I watch humans fumbling to make a connection between the universe and our bodies, as if without their metaphors and poems likening birthmarks to galaxies, we would be two separate entities, a collection of particles that inhabit entirely detached spaces from one another. Truly, the connection is evident in far more than freckles that resemble specks of dust and planetary material; our skin is not just branded by our environment, but bloated by it.

We are made of mostly water.  We are oceans, our insides are swampy, and when we bleed, the sight is reminiscent of sunsets. There is a universe beneath our flesh, internally, like how we exist within the flesh of our universe.

I feel this connection most when I consider him. My body deflates into a cloudlike existence –soft, floating, pacified. His touch warms me, it calms me, it grounds me but in the sense that I am still free to kiss the stars, and my lips become soothing to them.

One of our final nights together, about midnight on Valentine’s Day, he took me to the beach and faced me in front of the ocean, stood me below a dome of astrology in the skies. Lucid blue from the constellations and water stretched for what seemed like days, all-encompassing me. But my eyes could not leave him, especially his mouth slipping into smiles, because somehow he appeared even more beautiful than the immensity of our earth enveloping me. He cradled me there, he lifted my dress, and still I felt warm against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean in winter.

He is a dream, and he is an angel, and I believe he steals ornaments from the sky to gift to my heart so that I can feel as beautiful and as grand as all the universe combined.