This is for English. We were asked to describe how we felt after a major epiphany as an exercise in pathos and because everyone in my English class is incapable of using adjectives. I chose to recycle something I wrote a while ago. I don't think I posted it here, so it will be new to anyone here.

I bled nostalgia today. 

On the lonely drive home, I took a detour through the quiet city streets, under the flickering street lights. I saw them blinking an urgent message against a back-lit, pale, grey-blue sky. Change. My sky is illuminated by a thousand lights, kept on throughout this artificially animated town, banishing stars and comets, illuminating the hazy grey clouds that cover a mourning moon. Do you ever look up? Do you remember what the sky looked like on that cold autumn night, the night that once colored my existence, coating me with broad strokes of milky grey? Of course you don't. You were never one for appreciating beauty, always turning it into a cold set of laws, calculating away its embrace--why couldn't you just look? I remember the sky, I remember the comet, the bright blue flame against the dull lament this city made of the heavens. 

You don't see a lot of comets in our sky--oh, but ours! Ours was a beautiful one, wasn't it?

I remember you cried, and for a moment I thought I saw a look of awe, your eyes animated, just as that magnificent and bright blue burst of energy in the sky.

But that glow was as ephemeral as our comet, and your eyes darkened and returned to that hazel sunburst that I so desperately tried to illuminate; I never knew how to warm the cold passion that I saw underneath those eyes, how to make it burn, to make it glow, not for life, as I could feel your hunger for those things that you had not yet experienced. You were ravenous and bold, luring every experience in your path like an angler. No, I wanted you to burn for me, as hot as the summer nights on the trampoline, the winter dawn under the comfort of a blue, snowflake blanket, as hot as the rage bursting from my throat as I shout away your existence in the dark, on these cold metal bleachers.

My screams are useless. I know my heart bleeds more freely than your conscience.

The grass in this stadium is soaked with nostalgia, leaving this body through my eyes, the metal bleachers are cold with my affect, mimicking the icy stare you receive from me, and the dirt on the ground is pulverized beneath my feet like a rocky coast.

Angry and lonely, I came to my knees, buckling under the weight of the memories, finally understanding how those unwavering stones at the ocean's edge had become the fine sand beneath my feet. 

And now I know that just as the sand was once made of sea shells, I was once made of you.

I took a handful of sand and let it filter through my fingers, allowing me to watch it fall back into line with the sea of silicon and mollusk remains beneath me. Indistinguishable from the silicon particles, I could not separate the bits of shell that fell through the sieve that my hands became. I am no longer made of you. The part of you that was me has been slowly and steadily eroded by so many new and wonderful things, by so many exceptional people, and by this magnificent feeling that transcends norm and distance. 

No one calls the sand on the beach sea shell bits, for they cease to be sea shells once they've been broken down enough, and although they never disappear, they are transformed into something new, something bigger than they could ever hope to be. There is no you in the sands of my existence. You are not part of this shore.

The sun that shines on me does not rise in the east, nor does it set in the west. It rises and sets in the south.

Yet, across that impossible distance, through the arid desert that separates us, it brings light to this abandoned shore, luminous and resplendent, glimmering off the ocean of change that meets me at the edge of my self, turning a turbulent and destructive force into a beautiful gem. One day, in the contemplative and serene autumn, that sun will rise in the south and set in the west; that sun will set over me. 

I bled nostalgia today.