Not a beauty queen. Not one of those. You know the ones. She was real.

A couple of them were school beauty-queen pretty while a few were that more real-looking type. A realer kind of pretty.

Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.

And when we finally stood up and turned to face the world, I could feel something climbing through me. I could feel it on its hands and knees inside me, rising up, rising up - and I smiled.
I smiled, thinking, The hunger, because I knew it all too well.
The hunger.
The desire.
Then, slowly, as we walked on, I felt the beauty of it, and I could taste it, like words inside my mouth.

As I make my way through, I feel okayness reaching through me.
The funny thing is that okayness is not a real word. It's not in the dictionary.
But it's in me.

I've wandered through the real world, and written myself through the darkness of the streets inside me. I see people walking through the city and wonder where they've been, and what the moments of their lives have done to them. If they're anything like me, their moments have held them up and shot them down.
Sometimes I just survive.
But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.
That's when the stories show up in me.
They find me all the time.
They're made of underdogs and fighters. They're made of hunger and desire and trying to live decent.
The only trouble is, I don't know which of those stories comes first.
Maybe they all just merge into one.
We'll see, I guess.
I'll let you know when I decide.