The year is 2095.
Religion is black and gold.
Reciting prayers are now the only way you can sleep, and all the conversations you had with others that never involved moving your mouth,
and I believe people smoke cigarettes because there is a salvation in being able to stop parts of you from growing that do not know how to do anything else. It occurred to me that we make everything before we even see it, and that is how extensive beauty spreads, it exists without acknowledgement, yet it is always there.

I woke up without my senses, not knowing the flavor of the string which holds these
linnens afloat on the laundry
of life's backyard, but I know it was where it was supposed to be, as most things are.
I do not believe in phantoms but I believe that when asking questions, there is always a response.
The world answers you back every time, and although
I have yet to understand the dust found between its proverbs that
I assume was beaten out of old rugs and woven from cobwebs.
What else is there?
I am constantly torn between being lost and being alive and looking for the difference.
Constantly torn between loving where you live, and trying to become
I found so many ways to be, that I never spent the time looking for ways to understand.

In the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul says :
"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God."

I do not know anything about God except that he was sure to not make us strong enough.
When people leave something, even if they don't see it, even if their memory forgets it so strongly that it's existence becomes less than it has ever been before, something in the world forgets how to grow.
Forgiveness is difficult.
Understanding is difficult.
But no one ever really has time for things that come easy.
Remember that we did not give the world it's color, we are only here to watch it change.


I am only here to show you that even in loss, even in darkness and ways and places that we may never understand, there is always something to see.
I wonder if everything in this world is connected in some way similar to that, and if we, in our most bare state of being, were once broken at the hip from the pieces of this world we hold most beautiful.

I know what the body sings, and what pushes blood inside people's arms and legs, how life and death is the only art that humanity is worthy of remembering. About the ending of things: is there any better way to die than lying on concrete, feeling your Life detach itself from your core and knowing nothing that you can hold on to is going to save you today, knowing that this is simply a conclusion of what was always there?
Remember: we never love anything enough to keep it alive,
and whether or not you want to believe it, you need more than love, because we are not built to withstand something so immense.
But in our lifetime, if we are lucky, we will find someone who makes you feel the way you do when you hear your Mother laughing from the living room.
How even the smallest ways to love things are greater than happy endings and how even in our greatest moments we are simply what we are.

1) For every great skyscraper, there are petty fingers that built them.
I wonder if we were made the same way.
They were strong enough to raise a hammer, but not enough to raise a family.
I wonder if we were made the same way.
She is cold, and he is drinking, and this is our backbone.
She is alone and he is driving home too fast because sometimes you don't have to be in the wrong place to be looking for the wrong thing.
She is afraid and he is warm, this is the beginning spark of a forrest fire filled with broken glass shattering in broken homes with broken people inside on a broken piece of land in a city that has too much rain for someone to build an emergency room in. Everyone with a burden holds their confessions in their left palm and their beggings in their right and no one ends up having enough arms to hold each other.
2) One day the whole world will be in your hands too, and you'll see that sometimes darkness can blind you worse than the red glare the sun paints your vision when you stare at it with your eyes closed.
You will be brave, you will stand up straight, you will stop being royal when people stop painting Jesus with a purple robe.
Even the concrete asks the sun to make it a garden so try cracking your knuckles a little louder and maybe you will wake up as a mountain.
3) Autumn. When you wrote secrets on notebook paper and taped them underneath benches in the city park, you gave too many pieces of yourself to things that weren't made for holding that much weight.
But you said it kept you honest and there were never any reasons for me to ask you to stop giving away the parts of you I wanted to myself. It kept me humble.
4) I am alone
5) You are October in a green dress with a black mask around your eyes and you have stolen the breathe of that day. And I hope when you are 80 years old you feel a breeze sliding on the back of your neck reminding yourself of all the times it should have snapped in half during the moments of what should have been your hanging, how it takes you back to living life like you're always in the desert and stealing innocent people's money and smoking cigarettes beside rattlesnakes.
I hope you find a beach in the Caribbean that asks to be died on, I hope you learn to forgive people harder than you can cry on their shoulder. I hope you watch a sunrise that you spend the rest of your life thinking about. I feel like for that to happen you need your feet in the ocean or underneath a rocking chair, but I would settle for your bedroom.
6) But with you it was never settling.

