empty and warm

for once i don’t want to talk about remembering. i want to talk about being. i want to talk about breathing. i want to talk about seeing and feeling. i want to talk about questioning and believing. how sometimes i can feel things changing right beneath me. how sometimes i have dreams of all the people who i have lost. that’s the tricky thing about loving someone. it doesn’t always stop when it should. when a soul dies or a person moves on. people expire but the feeling doesn’t. it lingers, phantom-limbed and without argument. you try to hide it in places you hope you’ll never look. but it sneaks up on you. it wakes up next to you. it curls inside your arms and you hold it like the way you’ve always known. i want to talk about some of these things i never say. some of the things that have too many gaps to try and fit my fingers around them and show you in between my careful palms. there are these dark places i try not to go because i’ve been there before and it’s not always easy to leave. there are these stars i see sometimes and i wonder what they’re thinking when they’re patiently staring back at me. how many wars have they seen? how many gods and kings, how many nameless feelings, how many people have they watched fall to their knees hoping for a sign that these lights missing their arms will never give. how many moments have they burned through. have i been burning too? if there is a heaven and a hell will i only spit on them both and take another road? what have i been burning for? i see them, moonstruck and raw. they wink happily, indifferently. through genocide and poverty and inequality. through hope, through young love, through those gorgeous little moments we all forget when we get too old. i try to be angry sometimes, i try because everything starts to feel so fucking hopeless. but i see these stars on cold nights and i wonder how something could be so beautiful and brave. i wonder how lucky i really am. i have so much time to learn how to love everything in life before i get too old. how rare and wonderful it is to be this young, to be this healthy, to be this free, to be this alive.

--Ashli Wood