Everything around me is beautiful. Waking to say goodbye is bitter, yet sweet. My heart is capable of sweeping dances throughout the day. What is on my mind? Love, flowers, intimacy, embellished words, soft textures, the flow of my dress, Rachmaninoff, my pen scratching black into the ivory of the paper…

I can detail everything in words only as quickly as my mind finds ways to capture them, but the descriptions are continuously jumping within me, ready to dive into the warm waters of experience.

Everything around me is romantic because I have willed it to be. I manifest the warmth and the visceral experience of beauty all around me. I want it to radiate with every touch I plant and every gaze I offer. I need it. The experiences I long to create and consume drip slowly like a rich molasses that is neither containable nor forgiving.

But, please, forgive me, because a brilliant beginning begs a gorgeous ending. Whether main or side or villain or narrator, every character exists on its own without tethering to a singular story. We are introduced as characters with great care despite lack of forethought, and meticulously follow the tropes by which we see all others, falling into place like cues on a plot line. Our movements are calculated and drawn with cold objectivity. Lastly, our endings serve only the story that is read.

I refuse. I cannot afford the searing gravity of modernism or conventionalism or politeness or even the humorous semblances of accepting reality when the reality I seek is one that I may fully command.

So, my own reality is romantic. Beauty will have no limit and time will draw out the bitter so that I may relish the sweet, untethered happiness awake in me now. Sunshine embraces me and an arrangement of strings playing upon the warm breeze touches my ears. I will romanticize life always.