What I wouldn’t give to be a bird right now. To wake up as the sun does, loud and obnoxious and beautiful. To live in a nest in a tree under the stars. To be protected by the leaves and the branches that support your home. To support your own weight by carrying it through the sky, across towns and cities, countries and continents. To not see or believe in a limit. To be able to eat only what the earth offers you. To watch the world go to sleep and to help it wake up again. To see everything so much clearer from high above. Simpler. Easier. A less complicated existence. What I wouldn’t give to be a bird right now….

I feel like an incredibly long sparkler. One that’s been lit and just keeps burning and burning, always threatening to really start sparking but dully fizzing down and down. I feel in this state of threatening to combust and feeling nothing at all. Well, perhaps it’s not nothing, necessarily. It might just be stillness. I can feel myself simply trying to stand still amidst a wavy lake. Like I’m on a boat or a dock, trying not to wobble so much that i topple in. But wobbling enough that my body doesn’t go completely stiff. I can’t go stiff, I can’t go numb, but I also am fearful that if I allow myself to feel everything at one time, I will completely drown. Suffocated by my own heartbreak.

Heartbreak tastes different when it comes from you. Sweeter yet more bitter all in one bite. I feel like all I’ve done since the last time I heard your voice is swallow heartache. And just when it seems I am able to catch my breath, I am swallowed in one gulp, just as a whale so carelessly swallows kelp—thousands at a time. As though, I am as identical as the creepy crawlies that somehow feed a whale’s large self. And I can do nothing but float to the back of its throat and ride the wave deeper down, deeper and deeper still and when I think I ‘m finally as low as the pit goes, I dive deeper—suffocated and silenced.

It’s interesting how something that has become such a guarantee in life can be snatched away without a second thought. And I hate the ability heartache has to strip you completely raw until it feels as though the very core of you in being eaten away, maggot-infested and alone.

It’s fascinating to me how fragile life is, not just your own, btu the life you build with other people. Part of me wants to drown the heartache in booze, waterboard and torture it unconscious until I remember that the body consuming all that alcohol is the same that feels like it’s rotting from the inside out like a diseased tree. And if I expect anyone to take care of me, I have to at least try to return the favor to myself. And I honestly want to feel it. I want to feel every breath of this heartache shaking through me. Because right now, that’s my only sign that it was real. That we were real. Real magic. To have built a whole home with someone just to have it crumble with two harsh words spoken over eight hundred thousand miles. As though the home we built was grainy and unreliable, destined to fall, just like the sandcastles that line the beach and are threatened at high tide. Completely obliterated by the waves that make up seventy percent of our bodies. How does it disappear without even leaving a mark of it’s existence? The longer the silence stretches mountains between us and no matter how hard I wish upon a star, you aren’t there. The star that was always you, guiding me back home is not just shaded by the clouds but has been annihilated entirely, zipping across the sky as I witness it fizzling, sizzling into nothing but dust.