everything i can possibly imagine exists somewhere and i just can’t reach it yet
my third eye and evaporation and the big bang theory
I spend a lot of time with my ear pressed up against different realities, listening for proof of myself.
I clasp my hands together and rest the joints atop my sternum, mustering the wherewithal to address the space behind them.
I urge my psyche to lay the evidence at my feet,
I beg my third eye for its testimony,
I pray to the blank space behind my eyelids to let me exist with or without witness.
Instead I find echoes of one million fragmented projections - remnants of ghosts I touched or tasted or hurt or all of the above.
I become a patchwork mesh of tangled up nerves and ephemeral strangers.
I’m afraid that when I die all that will flash before my eyes are dusty stills from nights spent retracted inward,
searching for any indication of life.
I’m afraid I’ll never be able to trace a path back to myself,
unable to extrapolate any meaning from the leftover scraps of me.
What am I,
if not whoever you are?
Everything about who I am was decided for me the moment the universe expanded from that hot, dense point.
Millions of inconsequential moments giving birth to liminal echoes;
I live downstream from the consequences,
counting bruises I don’t remember earning.
My third eye,
laid bare and weary,
sighs and lies its head down.
I turn to ritual to will myself into existence.
I pay my tithes and confess my sins and nail myself to a cross as an act of sympathy.
I lay my tender heart down on the altar as a sacrifice to a God I know is not listening.
I get down on my knees and pray anyway,
“Please, let there be no meaning.”
God responds with silence and I know this means everything I can possibly imagine exists somewhere and I just can’t reach it yet.
I want to scrape the dread off of my tongue.
I want to be curious enough to care about what might be on the other side of the ache beneath my ribcage.
I want to roll around in a field of my vulnerability,
and I want it to smell like grass in my backyard in 2012,
like the sediment separating me from the reverberations of my past lives.
I want to feel safe there.
My words converse with my apprehension instead of my heart as they stumble out of a chipped and crooked door. They arrive bruised and unsure of themselves.
My longing is a thousand-ton boulder that I cannot lift and the bugs underneath whisper sweet nothings to me in my dreams. When I am awake, they only scream.
Can I evaporate into my yearning, can I meld myself into something more corporeal?
Can I remove the gauze from the wound, can I let it breathe, can I let it heal without picking at the scab?
I press my ear up to one thousand different dimensions and hear my desires refracting back out to me in a million different shapes.
I manifest permanence even in the unfamiliar.
I reach my hands through the echoes and extract myself.
I learn that personhood is heavier than impersonation.
If I let the wound heal,
once the bruises clear up,
could I carry it?

“I’m afraid that when I die all that will flash before my eyes are dusty stills from nights spent retracted inward“ oh my god. Absolutely gorgeous and VERY close to home all the way through.
BEAUTIFUL how did u capture my exact feelings