Love, I think, is the closest we will ever be to God.

Whether we were carved, sculpted, or blessed with life by beautiful accident,
we are the closest to divinity when guided by our hearts, whose hearth provides life to the soul.

I have loved. My heart bursts and aches with love,
overwhelmed, overflowing, singing its song through tears, hugs, and kisses--through hugs, words, and acts.

Love motivates us. Love guides us. Love strengthens us. Love weakens us.

Love guides us to die at any hand to save the life of another,

Love guides us to rot in numb existence, and guides us to blossom in beauty and truth.

Love guides us to express in measures beyond our own comprehension--ans guides us to suppress our strongest nature, for the sake of another.

I belive love is a double edged sword. I belive love is a true, divine power--perhaps born of vital, carnal need, or perhaps born or divine mercy and grace.

I have loved.

I love my mother, whose sunlight brings the day and whose gentle twilight brings my sleep.

I love my father, whose endless patience and guidance brings the tide to weather my soul into rounded, ready stone.

I love my sister, whose soul sings alongside mine in both contrast and harmony--together we learn. We give and take--strength, weakness, lessons and lucky breaks--we are the silver glass, reflection and change.

I love my brothers--one whose near nature reflects my own, and who teaches me what I could be. What he is now--better, grounded, and blossoming.

What time grants us is grace--growth and understanding. Love.

My youngest brother, born so long after me as to be a baby throughout my life--I love him like I've never loved before, fiercely, greatly, and with strength to undo man, mountains, and the laws that govern this earth. A love to undo the written code of man.

With enough time, I understand that this must be the way my mother loves me--and I wonder whether my love compares to hers, or if this life changing love is only a distant echo of what a mother truly feels for her children.

One day I will know--I can only hope, or pray, that all those I love now will be there to find out alongside me.

I love my dog. She is gone now, but I know my soul grew alongside hers, and I know one day we will meet again--not for a grand reunion, but instead for the small things that warmed our hearts from the start--

Understanding, learned across a decade more of puppy and child growing together. Safety, care, and companionship--I was there for her, and she was there for me.

Love is the language of the soul. I believe it to be a gift--the greatest gift, motivator, and architect of our world--

An incredible chance--a carnal blessing from something greater than ourselves. Evolution, God, some kind of ancient law--whatever it may be, the power to unite hearts across species, bloodlines, histories, natures--there is nothing more beautiful, and nothing nearly as frightening.

Now.

I have loved. I love through acts, words, and thoughts--through distance traveled, through closed lips and open ears, and through collarless companion walking alongside me at night.

To be loved is to be free--and to love is to he shackled.
I think there is nothing greater or more natural in this world.

I have lost some of those I love. I will lose more yet as I live.

I am terrified--scarred already, perhaps even changed beyond any hope of returning to what I once was.
Sleep is lost to me, agonizing over those who my heart bleeds for--those I've lost, and those I've yet to lose.

But in the daylight, hugging my mother, loving my father, guiding my brothers, watching my sister, and measuring graves overgrown with grass--

I know love is what keeps me here. Love is what lets me bleed, what let's me cry--what let's me feel the divine privilege of heartache.

Without love we are less than beasts. Without love, we are without guidance, creation, and compassion--

Without love there is no children. No mothers, no fathers, no friends nor sons or daughters--no art, thought, or care.

Love is a double edged sword.

Humanity has blessed me with a living ignorance--apathy that allows me to sometimes look away from what the future holds. Away from the inferno that is the inevitable end of all love, as all living things comes to pass--

But humanity has blessed me with love itself. Something stronger than thought or reason--something strong enough to force evolution, to force strength and conquest.

As I think of those I've lost, I know to be true that I feel no bitterness towards the power of the heart--for the heart has taken me, wholly and truly as it has so many of our species and countless others.

Love has won, as it was always meant to. Instead of bitterness I feel only resigned gratitude--knowing the truth that love will bless me with strength and will beyond the purpose of our flesh and bones--

Knowing that love is what lies at the end for us all. Our last thoughts as we pass into what lies beyond, and the raging, consuming fire that turns body and mind to destruction in the face of love's loss and threat.

I fear love, and I worship it. I curse it, and I bless it.
Such immeasurable pain can only be matched by such immeasurable love--a feeling that written words such as these and all those before and after can hardly hope to describe.

