Euclid
Some days I sit in my car thinking back on my life. The emotions play through me in fast forward from the time I was born until now and it floods my chest until I overflow in tears. I feel every night I laid on the floor wondering what I was doing wrong, every moment I have laid in front of my love wondering what I did to deserve such a gentle, kind connection. Every moment I have struggled and every moment my soul sang with joy at the pureness of this existence. They all add up to exactly 27.5 years tonight.
Tears warm my cheeks as I think what I would give to run it all back just to feel it all one more time.
When I was 5, I didn’t know what I was getting into, just feeling and observing the world moment by moment trying to learn what it all meant. When I was 13, I was letting the world decide what I was and what my place was in it. When I was 19, I was hurt, angry, and confused, hating myself for not being able to be the image of a woman. At 24 I was fighting for my life, trying to convince myself that I was still someone worth loving. At exactly 27.5, on this very night, I am divinely changed, finding a reason to live in every direction I look.
I still grieve for the little girl who had to go to hell to burn and come out from the ashes to find love for herself. I am reminded of her everywhere I turn. Whenever I see a young girl walking to school on the sidewalk, a young boy playing with his friends, in my lover’s eyes across from me, in my parents, and in the moving circle my spinning ceiling fan makes above my bed at 2am. I rejoice at the time I have ahead to go on loving every piece of me that was lost for years and returned to me in a soul search, digging through the sand in an hourglass, picking out the shards until they made a mirror though which I could finally see myself clearly.
There are plenty of cracks and sharp edges that break up the different parts of me, but I have finally seen the whole picture. And now that I have put myself back together, there is nothing outside of me that could make me forget the sight of her.
All I ask God is for a little more time. A little more time to love and appreciate what I have made from the shattered glass before I return to my rightful place in the light that shines through the fissures of who I have become on Earth. My heart cries and rejoices in the same beat and there is no better sound.
