Vessel

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I should've been asleep already but I'd missed the last bus of the night.

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And so I walked - the streetlights passing overhead like a multitude of moons. A celestial dance of headlights streaming past like horizontal shooting stars.

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When I was young, before I'd been exposed to actual nudity, I had drawn what I thought naked bodies looked like beneath their clothes.

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And in this way, I peeled back the peep-show curtains of death because I was closer, then, than ever before.

 

I knew the texture of the city and its emptiness; and this, I realized, wasn't a problem to be solved, its neon lights dancing ahead.

 

So I chose to worship the rain that strobed across my skin because, I knew that, if nothing else, the sky was the one thing that belonged to us all:

 

There were as many ways to be human as there are people on this planet. But all of us were headed home.

 

All I had wanted was for you to text me back. But there were things I knew, even then, I couldn't have; so I walked and walked. My figure, my form, part of a great human lineage.

 

And though I carried it in my breath and bones, none of it was for keeps.

 

I was but as vessel for love, sadness and all those chemical reactions.

 

A tourist.  

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An ephemeral earthling. 

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May I always be a good steward of this experience. 

 

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