Because Jam is Racing Against Sunbeams

French-kiss the morning
It is your favorite time of the day.
In those few minutes between slumber and the shower, you feel a faint embrace of the warm dawn air. It lingers as you try to hold on to remnants of your dream, and suddenly bursts as the phone utters a shrill reminder.
As the hours plod forward, your dream wisps into the haziness of your recollection, and you are left with a warm, brilliant smile and eyes aching to protect.

Pray to the god of sex and drums and rock n’ roll
The heavy bass line thrums through your system, undulates and uncoils like a sweet summer wind. It takes a moment for the beat to pick up, and soon you see yourself in a roomful of people, slick sweat and lust redolent in the air. It is not merely a dance; it is the clash and the kismet of a hundred souls, gyrating for lost wishes and unfulfilled dreams and aching, bursting rebirth.
With upraised arms and a shuttered gaze, you join in the fervent ritual.
As the last guitar solo twangs into a yearning silence, you open your eyes and see your bedroom once more.
Few think you’d be the type to bump and grind.

Make the rocking world go round
You thought you could make a difference.
You still might. You’re young, after all. So what if you’re not slaying metaphorical, political dragons, saving damsels and the demographics from the tyranny of antediluvian laws and practices? Heck, some people made their mark past death!
Even as you rationalize, however, the years of youth—and that of hope, and change, and wrinkle-free skin—are slowly slipping away, and you squander them all in mediocrity.

Find a stairway to heaven
You’ve spoken about it a lot. Cried buckets to your unobservant best friend, mentioned Frost and snowy evenings in passing, routinely discussed the best methods.
Still, they think you won’t do it. A cry for attention, some think; spoiled little brat. Others say that your Catholic upbringing has permanently imprinted hellfire and damnation on your skull should you attempt to try. The few who knew you at the edge of seventeen know you won’t do it, if only for the memory of a bright-eyed sylph who faded far too soon.
You just want to be happy.

Fly to the moon and back
You just want to be happy.
Stocking up on impossible hopes and dreams, however, seems to preclude reality, and lead weights of guilt and reason drag you down back into the stratosphere.
Crash-landing seems inevitable.

21 sentences for a 21-year-old dreamer

(Clearly, in desperate need for an intervention)

1. Yell
On the nights when her mother shrieks and wails and she can’t do anything to help, she quietly cries in her room.
2. Roulette
It seems so easy, she thinks, to let it all slip away, and her mind allows the possibilities were she to play that game with her life; lately, she’s been gambling more and more.
3. Klaxon
In the weeks immediately following the day she nearly killed a man, and the odd day after, she wakes in terror at the sound of a horn.
4. Mirror
In her mind, inner has always trumped outer, and she searches her reflection in vain for some semblance of beauty within.
5. Vomit
As she spews the remains of the day and her stomach pulses and heaves, disjointed statistics on poverty and anecdotes on poor little girls (because needy and poor aren’t one and the same) collapse and congeal in her head.
6. Communication
She was once told she was a hard person to love by one of the people she loved most in the world, and for this reason, and many others, silence lays thick between them; the irony is made complete when she enters her course.
7. Pedal
Someday, when a souped-up motorcycle lies between salvation and a thirty-ton tyrannosaurs rex, she will end up regretting she never learned how to bike.
8. Hand
She hates incompetence, she hates stupidity, she hates the slack-jawed expression on her classmates’ faces, but most of all she hates that crestfallen look on her professor’s face; and so she raises her hand, hating they’ll now brand her a arrogant snotty know-it-all.
9. Fatalism
She believes that whatever Power-that-Is likes to toy with her for Its own sick amusement, and addresses Murphy as if he were an old friend.
10. Ate (Greek)
If she were born in another time and place, she would have made a fine Amazon, right breast notwithstanding.
11. Ate (Filipino)
Many have remarked on their similar mannerisms, some had raised eyebrows on their sibling spats, yet few know that she would murder—eviscerate, disembowel, and make a party hat out of innards—anyone who dared touch a hair on her sisters’ heads.
12. Romantic
She knows waiting for the right one would be utterly idiotic, but she can’t bring herself to pretend about the boys around her even just a little.
13. Nun
When she’s not the smartest or the most artistic or musically talented or prettiest or even the most capable, she wonders if being the most socially aware counts for something in her odd little family.
14. Picture
She doesn’t want to admit to missing them, because dammit they were the ones who hurt her, and shouldn’t they be crawling on their hands and knees after all she’s done for them, yet she still can’t delete the image of two smiling girls.
15. Funeral
In her personal life soundtrack, she had just recently crossed off “Another One Bites the Dust” from her dirge list.
16. Superhero
She prepares elaborate scenarios and backup plans for if and when her cover identity is blown, and most of them aren’t serious.
17. Maiden
A secret suspicion is that she’ll end up being the crabby old virgin with twenty cats; this pisses her off, but mostly because she’d prefer dogs.
18. Roulette (II)
In an entrance exam to another college long ago, she threw her life to the wind and devoted her essay to detailing extraterrestrial life forms in tertiary education; it utterly nonplussed her when said school recommended her for advanced placement.
19. Zephyr
She wants to run and never look back, and drink in the beauty of the world in her wake.
20. Security blanket
Sometimes, change terrifies her, so she keeps her mouth closed and her burdens heavy.
21. Change
But life still goes one, and eventually she shuts out all the clamoring inner voices and goes.