Unrealistic Fairytale
By Cambria Carson
Art by Moon_Patrol
Published Issue 112, April 2023
I hear them through the deafening, pouring rain
Their screams and accusations
The sky is crying and so am I
My tears roll over my cheeks and onto my lips.
I cry the water of the ocean, salty, and calming I am sick
Not the kind that comes from indulgence
The kind that is a side-effect for the unknown
Life is not the movies
Life is not the books
I thought my life was a fairytale
Turns out I was living the unhappily ever after where Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t get saved
Or the bears find Goldilocks
Or Cinderella stays a loveless maid
There is no happy endings
There is no true love
All love fades or dies or ceases with death or just time
I wish I could live in the books I read or the movies I watch
I wish that there was such a thing as undying passion
Turns out passion dies or never is born at all
Undying passion for someone who doesn’t have a written future is an unrealistic fairytale
Why try and plan your life if it will just do the opposite because it wants to?
About Cambria Carson:
I am a teenager from Colorado. My life from an outside view seemed perfect. But from my perspective things got depressing. People my family loved were dying, my parents were fighting, a global pandemic broke out. We needed a drastic change. So we drew up a plan. We would travel the world for a year. It ended up being a year and four months. My parents got closer, but at the beginning of our journey it was rough, their knowledge of each other and how to be with each other grew after every fight until soon the bickerments became wonderfully infrequent. Every couple fights. Sometimes I could only write to consume my feelings. Through the struggles of traveling to a beautiful but new place every week, being stuck with my mom, dad and sister 24/7, and not having any friends, I found comfort in relying on myself to be the shoulder to cry on and the person to pour my feelings to. Sometimes I would just sit down and whip out my computer and write what was on my mind. I wrote many poems throughout the entirety of our travels. But how could I not when I was traveling through places like Belize, Uganda, Mexico, Costa Rica, Germany, Ireland and more. Some of my poems were results of a school prompt and others, I was “self-prompted” to create. Sometimes your head is filled with words that are just trapped and trying to get out. You don’t realize that you are the captor of these thoughts until you are alone with no white noise to block them out. Sometimes it feels like you have been holding your breath all of your life and finally realized it is possible to exhale.
Moon Patrol is a Northern California-based artist. Taking themes including ’80s cartoons and video games, classic pulp illustrations, and comic book narratives, Moon Patrol remixes these many and varied cues using a collage technique he compares to “Kid Koala’s turntable albums, and in part by William Burroughs’ cut-up technique.” See more of his work on Instagram and snag prints at Outré Gallery.
This is Cambria’s debut Birdy piece. Keep your eyes peeled for more work by this talented poet and writer. Check out Moon Patrol’s March Birdy install, Atomic Kitty and Nightmare Machine, or head to our Explore section to see more of his work.