you now refer to as memories.
If I was there with you, sadly all you memorized was my absence.
Prayer
I still remember The Lord's Prayer, but I don't believe in God.
The words are imprinted into some strange, sunken shrine within my skull.
Forged into bone at age nine by naivety, parental notions, and nightly repetitions.
Each line in the dutiful prayer as meaningless as the instructions for a machine that never worked.
Yet they still rise up from the recesses of my mind like a reflex. Like a cough or a sneeze from a body that once bowed without questioning why.
Maybe it's because the cadence of it still surprisingly soothes, even though its content no longer convinces.
Her 9
Dublin and Sword’s Castle
Scenarios
I have tried to imagine all of the moments that I could bump into you.
As if I could compel corny, casual encounters that are made explicitly for the cinema into existence.
Maybe it's during a late night trip for cereal at the grocery store, an early morning stop at the gas station, or a mid-afternoon pill pick up at the pharmacy.
Maybe we reach for the same box, we arrive at the same time, or we stumble into the same softly lit aisle.
But maybe within each scenario something inevitably goes wrong.
All the shelves in the cereal aisle are completely empty, every fuel pump is forlornly flagged as out of service, and somehow I completely forgot to refill my prescription.
I have tried to imagine all of the moments that I could bump into you, but it just never works.
How could my mind ever create a place that will never exist for a person who is no longer there.
Consciousness
I dread those brief seconds of unawareness and uncertainty upon waking up.
My eyelids barely open and my brain immediately panics as it begins to recalibrate itself with a barrage of questions.
What time is it? What day is it?
Am I supposed to be somewhere today? Did I miss something?
I recollect my surroundings, orientating myself back to reality as the window shades shift shadows across my room's smooth walls.
My consciousness resumes.
My body relaxes.
It's noon on a Thursday.
I have no where to be and I have missed nothing.
Her 8
Unremarkable
In reality, too many people are simply a disappointment.
They live without passion.
Waking up each day solely to fulfill the mindless routines and mundane expectations that society prompts them to accomplish.
They simply exist to exist as they strive to subsist and survive.
Appeasing a world built purely around predictability, profit, and political propaganda.
How can people be at peace with knowing that their life will end as unremarkably as the day they were born?
Perhaps because mediocrity offers comfort.
Perhaps for many it is easier to die unremarkably than to risk the consequences of ever truly living.
AO Poetry 
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