Money can buy you everything but
it can’t buy you understanding,
because I
am me and I speak of all the things I don’t understand.
Like politics and music and that time I was a kid in church
and I felt so connected to God that I wept but ten years later
I called myself an atheist and never looked back.

Up to the “get your head out of the clouds kid,”
my dad said.
I speak of love and I really don’t understand that.

I speak of you and your freckles that look like a million little stars
and I am so jealous.
Because I wish I had a connection to the universe,
the big things happening out there,
but I am just
alone.

And you, your laugh. I look up to the sky and I wish that…
I wish I may, I wish I might

be able to capture you and study you,
examine every piece of you.
All the stars on your skin, the sunlight in your hair,
and figure out why you don’t ever seem to care that I don’t call you back
when I said I would.

Try to find happiness in this world,
but the truth is that I’m completely broken and it’s not that
I don’t know where to look, it’s that I’m like an explorer who
finally reaches the shores of his new-found land
and then realizes that he never actually wanted to find it after all.
That he should have just stayed at home and explored
the women of his town instead,
because that disappointment could not
feel like this

This is when he ends it all.

Money can buy you everything but it can’t
buy you understanding. I know this because
I connect to this world the most when I have nothing and
the emptiness in my pocket is liberating and for the first time
I feel free and for the first time I feel happy
and for the first time I feel
hungry.
And I would rather be unhappy than dead,
I think.

I speak of things I don’t understand,
like you and the time you were really sick and you accidentally
coughed all over me
like an old man,
but I didn’t care—I liked it.
I wanted your disgusting perfect germs to infect me and
connect me
to you

Are mostly what I think about when I think of the things
that I don’t understand. I keep trying to describe you
and find you and write you and
keep you this way
forever,
but I don’t know how to do that. And
sometimes you actually scare me and by the end of my
attempts I don’t have the right phrases and
the only words I know I should say are
me and
you.

About the Author

Lindsay Hansard is a junior at McKendree University double-majoring in English literature and philosophy. Outside of the classroom, she works as a literary research assistant and serves as the president of several campus organizations including the Literary InterestSociety, the Philosophy Club and the Young Feminists.

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I Speak of

About the Author