Nothing is as simple as it ever seems, and nothing ever will be.
You can say "I love you." or "you make me happy" without uttering a single word, and I think that's
the only reason anyone can make it past the age of twenty-five.
I remember being in third grade wishing I was made of steel and concrete and every other single thing that my father's knuckles couldn't break through.
I remember being young and putting conch shells to my ear because then you would hear the ocean, and I remember doing the same to my grandfather's grave, and how his marble tomb sounded like a hollow room with smoke rising upwards through the floorboards, and I see how even at our composition, we are flooded with what we cannot turn away from.
I see the power of finding more in things that you don't really understand, and that even something as soft as a voice can be my sweet tooth.  
I was once told that people are exactly what they allow themselves to be, and are defined by the things that they were given, yet decide to change.
So just know that I feel the time passing like wind sliding down my back, and I am carving softer ways to love you,
I am trying less to know you and more to know why.

Because the way tires leave blisters on the skin of the road when they leave too quickly, is the same way goodbyes scrape arms.
It is easy to devalue our breath, when we live in a world filled with flame, and coal, and ice which are not supposed to be beautiful, but despite their purpose, they find their ways to be.
It takes courage to pray to someone knowing that gravity can ****** your words from the air and bring them right back down to the soles of your feet.
So when we question things like Heaven and wonder if that big blue sky is another bruise on someone else's Mother's arm, we find much more than answers.
We find that people are nothing extra, they are only themselves, some simply more than others.
We are more afraid of a silent and a hushed love than we could ever be of one that oozes too many words, so I will continue quieting the world until it is time to listen.
So yes,
hell exists.
But I refuse to believe it is a place, and as far as I am concerned it is a moment.
It may be one moment or millions of them, but hell is real once you understand that the people who are supposed to love you like bandages that cover burn marks, seem to be pretty good at starting fires when no one is looking.
These are just things I was thinking about on the car ride home after I ran into your Mother in the grocery store.
She said you still walk like there is sand in your shoes, and I realized that being in places isn't the same living in them.
We have bad habits of getting up and taking a few steps toward someone just to say we were there, and I hope you are guilty of
loving me from within the distance.

You have to fight for everything, even yourself.
Nothing was ever built for weak people.
But you are precious.
You are all the things I never believed in but happened anyway.
You are all the last thoughts of the last moments of someone's life. All I ask is that you always find your way home like you lose everything except for this.
Remember that wind is a language, like everything else, and every time you meet a new person you are discovering how to believe in people. And where we live, there is a lot of wind.
So in effect, I believe War is another way of saying I love something so much that I can't stop breaking whatever makes it sad.
And where we live, there is a lot of war.  
And courage is the form we take when we become someone else's second chance.
Remember that Earth is cold, that the world is a scary place to live, but ask yourself what the world is made of.
We all bleed the same amount, and we forget that if you ask for freedom then you have already lost it.
That sometimes running and leaving and going does not always take you somewhere else, and that in order to keep things, sometimes we have to lose them.

Even in your medication, even in the early morning and the foggy air and the heat from a meal your Mother made you, one you ate as if it was a way to recover, your promises haunt you like a quiet hum that no one else notices, one that sits at the back of your skull until it softly melts into something that you call a part of you. And the rain is still there.
Still in its eternal state of trying to find enough within itself to break down whatever doors it believes to be knocking against, and you look right past it.
Your Mother made you this meal, your Mother was singing in the kitchen, the same one that you swear gave color to her milky skin, the same one where you saw that same skin bruised by your Father.
And you don't know how she can make such a place seem so much easier to step foot in, like the whole time you're just looking for a way out but for right now, where you are is okay. With some people, their dreams find ways to follow them when they wake up and then they slowly start to ease their way into places like the bottoms of their sneakers or even their shadow, and then one day, when you try to remember why you are here, and the way the winds would blow right through you in your slumber, you realize there isn't a difference between the skin that held you at birth, (the skin that was there the moment you became and the moment you became less all at once) and the things it cannot touch, and you see that everything is it's own language and has its own way of being and it is beautiful. And every day in your wake, in the moments you rarely remember, you lose a sense as to why, you even forget to ask about it, and it is up to you whether or not you find it, or replace it with the things people give you, because people will give you a lot. They may not notice it, they may not even have good intentions, but they will keep your hands full.

