fingerprint

before i formed you, i knew you.

i knew what i wanted you to look like, feel like. i knew i wanted you to make them feel. feel anything; feel everything. i wanted them to feel things they’d never felt before. i wanted them to discover tear ducts they’d never felt flow. i wanted them to laugh deeper in their bellies than ever before. i wanted them to ponder concepts they’d never even considered. you and i, we were gonna give them a sense they didn’t know they didn’t had... until now.

now we can make them feel. finally! for all this time i’ve had all these words, they leapt from my mind to the pen to the page with no one to read them but my midnight mind. well, now theirs can too. the words made me fall in love. i wanted them to too. the ink stained my mind with ideas. maybe it was temporary dye, setting my mind in a rhythm for that rotation; or maybe it was for forever. for so long i was dripping in ink, never getting to share it’s stimulating stain. for so long, and until now. until now they thought the print of my fingertip was always there. well, perhaps it was, but ballpoint pen dug the grooves deeper and deeper. the ink was crafted of my identity and my identity, in ink. now there’s a page to place my fingerprint, and you get to read the mark. i won’t apologize for staining you. that’s what ink’s for, after all. and after all this time, it finally gets to.                                                                                                         

hey! my name is miracle mayes. welcome to my blog. what you read above is my heart and vision for this blog. i’ve been a writer basically since i could pick up a pencil, and i haven’t put it down since. words have always been a passion of mine. there’s a few things to know about me and my style of writing. one quite distinct feature i that i us all lowercase letters- i like to let the words speak for themselves. it’s like yelling. in doing so, words can lose their simplistic power in the volume. i like to keep it simple.

another thing that i’m sure you’ll quickly learn about me is that i am very passionate about burning boxes. i don’t like molds. i don’t like formulas or templates. so many areas of my life have been places in a box: writing, poetry, music, style, speech, everything.

in 2019 i decided that boxes, fitting in and following the crowd were overrated.

i got so tired of being told how to be creative. how can i truly be creative in my most authentic way if i’m constantly being told how “my style” should look or sound?

so i burned my boxes.

now, while setting cardboard on fire is quite simple and a quick process, burning boxes placed around me as a person and a creative was much more difficult. i had to redefine for myself what creative freedom even was. i’d been told i had it for so long that i didn’t realized that i never did.

i don’t blame anyone for this at all. it’s all just a part of the system. “you have to follow the system and you’ll be successful.” “if you do what everyone else is doing you’re guaranteed to be liked!” well friends, being liked is overrated too. what do i care if people like a version of me that i made up so they would like me?

i had to decide if i wanted to be liked or if i wanted to be real. i decided to be real. sacrificing authenticity was too high a price for shallow and conditional acceptance.