Tonight on the car ride home I leaned myself forward so I could see the stars better and turned the volume up while simon and garfunkle were playing. started yelling out the lyrics to “only living boy in new york” and felt really lost and really alive for the first time since high school. The other night I wrote about how my father is a man of minor miracles - realized today that I’m a girl of minor fiascoes. Thought about how I held you last week. It was the first time I ever held new life. I never knew what that felt like before. It made me nervous, thinking about what I was holding. This tiny little thing. God, you were beautiful. You were perfect. And it’s fucking tragic to me how these words lack the strength entirely to convey the feelings I’ve got criss-crossed behind them. Started to cry when I thought about the holes in your heart. Wondered if they were big enough to hold things like your mothers voice, the sticky sunlight of morning getting caught in the wax of the wings you left behind, the sound your grandmother made as she cried on the drive home. Or if maybe they’re too small for things like that. If maybe the only things they can hold are tiny handcrafted secrets I spend my days trying to build out of the dirt. How sometimes I find myself desperately trying to enjoy a moment, but my body feels to heavy for it. Like my heart’s stumbling all over the place, hands fumbling, thoughts all water-colored and messy. Trying so hard to notice the beauty in ordinary moments, to enjoy things slowly and without effort, admiring people who live so easily. I see some lovers making out by the lakefront, hear a boy playing guitar on a bench, make up a fake constellation out of some left-over stars and I’m trying to tell myself “enjoy this. you’re young and the world still has the ability to be lovely sometimes” but it’s like the feelings keep falling all over the place. Like they can’t get comfortable, breathing heavily under me. I try so hard to take things for what they are and love them even in their crookedness, in their almost poetic way of never being like I thought beautiful things were supposed to be. But my body’s just to heavy for it. Too clumsy to sit still for a goddamn second and love some moment serenely in the quiet symphony of summer’s eternity. Maybe you’re not the only one with holes in your heart burying quiet thoughts your mouth can’t even whisper yet.

--Ashli Wood