Away from her is when you feel her the most.
You do not know how this is true, but when we are confused, the only thing left to do is find a way to understand.
So you looked for her; in drainpipes, in places that shined too brightly from the insides, in quiet dinners, in all the street corners that smelled like the flowers sitting on her front porch, and in the end, you feel so much smaller compared to how heavy the world has always been, even from it's beginning.
How could anyone grow while living on a place that does not realize how vital change is?
From the moment you came to being, from the moment you experienced so much light and hands and whispers and beauty for the first time that all you could do was cry as hard as possible, the wind has been pushing against your feet, trying to sing in all the places that cannot hear.
We see the still surface of a lake, or the deep **** of the ocean, and we know it is ok to jump in, and we know we can not be in it forever, and I believe you to be my favorite body of water.
We know that all the things that had a beginning, no matter their importance, no matter their size, nor their texture, all have an ending.
If there was no ending, life would have nothing else to offer.
I am writing this to you with my Mother's favorite pen, I hope you can feel the gentleness in everything you read from now on.
The world is a constant apology, when we tried to learn about our nature, we confused giving and trusting, and we never realized it. A year later I'm learning about true forgiveness, the type that doesn't ask for anything, the type you had when you were still a child.
You were singing to me and I was peeling apples and I realized that the only thing we really end up missing the most is ourselves.

Build me with frostbite covering my heart, build me with a snowflake constantly falling from the roof of my mouth, build her with an addiction for cold weather. Let every person I miss for the next 20 years smear a dab of daylight on my sternum, let me lick my canyon deep wounds with the honeycomb tucked in between your teeth.
I want to stick a panic room underneath the chalices in my palms so they aren't so timid once I hear you talk about wearing Sunday clothes when you had your first beer.
I want the next girl I kiss to have lips like daylight and her hands to be warm, her legs to be every Summer that lasted just the right amount of time, build me with gunslinger fingertips that touch and touch and touch and stay steady, build my footsteps with the sounds of a rainstorm knocking it's fingers on the ground of an empty parking lot, build her out of prayers for a flood.
If I didn't bruise so easily, if I wasn't looking for a way to be made of a river, if I needed the silence to mean something, then I would ask you to build me out of quiet revenge and goodbyes that stick in your sides like tree branches, I would need you to build me out of reasons to believe instead of reasons to be afraid, I would turn my kneecaps into strawberries in exchange for potter's hands so I could mold you a bulletproof spirit. I want to spend the rest of my life watching the clouds, I want to have a voice as steady an oak tree and I want to see the sun cry rays of light so hard that it has nothing left in it but happiness and tugs the sky so tightly it turns purple.
We are nothing but a list of demands.

"She was carrying a book, and the hand-picked flowers she placed on the bed outweighed even the drag of his dying. We believe it's the silence that's fearful, never the words; and yet whenever she stopped reading to turn the page, he would smile. Perhaps, in that stillness he felt his heart stop searching for instructions on how to live."

Jude ****** - Boys Throwing Baseball

And that is the only thing our heart does without understanding why; it searches.
We are too human to love change, something that is as dangerous as anything we could ever willingly let pass us by, and too human to not look for it anyway.
How some things are so much of themselves that they become their own language, like a bright red silk sliding against the shoulders of a woman, how these things are not made for each other, but made for the moments they are intertwined in.
How silence even weighs from the things that never were, taking from the miracles that were one opened mouth away.
And now, as you remember one specific death the most, you desperately search for the life in everything that passes you by, even the things that you know have nothing to offer.
Even the World, in all It's isolation, gives back to us by pushing us away from It.
Even the small things that we decide to keep for ourselves have come a long way to find us.
A cigarette. A person. A rainfall.
All spend their whole lives waiting to be found.

