Once upon a December.

It’s like December in your soul.

And here am I,

Searching for the fire

That once burned in your eyes.

But I find only the reflection of my breath

Curling in the cold, damp air.

Like the sunless sky.

Because you’re cold inside.

Why are you so cold inside?

There’s a hollow clinking in your bones

As I’m trying to light a match,

But there’s no oxygen

To catch.

And my fingers,

They can’t grasp

The matchbox

Or the match.

One-liners

With fascination I trace the delicate lines of your palm, searching for our future in those worn out intersections. 

---

I don't care what anybody says, there's unspeakable beauty in an endless sky. Restless hearts like mine can get addicted to the uninhibited confidence it exudes, even in its most naked form.

---

We walked like sheep to slaughter, smiling through slitted eyes to whet their hunger, through a place so hopeless it even smelled like darkness. Ready for a heart to heartless.

Fingerflow.

Call it luck or call it destiny, but I found an old soul in a box of trinkets that had found its place in a modern world. It is the key that unlocks a forgotten moment in time. I carry it with me in the pocket at my chest, and it whispers sweet nothings to my weary heart. Sometimes it seizes me away to another time, to a foreign place when people were valued for their depth and complexity, a time when being both strong and weak wasn’t a contradiction. It takes me to a time when respect was something people earned and a thing called honor was worth dying for, when freedom was a man’s elusive lover and loyal friend, when blood, sweat and tears was all in a good day’s work. I hold onto those sweet lessons, savoring them like a box of chocolates in the back of my mind...

The side of the world I'm looking at

For some time I'd been talking about my restless feet being itchy, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I'm standing on the threshold of a new adventure.

I've been looking at the world from a new corner these days. I've moved back to Dallas, my hometown. I've been here for about a month and have gotten pretty solidly initiated into my new job. After a few near-sleepless nights, I made my first round of deadlines. I dyed my hair purple, and no one at work said anything about it, so it seems I got away with that one ;) In fact, my boss says I seem to be getting along OK, which to me says I won't be getting fired any time soon. 

I don't have internet at my place yet, so I've begun cycling through coffee shops, cafes, and just about anywhere else that's open until God-forsaken hours of the night. 

The strangest thing about this move is that I've only been here a month but I already feel more at home here than I ever did in Amarillo. I think it's because this is a place where I could put down roots if I wanted to. I probably won't know for a while if that will happen or not, but there's comfort in the fact that it could. I've also stepped into a great job I think I'm really going to love a lot. And there are definitely opportunities on the horizon, which is exciting. 

I've already fallen in love with Dallas, which is honestly completely unexpected. I don't consider myself a "Dallas girl." I'm not a brand-name-purse, white-picket-fence kind of girl. I expected to feel awkward and out of place in the fast and furious concrete jungle, but Dallas has managed to surprise me in that aspect. Maybe it's just because I've managed to settle in Lakewood, which is basically a small city trapped in the middle of growing Dallas. So there's a kinship there, I think. I feel at home with these people, in this anti-Dallas corner of Dallas. 

But I even love venturing outside of the East Dallas bubble. Aside from people being a little horn-happy, Dallas is still Texas. People still smile at you when you pass them on the sidewalk, and they still talk to you in the grocery store. It's not such a foreign place, and for that, I'm grateful. In truth, it's a lot of fun being young and single in Dallas. There's a vivaciousness here, an energy. I could drink it up forever. And who knows, maybe I will. 

A Hope You Can Hold

There are a lot of things I love about my job. I could talk about it for hours, so I'll spare you the gushy details and just get straight to the good part. I love my job because it allows me to constantly learn new things about the world I live in. I get paid to talk to people and write about them. I get paid to understand the human experience, to dig deeper into what we do and why we do it. Over the past several years, I've written a lot of stories about social issues. Words like: poverty, hunger, teen pregnancy, homelessness, prostitution, sex trafficking, and foster care seem to be a constant part of my vocabulary. In our world today, especially in our economy, those subjects would be difficult to avoid, but I don't really try. In fact, if anything, I seek them out. They're what fuel me to keep doing what I do, because I believe if I can understand them a little bit better, maybe I can tell people about them, and then they will understand them a little bit better too.

There's another word I keep running across: Hope. I hear it everywhere I turn. And I'm not talking about, "I hope things change," or, "I hope this makes a difference." I'm talking Hope with a capital H, the kind you can wrap your arms around, the kind of hope Jesus talks about in the Bible. Hope comes in many shapes in sizes. It's food for a homeless man, it's diapers for a desperate young mom, it's shoes for the feet of a small child, it's college scholarships for a foster kid. Sometimes it's little; sometimes it's big. Sometimes it's longterm; sometimes it's immediate. But it always makes an impact.

It's easy to look at the problems all around us and forget that there's is still capital-H Hope because there are still people in the world who desperately and passionately cling to it. What's funny is it's always the people who are at rock bottom, tirelessly shoving up the muck of society, who use the word "Hope" the most. Because they believe in it. They believe in the people struggling to stand beside them. They believe in each baby step that person takes towards firmer ground. And you better believe, the Hope that they breathe into each struggling heart, is the lifeblood that keeps them going. They're not giving people cans of food, they're not giving people infant formula or old clothes. They're giving people the kind of Hope you can hold in your hands.

I love that. I love living in a world where people still believe that each and every thing they do, regardless of how big or small it is on the world-scale, breathes Hope into someone's life. They might not have all the money in the world, or all the power, but their beautiful hearts make them rich in my eyes. So thank you to every person who has ever given Hope to someone else. May God bless you and keep you :) You're my hero.