Seen As

This is an excuse or an explanation for the last four years of my life
Tonight I mean to set the record straight.
I am not a tragedy.
And I never wanted to be seen as such.
The words I write were not a call for action but merely reaction
To all of the times I've ever fallen in love in my short life.
They blend and blur together to create some creature meant to resemble art
But art was never the point.
All I wanted was to explain myself in a way that you could understand
But somewhere between my head and yours the meanings got jumbled up.
Apparently we don't define happiness the same way
And happiness wound up being something far different than I thought it would.
A record of mistakes leading up to what I am now
Making up what I am now.

Is what I am merely a fantasy in my own mind?
That question was rhetorical, this is true of all of us.
But does that make it mean less?
Does it matter if it means less?
I lie awake and wonder what kind of person I could have been
But I can't see beyond the edges of my own frame.
Goals I pretended at accomplishing and people I pretended at being
Mesh together to make this stumbling, stuttering collection of thoughts I call myself
And looking back...

I've spent so much time focused on what has been done to me I forgot to pay attention to what I'm doing.
And that hurts to realize,
Is hard to come to terms with
The fact that this road I've walked will ultimately amount to nothing
And if I continue I will be nothing but a record of the scars I spent too much time being self conscious about.

I meant to be so much more than that but life got in the way,
The childhood imagination creates a multitude of people you could one day become
And the heart says run after it
Run until your muscles give in from fatigue and don't look back for anything.
What happened to the people I meant to be?
Where did those dreams die and how can I bring them back and do I even want to?
And if I have succeeded in any of them, then why is it so hard to face myself in the mirror?

I once thought the only way to live with myself was to make my outside feel the same as my inside.
But I no longer feel the need to manifest my hatred in the form of scars on my body.
Is that growing up or giving up?
Giving up the war with myself, I mean,
Calling it quits, waiving the white flag and accepting that all I need to do is keep walking toward the light.
These days I spend less time wanting to die and more time wanting to exist.
Exist as something more than the result of the hurt.
Something more than a survivor.
I don't want to be a survivor, I want to be measured by a different standard.
I want to be the sum of my actions and not the actions of others.
I want to mean something more than that.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is this:
Loving you means more to me than getting past my past.
It means forging a new future,
Finding a better version of myself to be.
I'm not great at writing love poems but you make me want to resurrect everything I ever meant to be and Frankenstein the pieces together to make something I can feel proud to give you
Something more than a result of the years I've put in on this earth.
I'm not quite there yet,
But damn do you make me want to try.