The dirt and the heavens have sat and shown us everything at once, telling about the heart has grown gray hairs on it's brim waiting to be groomed.
I say they are roots, not hairs.
I say all the words anyone can ever spill into you are a rainstorm or a desert and they are going to make you wilt or drown you but either way you are as much of yourself as you can be.
We live in a world that is plagued with shadows that are taken apart by sun beams and sparks of the moon yet they do not know how to stop coming back to our hips like black horses that ride with what we allow Them to ride with.
And they sleep like they know there is a tomorrow, they have courage welded from wind and reverence from the cathedrals of giants that do not know how to be anything less than their very own purpose.
I think of the chapels of light, and the towers of dark, and how there are not even kingdoms filled with both of them, and I am reminded that they love each other too much to be consumed with the presence of one another knowing the world may stop it's dancing.
I hope come to be that way.
That I learn to love someones precense so much I cannot bare to be around it.
Infesting the night or the stars dictating the day as if something that cannot be held is not worth hoping for.
I think of what does not return and what does return, and ask that I have the wisdom to know the difference between what keeps me from seeing, and what has spent it's entire life giving my eyes gifts wrapped in flesh and blood and bone and filled with secrets not made to be kept on shelves or shoulders.
This world is not a child that can lie on your chest in slumber and fall asleep as easy as it wakes up. And I say, there cannot be evil where there is music, and that both what we give, and what we take, are the mosr beautiful thins our bodies can produce and that,

that is what is hidden in between shades of the Earth and her silence.
And from the loss and the blind places of land,
we run.

From your Father,
When I grew up I lived in a small brick house that was cold in the morning no matter how many times your grandfather yelled at the fireplace, the world never let him dream, he had to earn it.
You will never meet him.
You will never be the small reminders and the soft tug on the bottom of my sternum helping me sleep at night, I will give you string and yarn asking you to weave silk and save me from the winter.
Your hands will be overflowing with apologies, the sink will always be filled with water that looks like it is pulsing at an open wound, and the gauze from your mother's gentle throat is never going to stop you from leaking out how sorry you are.
I was not raised to be what you need.
I am not going to love you the right way.
When you are 7 I am going to tell you that the way you carry yourself isn't tall enough, for your 9th birthday I will give you a mustard seed and a pocketknife and will ask you to grow cherry blossom trees throughout our back yard and in all the pastures of the city, and cut each of them down the very next day, and THEN I will tell you how to be a man.
When you are 17 you are going to cry so hard that God mistakes your mouth for the trumpets that were used to tear down Jericho and when your walls come apart I am going to color your heart with footsteps leaving the room.
I will show you how to miss a warm shower, how to pretend so hard your head cracks and your skull looks
like the coldest bowl of tomato soup I ever gave you.
You will not see that this whole time I have been staining your windows to see things in a better light, even if it is not clearer in the afternoon.
This is my blessing.
From your Mother,
I was raised with ***** hands and the only person who I ever looked at in the morning and loved back was the sun.
Your grandfather taught me how to ride a horse, and cover up a bruise, how to scrub blood stains out of my white blouses, and a whiter conscious, and how to grieve.
Oh how he taught me to grieve.
You will never meet him.
When you are 10, I am going to write down all the sins of your father on a piece of paper, slit your throat with it, and tell you that it's just a papercut, I will show you that faith does not move mountains, it simply makes them smaller.
You will stand up, shake the dust off your knees, and learn to clench your fists without worrying who will hear you.
I will try, but I will not love you correctly.
When you are 13 I am going to show you that what you see is not always on your side, you can love someone harder than you can stab them, but people are going to worry about ****** knuckles before they take a second look at a bruised heart, they're going to forget which one is more important.
I am going to tell you to forgive them, and I will never truly mean it.
Maybe I am sorry.
I am going to flirt with death until it blushes so hard that the blood from it's cheeks flows down to it's chest and gives it a heartbeat.
I am going to make you understand that GOD needs you just as much as you need Him, and there is power in prayer, in the way God might not be worth as much when people aren't giving Him their attention.
I am going to help you need less of the world, but a little more from people.
Your words will be full and deep, but never your pockets.
This is my blessing.

