I lived, once. As a lone potter. I never connected well with people but I learned to mend the cracks life carves into the things we love. I died tired, with knotted hands and a heart as soft as clay.

I came back as a farmer and this is when I think, I found you. Our hearts mixed and bloomed, vibrant like the purple buds of the peas sprouting up in our fields. You spoke to some part of me that no one else ever could and I wept, knees cut and bleeding in the rain, on the day the pneumonia took you. The day everything I’d found withered to nothing in my arms and you looked up at me, as the air was leaving you, and left me behind. I died bitter and broken, your picture folded in my hands.

When I came back as a musician, you found me on the pavement singing songs about how cruel this world can be and you put your number into the hat by my feet. You were guarded, but when you let me in I saw at once, that I knew you. And when you hugged me at our wedding I could feel a piece of me moving back into place where it had hung askew my entire life. We spent our days laughing, dancing loops around our kitchen, lips stained with wine and the windows ajar to let in the heat from the sky. And even though I died young I was full of music. I left you too soon, I know, and I’m sorry for that.

And now I’m here, this vagabond thing. The music is quieter now but it still echoes inside me and the words are louder than ever, so I write. My veins it seems are full of poetry; I wonder what you look like now. I wonder if I’ve met you, if I’d even recognize you if I did because what I’m looking for isn’t something you can glimpse from the surface. There’s an all too familiar ache in my chest that I swear I was born with, and there’s cracks sprouting up where I least expect. Words from deep within me whisper, though, of how to fix them, and I think sometimes that my heart is as soft as clay. And when I place my hands up against the soil I can feel something there that I’ve lost and I wonder, if we will ever be together again