I find comfort in the saddest things. Like knowing everything I hold dear is already broken sometime in the future.
The beads on my favorite dress already busted and scattered on the ground. The dress hanging in a lonely closet without a body to fill it.
My hair already gray. Maybe fallen out. My favorite guitar cracked and rotting in the earth.
Oh, Earth! Beloved, Earth. You're gone already, too. I can see it. Our earth home. Piles of smoldered ruin because maybe she couldn't take the stress anymore, maybe got too close to the sun, or maybe it was just time to start over.
And then what? We have to find another rock to live on. Or maybe just another sky to fly in.
It's inevitable. The death. The end. The brokenness that we already are.
You with your bones. The way they wrap around mine at night. The way I can never peel away from them easily in the morning. The way your flesh pulses with promise and life and moments that feed more moments that end in death.
Your bones already tumbling to the earth. Returning to where they started. And me, crying over them. Singing over them. My love running, always running to where you are. Crying and singing and longing my way back to you. Because that's how it goes. I always seem to find my way back to you.
And yeah yeah, I know that only our bodies die, only the unreal parts of us break, that love lives on and blahblahblah. Trust me, I know all about the parts that live on. I know them well. But that doesn't make me not love the parts that don't go on any less.
I love the parts that break. I love your hair and your eyeballs and the dirt under your fingernails. I love the finish on my guitar and the flowers by my mailbox. I love the colors and the tastes and the smells. I love the leaves when they bud, and I get sad when they fall.
And it's this: knowing that everything we are in the physical form—your blue eyes, my crooked smile, the way your hand cups the back of my neck, the way your spine curves, the way the skin wrinkles around your eyes when you laugh.
The love, the touches, the fingers on flesh and flesh on fire sending songs into the darkness.
Knowing that we only get to do it this exact way once. Knowing that the costumes we wear and the shoes we walk in and the bodies we kiss are already broken.
Knowing that there is no promise, there is no saying when it'll be over. Knowing this brings me closer. Drives me deeper. Brings me alive. Makes me burn.
It makes every moment with everyone and everything I love that much sweeter.