she fiddles as rome burns.

if life ended suddenly, i have nothing to show but plans. blueprints of how things are supposed to go. of the medical school i should be accepted to. of the calvin klein models whose notches should adorn my bedposts. of the weight my name should carry. of the beautiful little hearts i can bring hope to, of the lips i can bring giggles to, of the spirits i can bring rise to. little me, chris, the hippy girl from omaha. i can change the world. i can change... something. i'm old enough to be done with undergrad by now, but i'm not. these standards we set, these bars in the clouds. how will we ever reach them, if we fall asleep every night, to thoughts of all we have not done?

every saturday night i play violin on the streetcorner. every saturday night i make rent, playing things that there are not words to say, or eyes to cry, or knees to fall to. emotions so much more complex, but so much simpler, than the ones that can be expressed in these ways. every saturday night i am surrounded by a crowd, the concrete cold beneath my bare feet, my chucks allstars sitting out to catch falling change, my dress blowing in the wind, i see none of this. my eyes are closed. i am feeling. and in this moment i am everything i need to be. in this moment, i'm free. and i feel amazing.

why doesn't every moment feel this way?

i have learned one thing from my violin. i have learned that life is composed of little moments, like notes on the page, we cant tell what is next, how long it will last, or how much of ourselves we can fit into it. we can only play the note we see now, and we can only move on as soon as it ends to the next one. and most importantly, it is only at the end of the piece when we can realize how they strung together to create music, and that each note played it's part, one piece of yourself at a time.