There is a burning beneath my ribs,
a hunger like the world’s run out of air
and your lips
might exhale
the last bit of oxygen on this Earth

I feel like there’s something important that I’m supposed to do or some place I’m supposed to go, but I’ve fallen off and now,
I’ve forgotten what it was.
I’m watching as time falls away beneath me with increasing speed.
My days are filled with a job I love and people I love and hobbies I love,
but something feels wrong or out of place, or missing,
and I can’t figure out what it is.

Maybe everyone feels that way

The kindest thing we can do for our children
is to heal. To be happy in our own being.
Not the kind of happy that is a mask
we remove at night
as we settle beneath the covers to sleep,
but the kind that takes root in our lips
and blossoms as something living in our skin.
Love for yourself that can be felt across the room
as you smile into it, onto others

Kids can feel our uncertainty,
our pain, our dissatisfaction, our anger,
when our smile is there
but there’s a shadow behind it,
pulling at us where we think no one else can see

Because like the white curve of your rib
or the slender slope from your wrist
to the cup of your palm,
they were once a physical part of you.
And though they have broken away
that connection remains;
it is impossible
to hide the truth of your heart from them.
They feel the ache in its beating,
deep in their bones
that look just like yours,
they know.
And it makes them inherently untrusting of the world.

You, the benchmark,
the earliest glimpse they have into what lies ahead
on this winding road we are all on
and when they look at you,
will they know that it’s worth it?

You, the most impenetrable force on this Earth
that at one time could lift the sheets
at the foot of the bed
and slay
all manner of horrors lurking there.
In their eyes, what could break you?
What hands hide in that darkness,
waiting and twisted
to drag them, too, into the black.
Will they retain in their own cupped palms
that glowing happiness of youth,
or will this world drain it,
drop
by drop,
until they too
become haunted

These and hundreds of other wordless questions
will linger like ghosts,
drifting amid the caverns of their subconscious,
doubtful and weighted and gnawing
for years before they ever realize they’re there.

Some of us never do

It’s part of being here, alive and human rather than any of the other wild things we could of ended up beneath the skin of. We have the capacity to feel strongly; to think deeply and love, equally so.
To deny ourselves the immersive life experience that comes with opening our hearts to what they’re capable of is a disservice to the world that yielded us, here, into existence.

If I could
I would uncork it
and whisper
“I’m sorry”
as I drained every thought of you
glugging
down the sink

but instead
I will sit
and let the wind carve you out of me.
I’ll welcome the rain
in great sweeps,
and beg it,
to bleed me dry
of you

and maybe the sun will come up
on a day
that it doesn’t hurt so much,

and warm the stone that will become
my heart,
beat smooth
by the drum of disappointment
from the fall

And you’ll just be this beautiful,
distant thing that happened,
but never to me

The water that separates from the sea,
someday you will be together again

The tide is out for now and you are on your own,
to feel the sun’s breath through your hair
or the cold kiss of winter in your veins.
To reflect back the evening starlight
and paint within yourself
a universe of your own

The tide is out for now
and you are separate from the sea
but someday,
it will rush back in to greet you

It will fold over you like an old friend,
all your memories
all your stars
sinking into its depths,
and when it pulls back again
there will be no way to tell
where you end,
and the ocean begins

New tidepools will bloom
to feel the turning of our Earth, and its moon,
Over and over again

And we are not asked to agree
that it will be easy,
but we are asked to be grateful
for the tug of each moment on our hearts.
To make the most of the time we’ve been given
and to choose, relentlessly, to live

And be unafraid when it ends