i.
the sparrow fits neatly in the palm of your hand, its tiny heartbeat pulse fluttering against your fingers. its life can be as short as closing your fist, as long as your mercy.

there are many small things like the sparrow, you know, many small things in the palm of your hand. do you choose mercy? do you choose a swift end?

ii.
the sun is dying.

you know, the one hiding in your concave chest? the one crying over the waxy feathers scattered across your bathroom floor?

the sun sinks into the horizon-sea and you wish you could follow, but your feet catch on brambles and the waves pull away away away...

you are cold. you do not know how one can feel such cold and survive. yet, here you are, alive.

iii.
sometimes when you look at me i wonder why you can smile with eyes so sad. sometimes i wonder why your lips can stretch over your teeth in a ****** snarl when all your eyes seem to scream is your desire to run.

sometimes i wonder if you know i love you. sometimes i wonder if you think it matters.

iv.
god brushes away your tears with just the tips of their fingers, holding you gently as if you are something precious. but then, maybe you are. what do you know?

but your dog doesn’t know why you are sad, only that your wet face tastes of salt and the sounds wrenching themselves from between your teeth are wounds. his tongue is like sandpaper on your cheek, smoothing out your harsh edges and softening you into something worn and warm.

your mother stands in your doorway, an old pain wearing cracks into her indifferent mask of freckled skin like yours, an ancestral grief painting fine red lines on the whites of her gunmetal eyes like yours. children of your line have always been tender warriors, but bullet casings are tangy on your tongue and angels’ song hums just within the shell of your ears.

your mother watches you, with god's hand in your hair and their gentle whispers in your ear and your dog’s nose pressed into the crook of your neck. her smile is tentative, tremulous, but then again, she always has been, even with knives in her hands and razors between her teeth.

v.
it is okay to cry when celestials make their nests behind your eyes. at least now your mind is one with the stars you have always strived to reach. at least now even with your thoughts you are never alone.

even if you are an old soul, the universe has existed for so long, your hundredth reincarnation is still a child against it.

vi.
when you dream, do you dream of the many-eyed creature twisted between the tree roots in your front yard, the being of bright eyes and ****** teeth and ocean-deep sorrow? do you lay in the grass and wonder what a tragedy that beast is, to be monstrous in form but as soft and small as the sparrow at heart?

it is one thing to polish your misfortune until it is a gleaming weapon. it is another thing entirely to let your cracked-stone heart crumble into the dust and dirt you’d use to sustain the flowers you’d weave into crowns when you were younger.

vii.
the butterfly knife in your pocket is cold. you haven’t touched it in a while.

viii.
it is raining. each drop falls, soaks your clothes, clings to your skin. it anchors you to the ground, and you breathe. the air is damp and electric and you are alive.

you will die someday, of course, but for now you sit as high in your tree as you can climb, face tilted up to the cloud-obscured stars. maybe one day you’ll join them. maybe one day your heart will burn in your chest again, a reignited fire.

ix.
you trip up the staircase after being away for so long, high on the realization that living is as simple as breathing and as difficult as touching the core of another human being, of what they are.

you don’t know who you are anymore, but that’s okay. there’s no such thing as a permanent state of self anyway.

x.
‘the end’ doesn’t always mean ‘game over.’ sometimes it means ‘it’s time to write yourself a new story, to begin anew.’


—just remember: i’m glad you exist

h.f.m.

i.
heavy-layered blankets when i wake up as something sharp trying to remember how to breathe, and the darkness of the night to hide how i’m not a safe thing anymore, and how the stars watching me through the window anchors me more to my humanity than anything else i can remember in this lifetime

ii.
burnt-gold rust-stained leaves crackling beneath my boots like a campfire, like warmth in darkness among blurred faces and laughter settling around my shoulders like an embrace even in the crisp cold miles and years away from memories that still serve to comfort in the absence of company

iii.
stories of wild animals searching out humans for help as if we are some sort of fae willing to assist only as it amuses us or as whim guides us (but in the end only serving to remind us that we are no better than beasts looking up to the universe in hope that there is an equal equivalent somewhere, the timid-quivering desperate belief that we aren’t alone)

iv.
milkshakes at five am held high to toast the rising sun as we sit on your iced-over roof in our t-shirts with barbed-wire words misting in the air before us as a cacophony of dissent rising with the morning fog from between our teeth

v.
this burning terror in my chest akin to the winter sunset consuming the western sky because it tells me i’m afraid but that means i’m alive

h.f.m.

i.
when I speak sometimes I wish I could catch the words in the air and hold their fluttering-stabbing-twisting in my cupped hands and reshape them into what I meant to say, into something that would brush the shell of your ear softly instead of slip through your fourth and fifth ribs.

ii.
I hope it isn’t too forward of me to say that I don’t think that things can be broken. that is to say, that I don’t think broken things cannot be their own whole. everything is pieces of other things, fitting together like a child first learning how to put a puzzle together and forcing the pieces to go where they want and be whatever they choose.

