And What Would We Do, You And I, If We Could Know For Sure That Someone Was Out There, Squinting Through

And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure that someone was out there, squinting through the dust, saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only to be wanted back badly enough?

excerpt from Don’t you wonder, sometimes? by Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars (via: skinthepoet)

On turning 24 and shedding skin

I walked through being 23 empty-handed & lonesome; stripped off the warmth in the mold that casted my existence. A complete year away from the lands I used to call home. Being 23 was very much about trying to become both tender as the blue in the sky & daredevil as the red dancing in flames. In aiming to be everything, life felt wilder than ever before; in aiming for the sun, my thinking sometimes got reduced to mere shorthand. A year I finally dared to flood. And in doing so, I ran face first into several walls that tore open my skin. I learned that some people will lie straight to your face; and it’s not like in the Hollywood realm where an evil look or a stuttering voice will give away their lying. It’s usually the opposite: pretty, very pretty smiles that will convince you to run barefoot on shattered glass. It took time and guts to wrap my head around the idea that it’s okay to walk into these labyrinths; to understand that some of the doors we open will lead to black holes and it’s not a crime but nature to let the body get absorbed into the void.

Nature as living art. Nature as force. Nature as the shadows of our dreams. Nature as morning walks. Nature as being. My 23s were all about nature and my relationship with her. It felt like befriending a neighbor and finding out they’re cool as fuck: ‘hey you’ve always been there and it’s just now that I realize I’ve been missing out on great things all these years’. I bonded with nature and her frozen whites, vivid greens and Mediterranean blues. She held my hand and walked me barefoot through silent rainforest. She looked at me with eyes that shouted ‘dare to become’. And then it hit me: I’m more ready than ever to touch the world with my bare hands... even if it melts down in flames.

scientists fear

with a hand on the window frame, you looked out at the night sky. & turning your head toward me, you said there was this theory about the universe being ever e x p a n d i n g.

that every star, planet, galaxy & blackhole currently alive, is endlessly drifting apart from it all.

as though in their hovering for distance, in their majestic swaying through stellar matter, every atom of the universe claimed independence from our shared existence.

that same night our last the spellbinding vibes in your beauty & that rant over the cosmos, walked me into a laberynth of oblivion; cause what i forgot to tell you & what you didn’t seem to know, was that there is another theory out there: an antithesis on the dynamics of the universe.

scientists suspect the universe will eventually stop its expansion to begin its c o n t r a c t i o n. exactly as the ball vertically thrown to reach the sky, that at a certain height surrenders to gravity & starts its way down.

scientists fear that every star & planet & galaxy & blackhole will shrink into a single spot in place & time. a sort of big bang in reverse. outside going in.

boom

which is to say: you fled away from me to smash piece by piece the things we had built. i guess in some shape or form we mimicked the universe by drifting away from each other; by sitting on opposite edges of this galaxy; dodging our own asteroids; breathing distant stardust & riding comets that might never cross paths.

imagine, just imagine that these scientists’ fear comes true & all we know to exist begins to compress; will the universe then bring us back to where we were?

a massive clash. gallactic friction.

cosmos to cosmos, blackhole to blackhole, planet to planet, & lips to lips.

hey, this might just be the universe reminding us that we are destined to collide.

- @skinthepoet