in group the other day, we were doing this mindfulness practice — focusing on an object or scene, really letting yourself see it, the texture, the light, and edges. the quiet stuff your brain skips past most days.
someone pointed out a single cloud moving past the window. we all looked. then a man, maybe in his thirties, sitting a few chairs over, said: “Eventually, all our thoughts mingle in the same cloud.” I don’t remember what it was in response to, but it stayed with me.
I kept thinking about the way we all become part of something bigger — how even the stuff we say in pain or fear joins that same cloud eventually. it made me feel small and huge at the same time. like a single word — small, a preposition maybe — floating in a much bigger sentence. alone in a way, but also part of something vast. necessary and tiny. all at once.
that’s what music feels like to me. that’s what poems feel like. I put a song out there, and it drifts up to meet everything else.
with the group, with my therapists, I’m learning how to move forward. we aren’t the same, but we mingle, too — week by week, word by word. healing isn’t fast. it takes time — but it’s unfolding. and I’m learning to let that be enough.
still, I need my own little cloud too — the one I rest in to make music, to skateboard, to be a person. that’s always been a lonely place for me, especially with the depression, the using. but now, it’s starting to feel like a part of something larger. not just apart.
I don’t have to choose between the shared cloud and the quiet one that’s mine. I can belong to both.
here’s a new song called fatKiD, named after Fat Kid Spot, a skate park where I go to clear my head. it’s about messing up, feeling like you’ve let people down, and wanting someone beside you anyway — not to fix it, just to not be alone in it. it’s up now on bandcamp and SoundCloud.
cookie nieves 
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