I know that my life is one day forfeit. Would I have given my life for those loved who have already passed, and how I would give my life for those yet to come.

No matter our origin, our belief, or our present--love is what has brought our species to this morning's sunrise. Love is what has brought all other mammals to the morning that dawns on this Earth at every turn of its axis.

Love is written into our bones. On our Earth, love is life--love is time, memory, heartache and change. Love is species' persistence. Life's persistence.

I am scared. I am grateful. I am resigned. I am my heart, and my heart is love--these words, though written through tears and joy, are a faded echo of what love truly is.

Look in your heart, and look at those you love.

You will understand, as we all do in the end.

I am immensely stupid
To have allowed myself to walk so far.

Why do I echo in the endless void?
It makes sense to me that in this nothingness
my voice would be swallowed from my lips,
pulled from my throat
and lost to the liminal silence of nonexistence.

The horizon was only something I could imagine,
an intangible idea I could grasp with the barest edges of my mind
and yet, it spoke to me.
My voice was returned to my ears, warped and misshapen,
a single variation from the mouth of true nothing. A gift.
I began to sing to the void.
Delicate songs slow and high,
broken, to avoid being lost to the infinite warble of space,
a thing of oblation and humanity.

With so much time my heart tired of that lonely devotion,
the ringing solidarity of a single soul.
I yearned for something greater than what had become of me,
something greater than the timeless pit I submitted to.
I abandoned the pinprick care of my song, and
embraced the only companionship I would ever have.
I stepped away from delicacy, and into echo.

I dove into the void, howling my right to blinding sound.
Notes blended and crashed against one another,
my chorus, mirrored voices swelling into a creature
unrecognizable.
My existence was many and entirely mine,
changing my world from nothing to everything. But
such immolation can only last so long, with
silence always hovering just beyond my efforts.
Eventually I needed rest, each burst of creation more taxing than the last.

Rest became hiatus, and hiatus the stillness I knew before.
I could not defeat forever, and I could never reach the end of infinite.
I did not sing. My voice began to tremble, to thicken.
My voice began to fight me.
And with time, it failed me.
The first crack
like the hand of God clapping against the earth,
sealing my fate
and leaving me with the agonizing awareness
of my own disuse.

I miss being a child
When I had no boundaries,
And those around me had none of their own

We would drink each other in,
Our minds racing, probing,
Great sweeping limbs pressing into every corner,
Ink oozing into cracks and out of seams
And thunder peeling away layers like a bullet's exit through metal

We drank and drank,
Tipped cups of humanity
And spilled the vast consciousness of life down our chins,
Our throats, and soaking the shirts we wore,

And we learned,
Of each other
And of ourselves
And of the world.
A child's world, it now seems

I feel the press of adults.
I have not had a drink in so long
And I see this cup, one of existence and expanse,
I see it sitting so lonely in the center of my town square

People, adults, are everywhere, pushing
And forming a fountain of empty stone around it
Shuffling and averting their gaze

I feel like a sore spot,
My eyes are attached to the drink by fired harpoons
I cannot move them, I cannot move my head,
And I most certainly cannot move my body,
Where adults are streaming past me like water down a drain

Why don't they drink?
They must surely feel this feeling I feel,
Like bamboo shooting from my stomach
Like my mind rotting without the essence of life

They refuse to drink,
And becaue I am in this adult world,
I refuse to drink too

I had not realized, until years later
Locked in a room with some wet mixture of paint
Drying around the edges inside me
Crusting, not really drying like paint is supposed to.
I told myself I understood that I didn't understand
That we didn't get along
There was no reason for love.
She stole my heart and that was okay,
And she'd steal it again when I took it away.
That she was feral and strange and not at all like me
Until, hiding in my little lit up world
Flooded with blue and softness
A dog, and a cat, and a gray blanket
I was warm and content, and ignoring the dark shadows in the back of my mind
But also so cold at the same time.
It was a good day, the kind where you tumble along like a bubble riding a stream
Nothing of interest in the day's report
Until something stands out.
Only one thing stood out
And it filled my warm day with cold, like two hands of opposite color linking,
Black as ink and white as the trim on my gray blanket
Touching, but never mixing
And in my book,
I read the words "sick with a miserable happiness."
And like a boot
Falling in my stream, popping my bubble
And forever warping the path I would take
I understood what she was, and what reason there was to love.