tell me what it is to be a thing remade by a moment. to let the truth cut me down from these live wires, these electronic sunrises, neon-lit sunsets like a pre-programmed kind of future. i am asking, who will we be –– a question about identity, and other unmentionable things, a question addressed to the city, or god, or something at least bigger than ourselves.
i want ordinary things. dishes in the sink, cups in the cupboard, soup simmering on the stove. normalcy like fresh sheets, like holding a warm mug between cold hands. it’s winter-dark when she calls and asks quick about the existentialism of being alive, of breathing and seeing and the weight of having a heart that beats, and i’m struck by the fact that i don't know how to answer. i think, i tell her, speaking soft-slow into the fragile dark, i think it has something to do with how full the heart is. i can hear her breathing, the slow dance of her heartbeat in the ambient silence. she asks if she can come over tomorrow.
there is something else here, something old, something hidden inside of us, in the bricks. hope, maybe, or the fear of being alone.
destiny bites the tips of our fingers, for the things we wish to know and the things we wish to accomplish have never been so close – is this what we are meant for? the stars align, the winds howl, and are you sure we're the only vicious things here? man vs. machine, the age old game, the famous test. who is more complex? who is more human? who admits to their faults, who falls to them, who suffers from their own complexities? who is who?
monsters that follow you when you run away from home, when you grow old, when you are too scared to look back – is it still bravery? is it still strength? when you knock on an old legend’s door and call yourself home by saying all the wrong words, but isn’t it this, isn’t it here, where we are still self-proclaimed heroes even when the lights stay on? even now, even then, when the story stops?
here is another place you do not know exactly how you belong to, and so we dream a new world to hide in. what are we to do when to stand for everything / is to fall for anything? such beauty can be made from destruction, but does time always refine? what does it make of us? of you?
and what are we, if not the distance between here and somewhere else entirely? what are we if not the space between ourselves, and whomever we are to become? is it the matter of existence – that is the real question. do we squirm, or sing? we look to the past and it is a history of wrongness. it is shining with pinpricks of light, stars of joy, of radiant hope. which is better, which is worse? to hold the weight of knowing, familiarity / or to fear all that is known, unknown?
being here, being alive – it is meant to be worth something, i tell her, on that winter-dark night. more than what we are, more than what we are able to become. there is beauty, i believe, in not knowing anything / but wanting to / wanting to.
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