People are in this place, eating food and loudly discussing politics and religion. The light hurts my eyes. I just finished “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” for the third or fourth time, and it was just as good this time around. Last night I sat on my bed in the dark and played guitar for what felt like 2 hours, creating my own soundtrack to my own thoughts, just the way it should be. I think about life and death and war and peace and money and greed and poor people and rich people. I wonder why we spent so much money trying to find water on the moon when half of the planet we live on doesn’t have clean water. I wonder why science spends so much money trying to find new species when our very own species is hurting so much and in such desperate need. I think that if we spent less time looking outside and more time looking inside, perhaps we could heal the wounds that already exist instead of finding new things to break. It bothers me that people in this country alone spent over four billion dollars this last holiday season, when it would only cost less than ten billion to end world hunger permanently. We give our money to the cardboard signs advertising new toys and games, but we ignore the cardboard sign in the hands of the man on the street who just wants somebody to smile at him. We put our money on counters and the people on the other side give us the things that we ask for, but we won’t even hold out our hand to someone without a home. Do we value things over people? Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else, and I have no where to point fingers but in the mirror. I’ve turned a blind eye to people in need because that’s what I saw other people doing, and I never bothered to question their motives, much less my own. It’s not that I trust others too much, it’s that I don’t trust myself enough. Sometimes I get in these moods where I don’t know exactly what to think but my mind races and I don’t know what to make of it all. I hope you get that too because it’s kind of exhilarating and it keeps me on my toes. But I guess it’s scary sometimes, too. Your mind suddenly becomes this big world and you don’t know where everything is and there are no maps and all the streetlights are burnt out and it feels like there are monsters everywhere. But when you have somebody, it becomes a lot easier because it’s not so dark. And then, this whole time, there is love and I’m reminded that you can’t sit back and listen and watch and then call it love… love is something that you have to do and it’s not having sex and making out and holding hands. You can be a shoulder and a hand to hold, but sometimes you have to reach out and grab the hand and open your arms and make something beautiful happen. People tell you that you can’t make something out of nothing but you never have nothing, you always have something. And “life” is what happens when you make something out of that. Life is love and love is life and if you want to live you have to love but in order to love, you have to know what love is. I hope you’ll listen when I talk and talk when I listen. Sometimes we get scared but it’s only because we’re unsure. There’s really nothing to be afraid of, I promise. Thank you for being here.
