Weather for Headphones

Once upon a time, there was a boy. And the grew up like every other boy, except his parents didn’t teach him to believe in unicorns. All the other children would talk about their unicorn adventures. You see, you have to believe in unicorns to see them.

The little boy felt left out and he became bitter and angry. But mostly he was just sad and hurt. He thought everyone else was making up the unicorns just to tease him. How could they do that to him? He hid in this closet and moped. His parents didn’t know that you had to teach your kids about unicorns. They thought he was just a big ol’ good for nothing delinquent.

But one day the little boy met a girl. She saw how sad the little boy was, so she walked over and asked him what was wrong. He didn’t say anything. She tried everything she knew- she tried asking, she tried fake-crying, and she poked him. A lot. She even poked him in the eyeball. He just sat there, moping and crying.

Then suddenly she came to a wonderful realization. “I know! You should meet my friend!” And there was a blinding flash of light. When the boy looked up, through his blurry eyes he saw the most beautiful, brightest unicorn in the world. The little girl had disappeared.

“I have watched you for a very long time,” the unicorn said. “You a very special young boy. Did you know that? You are truly lucky, for all the other children have known unicorns their whole life. They take us for granted. But you…you had to find us. You believed in your heart, and your heart made it true.” And the unicorn smiled, if unicorns could, and the boy wiped his tears away and climbed onto the unicorn’s soft fluffy back, and they flew off into the stars, and they lived happily ever after.

The end.

1/31/2010 Chungyen Chang

i believe in quiet rooms
and quiet eyes, and quiet ears
believe in fingertips and faint smiles
and goodnights

i believe in wearing my heart on my sleeve
so you can see my everything
i believe in laced fingers
because it’s always a big deal
when you move I’ll move with you

most of all I believe
in kissing you.

There’s something wrong with music today.

The people you hear on the radio follow formulas. The record companies are factories and the musicians the mass-produced. Art is supposed to be an expression of the human condition, the message that comes from a heart devoted to sharing a feeling. It’s hard to do that when you didn’t even write your own songs, or when the songs are shallow and lifeless. These days, a lot of pop and rap musicians are simply actors. They fill a role as performers, not artists. They aren’t expressing an emotion. They didn’t put a significant part of themselves into the composition. They didn’t create it out of love.

A friend of mine says that he dislikes a lot of music these days because it is too intense. I have to agree with him- if you turn on the radio, it’s like listening to a thousand soap operas. Everything is about love, sex, and partying. If you spend an hour listening to the top 10 station, and then spend an hour listening to music from the 60s and 70s, or a station like K-Love, you’ll notice a huge difference in your mood.

Music these days is simply too heavy. It’s supposed to uplift and inspire you. Not that there is anything wrong with love songs and sad ballads- but if you listen to these things all the time, of course you won’t be happy. And that’s what the radio is like today. Even if it isn’t something slow and somber, it’s dark and heavy.

Do yourself a favor, and stop listening to the radio. Find new music. Explore people you’ve never heard of and genres that are strange and alien. Find music that loves you back as much as you love it.

Sometimes I feel old. I don’t think that it’s all bad. My toes creak and my body shivers in the cold. I have trouble getting out of bed because I’m afraid of how I could get hurt. Life has made me hope too many times, and I each time i got burned. But I’ve gotten good at it.

I get better at hoping every day, like the way the next term paper is better than the last. Like the way I love you more and more every day, in little different but noticeable ways.

I fall down the cliff, and I climb my way up. I scrape my skin and my heart. Sometimes I cry a little. Maybe I cry a lot. But every time, I get better. And everytime, as I’m scaling that face, with bare hand and thin jeans, I look out at the sea. I see things that weren’t there before…and I let go of them.

I’m beginning to suspect that hope is what life should, what my life should be about. Everytime I think I can’t make it, everytime I think about taking another bottle of pills, I realize that I don’t want to go. Even when things seem pointless, hopeless, and gone- I can’t.

I’m beginning to think that hope is a part of me. I don’t understand where it comes from. I’ve had nights when I scratched myself bloody, nights when I awoke in a bed of my own skin…but I keep going.

Sometimes hope pokes fun at me. I want to cry and mope and blame God. And then hope comes from out of nowhere- from inside me. I’m so set on crying, on feeling bad for myself, that I say in my head, “No! You can’t hope. No! What? Oh. Darn it.” Hope makes me realize that feeling sorry for yourself is an excuse. It’s an excuse to do nothing. So I keep climbing.

Sometimes I feel young. I eat junk food. I dream about being an astronaut slash president slash pulitzer writer slash rockstar slash nomad slash moviestar. I watch bad tv. I’m still afraid of the dark.

Have you ever cried so much that everything seemed funny? Or you had your wet eyes closed for so long that, when you opened them, the world was bright and new? That’s your body telling you to hope. Because nothing lasts forever, good or bad- but especially the bad. There’s a saying- if you don’t like the weather in Kentucky, wait a minute. If you don’t like the weather in your heart, close your eyes. Just for a moment.

Hope is something that lives in our blood. A heart doesn’t know the day it dies. It could fail any moment. Lightning could strike you. There could be a plague. But it keeps pumping, day in and day out, no matter what happens. It hopes for the next day, the next hour, the next second to stay alive. It hopes, even when you aren’t.

As long as you’re alive, you have hope.

at night the birds escape
their homes nestled in the crook
of my ear and my eye, pecking holes
i want to kiss them, make friends
but they scream when hands wander
near the place where i burned myself
with so many forgotten fingertips
the fallen pieces start to ache
these rough surfaces wear smooth

one day i’ll stop the sharpening
but a bird that leaves will always return