There is a disquiet
in the core of me.

it stretches over my lungs,
a cotton sheet
that tightens
at the corners.

and nothing feels comfortable Here.
My roots trail dry behind me,
dripping with soil
where I’ve ripped them from the Earth.

and each step
has yet
to offer release.
My heart, a thing twisted
in the constricting grip that is connection.
Over and over,
everything remembered tying together
into the new.
Into images that I must swallow,
with a parched throat
of something gone.

People say we live once,
but sometimes the opposite is true.
Sometimes we live, every single day,
and it’s death that comes to take us
just the once

Emotions are amazing, when you think about them.

Here we are in these physical bodies, an orchestra of precise chemistry, right down to the atom. And there are entire universes expanding inside us. An inner landscape completely separate from the outer world we find ourselves in, and yet we are so viscerally connected to what transpires there that we become altered; our experiences transforming, physically, our world within.

Something tragic happens and our bodies flood with cortisol until the ache we feel spreads to every inch of us. Until it’s difficult to get out of bed in the mornings, and we wonder, if we will ever be light again.

Something we’ve longed for happens and these same bodies react in vibrant bursts of dopamine and serotonin. A symphony of feel-good sensations as though fireworks have risen up to explode from the center of us, and everything becomes possible.

And the events that inspire these physical changes within us may be fleeting, but they linger, too. The way that ink stains our fingers. The way that grains of sand are never fully gone from the soles of our shoes after a day at the beach. And for some of these events, we are only ever one song away from triggering a feeling so moving that it all comes flooding back, washing over us the same as it did the very first time.

And how wonderous of a thing it really is, to be Here. To feel this world and the people in it not just with our hands, but somewhere deep, beneath our skin.

You told me you needed me,
more than I needed you.

I hadn’t heard words like that from you before.
It was your strength,
your impenetrable confidence
I had always leaned into.

It didn’t sound like you, and so,
I had no idea what you meant

And I wish there were some way
I could still reach you.
A way to tell you

that I would have moved mountains for you

I would have picked up every shattered piece
of who you were from the pavement,
as delicately as I could,
even if it cut me.

I would have held you tightly enough
to take your pain into my chest,
and lock it away from you,
for good.

I would have shown you
that you weren’t a one-man sailboat,
strangled in the spirals of a hurricane,
because together
we could’ve been an island
with a bomb shelter,
and someday, we’d come up,
and the storm would be gone.

We could have looked out at the ocean,
in awe, of how it can still be the ocean
even after a storm,

if only I had known what you meant

You wouldn’t be able to stir it up
if it wasn’t still there,

collected

dark and shifting
at the bottom
of your cup

I said your name into the dark,
a furrowed brow
a question mark

and then a light began to bloom,
and shock set in,
and fear ensued

with swift intake of startled breath,
quickened pulse
and nervous sweat

a thought, it then occurred to me,
that you are more
than just a dream