I wake up today with a fear of the world slipping away and through my fingertips. I remember about the monotonous drive to school in the morning, the shadow of lost time falling behind tall tree trunks. I fell asleep reading about doors with knobs only on the inside. And the way it let me breathe deep, into my own floor. The way no one could steal from me if they didn’t know I was hiding inside the walls. My skin sinks closer to my bones. The way it’s just okay for me to rest in the center of my own chest. No one to know I’m here, no one to reach me.


There is this slight cry in my cells. An ache. Like the way the sun rises in the morning and my skin so thin absorbing the world’s rush through roads, the coffee cataclysm, and waking from dreams with feelings of such inadequacy, an ache in the heart. I wonder why we all implode in this way. And I, absorbing it alone, up on this hill. My doorknobs are on the inside but I can’t not feel you and your sticky membrane pain, that doesn’t dissolve in the rain, but grows thicker.


I wanted to rip the doors open and let the cold breeze lick my heart clean. I wanted to walk through the hollow with the passion birds and let the reeds sing from inside my spine. But some days the lion mountain in my mind stops me from traveling so far down the road alone. Some days, I only make it to the watery nestle, where women with zippers cutting their chest in two, with talking metal-glass plates pressed to their face, sonder in front of me.


I wonder about the way my house protects me and traps me at the same time. The way it keeps my skin warm and dries my eyes out. The way it holds all my books, the way their words pull me deeper into the floorboards. Where I cut paper and paint worlds. I think about the cliffs, and the way they’ve stayed there just the same, each day without me. The winter storms they’ve witnessed without my body sinking into their top soil. The way they hold the earth’s edge. The way the ocean doesn’t seem to wear them thin. The way the birds nestle into their open groves.


My back body like a blank slate that only exists to catch whispers floating through the air. My neck connecting these two parts of me that want to receive the same message from the sun. Will you walk with me down this path? We’ll waste no time when the mountain remembers us.


I whistle a sharp tune of not-enoughness. Of decaying in the soil with nothing to say. Only a vibration that permeates out of me. An old plume. This way I pour hot water in circles, over dried and shredded earth life. The way the burnt wood drinks the water clean. The way the bark holds us in. To drink the sun, to be the wind. And I remember the wind doesn’t decay, she just flies, with pours of hot and cold driving her around so smoothly. And some days she rests still over the ocean.  No sign of her own reflection, just the bliss of her everywhere-ness and laughing when she cuts through lungs.


This old desire to be worthy of life. It weighs heavy on my back. Would you come and take it off? And remind me that my skin comes from the sea, my bones from desert dust. Will you tell me that marching between the trees, with my bird eyes and water hands, that this is all there is? I want to remember that I come from the earth’s crust, so I can stop turning over stones looking for myself. So I can rest heavy on this ground and feel your words ring through me: “there she is.”