V.XII

A piece I’ve read live many times, written on a day that was once very special to me: 5/22.

wild hearts can’t be broken, i told myself when this all began. how far from the truth it now seems.. maybe this has happened because i’m so afraid to feel it – his loss, her loss, my loss – all internalized. i will be better, and i won’t break. this wild heart of mine – it will burn even after the rest of me has turned to ash. because yes – the universe has visited me. it beckoned me to the future, told me i would survive. it loosed my grip upon the ego and the sadness and the fear – all sense of entitlement and even belonging, save for the space i had in the cosmos itself. now – here i sit with the stardust in my trembling hands – they were too bright, i squeezed too hard – i thought i could, i thought i was.. the punctures don’t hurt. it’s everything else. the deepest aches that always strike without warning. they are what make me feel the most fragile – how they seize me from behind and buckle my knees – and oh, what violence i feel inside myself for crying – not only for crying, but for crying when i thought i was safe. hanging from my constellation, even by the tips of my fingers – still, it was better than falling. i couldn’t. yet the universe, in all its spectacular beauty and sorrow, insists on showing me what i’ve lost – pressing it into my consciousness like sand from the shore scratching mercilessly against stinging, sunburnt skin. even surrounded by the warmth of thousands, overwhelmed by the lights and sound, singing the words with a voice that is no longer my own, now choked by emotion – i am raw, raw as the moon unspeakable in its brilliance, as the explosions of fireworks that suddenly mean nothing, as the recollected glimpses of those nights we thought this would never, ever end. what do you do, now, in the aftermath of forever? in the postscript your bleeding hands can barely write? walk on, my child, and fall like a star. because it is the only way you too will be reborn.