And It Isn't Any Of Those Things

What is real? It’s real when you touch somebody who you love. It’s real when your sadness or your joy is understood and held delicately. It’s real when a half sleeping strength kisses you on the shoulder at the exact moment you feel yourself sinking into the abyss. And it brings you back. And it breaks your heart. And you assign it so much grace. And you remember it forever.

It’s real when she sings. It’s real when she fumbles over words because she can’t fit them in her mouth. They are big, she is small. Just like you I know I only love her in one sense.

I love to feel the fibres of the universe entangling the best and loneliest shards of me in webs. Those tendrils touch me even if neither of you can. They’re not visible or tangible but they are what hold me together in moments like this.

The only thing I need to be able to breathe is simply the smallest possible distance and some platonic part of me feeling tendons and a heartbeat under the maze of my own fingerprints.

I understand it now. It’s not some inner repulsion that locks my spirit up. It’s just feeling I will die if I don’t. Of course, I don’t. But I am drowning. Sometimes, somewhat. Gasping for air I can only half remember the taste of.

It is the dark. It’s when I thought my heartbeat was the sound of an army marching to get me. It’s when I was certain the paintings on the wall were your mother’s limbs and I prayed for her. And it isn’t any of those things.

I’ll stay quiet. I’ll find ways to make art and maybe one day I’ll be outstanding in a field. And it will be filled with poppies. And Daniel, Jon and Julien will shake my hand and I’ll still be lonely but it won’t matter. In the same sense it doesn’t matter now. I’m already significant. I’m already okay and it’s always going to be okay.

I need to learn to love selflessly. I need to be inspired by poets and people I can’t cry without. I’d never harm myself beyond a bruise to the face but I harm myself everyday when I am uncurious and ungrateful.

I promise you, all it is is the desire to just hold on to a moment.