I don’t know if that metaphor makes any sense to you, but I hope you can understand what I’m getting at anyway.

hurt doesn’t define you. your past isn’t a rope around your neck. my love is not conditional upon some arbitrary state of “wholeness.”

there is such a thing as wellness, yes, and I want that for you, for us, but that does not always mean returning to the state of self you inhabited before your pain. the human being is an ephemeral, ever-changing creature, and I will not love you less if I have to meet you again.

if I have to rediscover you as you heal, then I will. if I have to show you how I have refused my splintered pieces into a new shape myself, then I will.

I will love you gladly, unconditionally, vulnerably.

iii.
do you understand me? I have a scar on the inside of my thigh, but I don’t remember where it’s from. I have tiny, scattered patches along the underside of my jaw from when I’d pick at uneven skin. I have accumulated all sorts of scratch-thin, white lines across the backs of my hands and my forearms. stretch marks dash in lightning patterns under my clothes. do you think less of me for them?

iv.
I can be harsh like a blunt-force weapon when my attention slips, my shoulders a bastion of defensive tension, all sharp lines and a diamond-hard glint in storm-grey eyes. do you think this makes me ungentle? do you think I cannot form myself into a shelter if I so desired?

despite my rough-hewn edges and whip-like tongue, I’d like to think I can provide some sort of comfort, some level of reliability.

you don’t have to be soft, my love, but I find that sometimes it pays to be kind.

v.
once I saw you sitting in the park, fingers buried so deep in the tangled grass it looked like you were trying to take root.

it takes a certain kind of perspective, I think, to listen to things like trees. individual pillars, yes, but connected at the roots. isn’t that like what we are supposed to be? bound at the core with enough self-governance to reach for the sky, the wind and sunlight tangled within our reach.

vi.
you don’t need to worry about being enough for me. you will always be enough.

h.f.m.

i.
there is a boy who visits my dreams sometimes, colt-like and all of seven years old. his eyes, pale blue as shadowed snow-fall, are unsettlingly, peacefully unfocused and half-lidded, peering through long lashes of ink that brush his baby cheeks with each slow blink. pale pink and gold flowers, five-petaled and sweet, are woven through his dark, ever-dripping hair like pin-point stars of gentle flame. his edges are blurred, softened, and he silently guides me through the pitfalls and the white-water’s undertow in my sleeping mind.

ii.
the human is a thousand half-truths framed as gospel. an example: the dead all smile, grinning at the setting sun as the wind whistles through their ribs in a mimicry of breath. the dead smile and smile, and are alive as our memories of them, as alive as they are in our dreams. (and oh, in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?)

iii.
do you want truth from me? look who you’re asking. were you expecting me to tell you anything you don’t already know? i am just as real as you, just as human as you, just as much of a fallacy. sometime, somewhere, an old, lonely god dreamed us up for company. dreamed us up and watched us grow and learn and stumble and fail and pick ourselves back up with band-aid wrapped hands and scratched knees and feral grins as we start climbing the same hill will fell down with renewed determination. we want to know what’s on the other side, can only imagine it, and so we try again. (our angel cousins watch with a thousand eyes and shield us with a thousand wings and a thousand rings of fire from the infinity we are not yet enlightened enough to understand).

iv.
he has never been alive, this snow-soft not-ghost, this ink-stained child, this dreamed-up boy of mine. never breathed, never spoken, never slept. (do dreams sleep?) but he is as real as anyone i have ever imagined, or remembered, or thought of. the world is in the mind, we all know this. and the mind, truly, is and can only ever be, a place of dreams.

h.f.m.

