I’ve broken so much of myself to carry these last few years forward: cracked bones to examine the marrow of my character, dissected my every decision. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of fixing yourself, this static concept of a thing, as though we are specimens trapped under glass. There is a universe of lifetimes inside of me I could spend a universe of lifetimes dissecting, and in so doing forget to live entirely.

I don’t think I’ll ever quite kill the fractals in my head- web upon web of patterns, predictions, presumption keeping me trapped in hellish loops of inaction and indecision. I’m beginning to see it more, before it chokes me. I know now I am someone I would trust, and maybe I don’t have to live inside out to deserve it.

There is such a tumult of emotion inside of me I struggle to determine which grief, which joy, which pain goes where- an undifferentiated mass that rises and recedes, breathing through my days.

In my surge forward I have necessarily been a volcanic landscape. My pulse settles itself more easily these days, my bite less rabidly defensive- realized I can’t trace the paths back to own my indiscretions faithfully: the hurt and pressure and aggression that come so naturally to me, the holes I tore that I’d’ve sold my soul to fix. I can’t undo what I’ve done any more than I can stop moving into my becoming, but I would have stopped time for you, to heal you.

The scar I’ll keep will be from my own teeth, the necessary tearing of an inescapable awareness that crippled the faith I’d been trying to build out of nothing. Rough hands and a selfish heart, an insatiable kind of recklessness we never should’ve tried to collar caught us up. Hard lines and absolutes and expectations ground us down, such a crushing exhaustion.

I’m sure this body will live pinned and flayed on the table, until I relax back into the endless learning of love. Until I don’t need the pain to define the borders for me.

You held my hand through a dozen hells. Held me up against the onslaught of my mind. You’re good at being strong in love, a truth that’s buried in my bones too deep to scrub out. You made me see that I have a few more lifetimes of learning to do, more to build now than break.

I am abundant, I am becoming infinite. I will soften, eventually, learn to yield instead of tearing down everything around me. And love will have led me there.