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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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