03.15.2024

i think of love as having my arms outstretched, for balance.

tenderness is a virtue and tenderness is the end of the whole world. i map my body against its fleshy outline. something like a bandaid that has been stuck on for too long, where the glue melts and fuses into your pores. something actually meant to be peeled away slowly and we have collectively accepted the reality of hurt.

i like being in the water so long the skin gets all furrowed. its something about seeing the impact of stillness charted along the body. tracing it and knowing it, those ridges. the bath of the hospital, the bath of my childhood home. dangling appendages over that cold ledge. i want to learn to be gentle. to kneel in the presence of pain, on crayola coloured pencils and long grains of rice. catholics have always understood this. genuflectoriums and carpets with friction. those bruises along shinbone or knee as evidence, as proof.

my God is asking us to be gentle. my God is clasping our hands together for us with His hands.

to think that we ought to be connected, somehow. to think that we ought to.

i think there are too many writers and not enough lovers, probably. something in the way that one of them knows how to ache and the other knows how to point to it. to approach the spot where the tenderness is with kitchen scissors.

maybe the whole point is to give things up. i am emptying my pockets of heavy things, like mortar and brick and laundry tokens.

as proof, i am showing you the holes in the centers of my palms.