every story is an origin story. we don’t know any other kind of story – this is the only story we are ever able to tell. and in it is the thing you are missing, easy to name, as it always is. you remember, don’t you? not, in the same way, of course, times have changed, from peanut butter stifled laughter and vibrant blue skies and the wind in your skin, a buzzing kind of youth is not who you are, anymore. the story has changed.
we are present just long enough to feel the wind as it sweeps through the branches, through the bending of the whole world, and by then it is already gone. it is never long before ghosts come to claim the names of everything that you have picked and passed on. here there are so many things to forget, and towering deluges to remember. tell me, where do you even begin?
you start anew and expect to be - the same. do you see the contradiction? the hypocrisy? here / a lineage. a place of belonging, if you want it to be. sit bent, bowed, aged, among all of this history, every myth that runs its way through you. become, a voice says. you must. to create ashes, you must first let the flames consume you, a wound to begin all wounds. try again: drop the sword, drop the shield, what purpose do you serve? who are you? who were you before? do you remember? are you even here? someone asks. were you real, before right now?
the past is the presence of absence, but at the same time, it is something we can hold. this, of course, means nothing, everything changes in an instant. are you the same as you were a year ago? a week ago? a day ago? how easy it is to hold nothing but the replay, the yesterday, the photo turned over and over until it too, is light alone.
describe yourself in anything but a mirror, a photograph. refuse to, like a litany without form.
how long is now? how long am i supposed to hold all of this in the light? how am i supposed to let it go? how am i supposed to let it pass me by? how do you leave yourself / to open the door and walk through? which path do you choose? in which direction do you go? how do you leave it all behind, each shape of strict sky at the end of the night? how do you not look back? how do you not always look back?
memory - memory is like something beautiful with blood behind it. memory is you, stretched, reaching, always, always reaching for something as large as your longing. what has happened, your own tone, stuck with the air at the back of your throat, escapes with the hum of hope, of light. it gives you a name, unpronounceable, but still a name, and it resonates within you, like sunlight. do you remember it? can you still feel it? is it you? hasn’t it always been you?
we can say that we are done with dreaming, but are we? can we ever be? we who are firework dancers, swayers with the willows, every piece of us weathervanes pointing towards one another, finding home in every space within and outside of ourselves. isn’t it funny, then, how the past can stand between us like it's something we lost? slipped out of our pockets when we weren't looking, and how we can still hear it, sometimes, when the light is low?
we all turn like clocks ourselves, creatures of habit, of routine, and it is within this piece of living that you will continue to do what you have done your whole life, you will go out in the world and you will give the light another hour. you will let it break over you, you will keep breathing, you will see what it brings, where you will go, where you will bring you to right here, right now. how you will let the light rush in. become, again. all of the courage, all of the catastrophes attached. let it come, everything that has gone and past and become ghost before you. give it a name, even unpronounceable, even if it is just your own.
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