I knock when I fly under yellow lights, remembering long limbs and the secrets of a girl who was never mine. I don’t wonder if you think of me, I don’t think of you as something complete. I’ve mutilated the memory (a loving process, I promise), removing the humanity and fixing the Saint into the stars. It’s what you do with heroes of the soul, you immortalize the pieces of them that saved you and forgive the rest away into anonymity. I could never cling to You the Person, but I love you, the memory. You, the Savior. You, the embodiment of change and perseverance. You, the embodiment of wholeheartedly. I remember you and I knock on glass as I fly forward, as I lean in with my whole heart, and continue to pursue the beauty and joy you reminded me existed outside of my selfishness and immaturity.

If it mattered at all it should reassure you, I suppose. That she let go. It wasn’t a pretty one, but she pulled off Ophelia with disarming candor as she drifted to the bottom of the basin of Selves. I believe the girl I knew would’ve appreciated that. But she let go and she lays there, decaying merrily into the fertile earth that feeds the Marais. Her heart beats in my chest and keeps alive the memory, homage to the teachers, shamans, and guides I have been lucky enough to love. Blessed enough to have been and be loved by.

We rot, my dead selves and I. We rot, we riot, we grow and live and learn and die, and we do it again, and we put our wings together one life at a time. Sewn together with these golden threads of love, speed-smeared yellow lights weaving themselves in as I learn to fly. I’ll keep reaching up to touch the lesson, secret rituals to remind myself, my thunderous, whole heart, of our capacity for joy.