i.
it is so much easier to write rage to write anger to write agony than all of those fluff-feelings of joy-love-peace-hope and i have a truth for you and pain is not sweet and we always want to turn blood into paint for a masterpiece as if our suffering is fair trade for our passion and and and—

ii.
my mouth is a wolf’s maw full of sharp and bone and hunger and i wonder what satisfied means and i wonder how you dare speak to me like you know me like you know anything about me like fact and truth are equals like absolute power is anything but the most concentrated form of weakness like—

iii.
9-year-old me listens with such innocence, such naivety, such sickening hope as i tell her a tale of redemption and happy endings but now the world is burning and people are dying and i am being ****** into a stagnant role under the title maturity and civil responsibility and if this is growing up then give me back the youthful fury of my teenage years where i believed that my voice meant something and my actions made a difference and that i deserved my righteous indignation at the world trying to condition me into using my will and my desire and my skill and my love for the sake of everything and everyone but myself while i try to beat my quivering into the shape of something of use.

iv.
my hands are shaking but i will take the fire itself into my hands if that is what it takes for you to listen.

h.f.m.

PART THE FIRST
our words are painted in the blood that coats our hands from our self-vivisection a harsh introspection gently brushing crimson paint over our mouths like too-red lipstick in the shade of the sunset before a storm and self-deprecation becomes an artform akin to the irony of smiles in the faces of skulls and surviving without really living.

PART THE SECOND
who was it that so thoroughly convinced us that gentleness is weakness that vulnerability is to be avoided at all costs that emotions are distractions that showing fear is a sign of defeat? when we accept our broken pieces not as failure but as experience and do not beat ourselves up for the cracks that remain that is when we will truly know who we are.

PART THE THIRD
we are afraid of the things we want the most because striving for something we cannot reach hurts less that achieving all we could have ever hoped for and having it slip through shaking hands like smoke in the winds of change and if that is not the hallmark of self-sabotage than i dont know what is.

PART THE FOURTH
like all things time is a construct merely a patchwork of cogs and stone circles and the small pieces of autonomy we carve out of our day to paste on clock faces like our painted-on smiles and ready acceptance of having our days dictated by our ancestors’ need to define-contain-control.

PART THE FIFTH
the hallways of academia are perfumed by anxious fear-sweat and existential rage mixing as a noxious fog of violet and violent movement in absence and the eddying swirls of determination’s backdrafts.

PART THE SIXTH
we loved legends with prophecies when we were young because we wanted purpose and direction and meaning and now we devour stories about rebellion and fist-fighting with fate because now we think we know that being told to only set our feet in orchestrated patterns is little more than accepting our role as puppets to the cosmos but really what do we know about anything? there is joy in clear directions and there is joy in carving our own path but either way life is a jungle and we are just as likely to be devoured by graceful creatures of earth and sky and beauty on the path as off of it.

PART THE SEVENTH
they say that youth is pain and that growing up is exhaustion but who are they and why do they get to dictate the trials of life by binding us into cliché who are they to speak sorrow into our very breath who are they to tell us they have taken the measure of human existence and found it wanting?

PARTH THE EIGHTH
peace is the name of a friend ive never met who might as well be imaginary and relegated to the dimmed halls and dusty attics of my early years.

PART THE NINTH
sometimes i wonder if i donated my breath to charity and the remaining hollow shell of myself to science would my gift be considered a sacrifice would my story be considered a tragedy would my life have meant anything would i have made my ancestors proud?

PART THE TENTH
and we learn that words are alive alive alive as we drown in eloquence not meant to be spoken in high places not meant for voices of thunder or gods but for the fragile invincibility of children.

h.f.m.

i.
graduation feels a little like tripping, a little like falling, a little like flying. for thirteen years our only job was to do what our teachers told us, learn what they taught us, shut up and sit still and listen when they were talking. we wrote pages and pages and pages on historical significance and environmental responsibility and socio-economic balances, all the while thinking to ourselves what does any of this have to do with me? and now the future whispers across our shoulders while we sit in parallel rows wearing identical black gowns it has everything to do with you.

ii.
half of us dont know what we are doing or what it is going to be like where we are going, or if we are even going to make it, but each of us are filled with a new fire that ripples under our skin like power, like a song, like the secrets of the universe murmuring come find me, children of hope, children of madness. because we have to be mad to believe we can change anything, we have to have a little bit of crazy to make a change. lucky for us, we are plenty insane, ready to shape the world under hands of benevolence and tolerance and innovation and freedom and hope.

iii.
they tell us we are the future, but theyre not entirely correct. what they tend to forget is that we are also the present, and we are already picking up their pieces to make a new mosaic in the shape of humanity’s rebirth.

h.f.m.