All Will Be Well

Sometimes you just have to let yourself go
and fall in love with a stranger
who orders hot chocolate in the middle of summer,
or who writes poetic articles online dissecting life,
or who reads non-fiction so thick it could stopper a door.
Fall in love with someone who you think you know
because you know how they like their coffee
and who their favorite band is
and that they’re a dog person
but don’t know how many siblings they have
and if they’re allergic to shellfish
and who they went to prom with.
Fall in love for the sake of falling in love
but don’t, for a second, wonder if they love you back.
Sometimes you hit a wall,
looking back you forget how you got there
and how quickly everything you thought you would do fell apart
and how swiftly everything you thought you would be became a dream.
Everything that never happened never was because
you never tried,
or you didn’t have the means,
or you were paralyzed by fear of failure.
So, you told yourself to move on.
You trick yourself into believing that
you can’t miss what you never experienced.
Like lazy afternoons on a beach drinking mai-tais
listening to obscure indie rock bands
whose melodies are melancholy
and trying new foods spicy and foreign
from lands you’ve only dreamed of visiting.
Like buying a ticket for the next flight out
not knowing where you’re going
and who you’ll be with
because Canada or Australia, it doesn’t matter
anywhere is better than here.
But we never really vocalize
that we didn’t believe in our excuses to begin with
because it means facing the truth of our regrets
and that can get so overwhelming
that you can barely look at yourself some mornings,
thinking about where you’d be if you’d just taken a leap of faith.
So, sometimes we need to let go
and move to Scotland to open a café
and screw a college education
and fall in love with ourselves for the first time or all over again.
And it isn’t until we make this decision that we realize we’re happy.
We all do things were not proud of
and there are things we’ll never do
but somehow, someway
sometimes we end up exactly where we always wanted to be
even if we didn’t know it ourselves.