These days I’ve been realizing how humans spend all their lives picking up pieces of themselves. Don’t dim the lights, I’m sitting on the cold marble hugging my knees and tracing where my body could’ve been. Teach me how to breathe while you count the creases on my palm. How long do I have left? I will gently place my hand over your eyes while you remember living “forever” too long, after that, we weren’t, and you will mourn freely because nothing that belongs to us ever stays.
Let me tell you again how humans have to lose everything they own to feel like themselves. Let me tell you again and again how breathing is all we ever do, yet something we always forget how to do.
Some days I wonder if it’s wrong for me to crown you with the words that I do — solace, respite, hope, home. I wonder if they would weigh you down as all the other ones of a big, scary magnitude do, and I would never want to add the weight of a single feather to everything you already carry on your back. But then I think of how every word you use for us buoys me just enough to keep my head above water on most days. I think about how I’ve only ever wanted to hold enough light in my palms to be mistaken for a faint, pulsing star, and how you smiled, shook your heads, and folded my hands into yours, trembling and all, and told me that I could be an entire universe instead.
So, thank you, for folding up a paper boat for my waterlogged life and drawing a smiley face on the bow sails to keep me company while I float on a peninsula of faded space beyond the horizons. I’d ask you to promise me that you’ll still be here when I finally find how to breathe properly. But the truth is that you hooked your pinkies with mine on the very first day. And isn’t it wonderful, to have someone asking you to lean on them when you can barely even see how weary your shoulders, head, and legs feel yourself? isn’t it wonderful, to have someone willing to walk with you to the other side, and not just wait for you somewhere beyond it where your breath catches?