When we were born, we were asleep.
We may have been ******, and wet, and afraid, but we were asleep.
So we were miracles.
We walked without sight and we learned how to touch each other.
Slowly, like olive oil pouring from an open wound.

And we opened our eyes.
We looked for something to pray to, we looked for something to turn carpetburn and ****** knees into
blessings, unaware that heaven is not so quick,
and demons are not so hesitant.
We built Summer with a love that could not last.
We grew shade, not emerging from us,
but shade from glass and brick and
the shade that was beside us did not seem so great.
And we gave names to bark, and water, and gravel, and seed, and grass, and it was good.
And a few years later we held out our hand and we touched flame, and we touched mineral, and we touched machine, and bullets, and even stars, until we became everything that we only knew from our skin and our vision and we became less than what we were supposed to be.
We rode the sun to our palaces.
We loved everything as if it was dark,
We loved everything the way you would love something that didn't want a reminder.
And we saw this as good.
And we wept for the things that are simple.
And we wept for the things that were not so simple until
our eyes became coasts and we did not stop weeping.
And then we learned to jump.

The miracle, the way that we have found enough light in people to see them as more than a spit of darkness, is my biggest question.
Because the heart is tender, and more of a song than anything else,
and it is up to us who we allow to echo throughout our hollow bodies, proving again that our anatomy an opera house, and coming home a
form of apologizing without even speaking. You only die as many times as you live, you only come back somewhere one time until it starts to become a
piece of you.
People are the same way.

It was not how her hands
trembled pouring orange juice at breakfast, or how I saw his eyes never looking at her the right way,
but it was the silence that broke my heart. The quiet, the absence of everything beautiful floating in midair, suspended like lungs that
were made to be drowned and never had the taste of saltwater.
Silence, more than any word, carries the weight of cities, it is
the red exit sign, sitting atop the door near the back of every
restraunt that you look for without even meaning to. I want to
write about life, and how much it simply is, and how there is so much
to it, but I can't tell the difference between it, and the moments that
define it. All of these personal infinities that shape us like skin was made from wood and hands made to carve, and I find myself grateful for the small
eternities that come to me.
All of these ways to take the tender from the heart.

So we know what the world gives us. And after treating your body as something only used to tell time, we find that what makes us human, usually makes us more.
So now, if at it's composition, something is as much of what it can possibly be, there is always a corner in the world that keeps it's opposite.
Even with you and me.
People talk of living as if we do not die every single day, in more ways than one. Some times, it is because of people, some times it is because the lacking of them.
We talk of living as if we do it so well, but we still have no idea why the heart begins to beat.
We learn the most at birth, and the rest of the time we are just practicing how to lose things.
How to be places without leaving them.
And when we become so much of ourselves that we see others as places, then we turn into nothing but tourists to every person we meet, taking home things that help us forget that despite where we are, there is only one place we are ever supposed to be.

Everything is exactly what it is, and at the same time it is more than what it is.

I spend all of my time hoping you will understand.

It took me two car wrecks and 20 of your mother's favorite pieces of china lying broken on the kitchen floor to realize the world has so much more to say when it is silent.

Come back before you are ready.
Come back as anything you want, but you are still responsible for what follows you.

We need quiet to help us understand sound, as in : we need this tree to look differently under a cloudy sky than it does under a clear one.
The Why comes later.

Your father kisses your cheek and tells you goodbye and you spend the rest of your life not believing him.

People are the most spiritual things we have been given. Not even the trees are more, which we once thought were like the soul : when reached for, you knew was there. And always where you left it. There are some things in this world that you can spend your entire life searching for, and even if you never find it, it would still be worth every empty space you discovered along the way. We are defined by all the things we do not let ourselves forget. We are defined by what we allow the small pieces in ourselves to be. As in : you think your heartbeat is a thud, many of them, but they are all memories, you still keep alive. They are all the places you were at when things were so easy on you that the moments you lived in covered your skin like sunlight and just sat there like it had nowhere else to be.  Whether it be the sound of a baseball rolling off your fingers or the first time you almost wrecked your car and went on with your day, we are the things we do without noticing