the world is forgetting you and the world is being forgotten.
sometimes, it begins like this: a feeling that one day, these flower fields will devour us, with their seeds like fruitless mouths, their petals like soft teeth, where there are too many things that are easy to tear apart. where we shift ever-so-slightly and every nearby planet looks down on us from its home in the sky and shakes.
here, the nature of nothing and everything knocks on your front door, asks for you by another name, calls you into the world with every expectation. your recollection comes swiftly, the way winds change, the way seasons end, always taking something with it. always something ending up missing, where secrets cannot reach you, the presence of muddied shoes and the epithet of unearthing ancient things. there’s a calculus to appearances: the angles of humanity sharpened to points, blunt only in grief and half-whole, half-finished testimonials. some things exist forever – and some are never meant to exist at all.
you sit on the front porch of old mythologies and try to make a home out of them all, another story, another tale that is retold until its meaning gets rescripted. but here is the secret to telling a story that never dies: never have it end. take the time to mention the small things, or the fact that we are not always a star or a universe or a glorious rising, but once, and maybe still, that we are just ourselves, surviving, holding on to what we can.
i want to call it love. couldn’t it be love? couldn’t it be beautiful, just once? just for me?
everything we are is storied. we are stories in the shape of people. everything that we know stems from this, the legacies, the lives of everyone who has been here, who has stood this ground before us. can't you feel their heartbeats? can't you hear their voices? the word for what you are does not exist; this is where you make it for yourself. an old secret: talk your shit and don’t backtrack, tell your story and don’t edit anything out. we are all writing towards our own endings, we can’t help it, we are bound to it, hymned history repeating ourselves to ruins of what once was. time comes for us and find us waiting, word-full. everything is important: psalm your song and don’t flinch. refuse to, like a litany without form.
another day, another past –– i know that there is no such thing as permanence, but oh, some days. some days, i want to try.
there is too much of me here, stretched out, folded over and inside again, pain leaking into pain, into wonder, into dreaming. and yet this, of course, means nothing. everything changes in an instant. are you the same as you were a year ago? a week ago? an hour ago? how easy it is to hold nothing but the replay, the yesterday, the snap-shot turned over and over until it too is light alone; a supernova replaying it's own bursting just to know that it was alive, once, the brightest thing ever seen, no matter how much it burns.
this is the death of common language; identity and other unmentionable things, your name, mine, the names of change, derelict. the introspection of itself, epigraphs of epochs. i remember what i used to be, of all that we know that is unnameable, the space of what is between words and worlds. i remember and i lose myself; unbridgeable. do you know me? do you remember what is inside of us? what stays? what is the name for what we leave behind? for what leaves us? hold the shell of me to your ear: do i sound the same?
if a thing is chosen, is it not cursed? here i am holding my hand out into the light as it forgets me, leaves me inch by inch, but this is not a betrayal, not forever. it is not something i can hold a grudge against, hot-flare and warm in the cool of night.
momentarily, it feels like bursting. like love, maybe, or what i imagine love to feel like, which is to say that it is a thing that holds. something gentle, soft and pressure-present, cool in the dusk-light, in the dawn-hills. and it is here i know: someone will remember us. isn’t that a wild dream? so many things are lost and forgotten and barely recognizable, now, and yet we still have things to hold onto. fragments, yes, small pieces of a body we are missing the whole of, but pieces, all the same.
is this not what connects us? lines on maps, one place to another, can you feel me even when i am not there? am i always with you, in some way? a landscape, in some ray of light, some humming melody? we walk towards what is next, and it walks towards us just the same. we rise to meet it like a mirror, close enough to just nearly touch, always a moment ahead, a moment apart. everything is happening, or nothing is, but here it is peaceful, for the moment. nothing is shattered at our feet, and the world remains. maybe this is the way this story could end: a changing, a shifting, into something new.
the future is perfect and necessary and none of those things at all. it is contradictory, made of invisible things, made of almosts. but it is a constant, a thing we know will wait for us, as any loved / loving thing does. there we will become the history of hands that know what it is to hold the only the things we have, and to hold it all for as long as we can.
to know that we were here, like this, even small, even broken, even just for a little while – is to be a piece remembered, a piece of that body, before. even if it just a vision of you, in the mirror, saying: i will remember you. i will remember this, and you will always be a part of me. i forgive you, i love you, it's okay to be afraid, it's okay to dare and dream and cry. there is so much more to come for you. i hope that if you could see me now, right here, you would smile so big, and so bright, you'd put stars to shame.
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