James Friedman
I have found within myself, upon this shifting season of my life, a moment of clarity spared for my thoughts about love. In poems and films it seems forever the blossoming of a new thing, an esoteric womb holding the birth of forever from my eyes behind a veil. Was it ever there? If not, then how come I have developed such a wound? Am I so sensitive as to let formlessness pierce me? Am I so blind as to have my footsteps falter in the light that I longed for, fearing the escape of the dark I know so fondly. No. I know your love. I felt it every step of the way. It coursed and it swayed, it parried and feigned. It wounds. I have come to give these thoughts names in words to consider the weightlessness of life outside my body, the distraction from the movements of my soul. There is love in this world. Yours is a knife lodged in the crevice of my heart, filling the hole you found there. While I choke silently inside, I show the world no blood, and in your arms hold on to life a little longer than I should. Were you to withdraw, every part of me would escape into a pool on the floor, and my consciousness would haunt my body no longer. My frame would walk the earth for perhaps a thousand years, searching for a death that stung as much as the first. A thousand years grieving the loss of the heart in time as each other part faded with nothing to feel its departure. With each cell gone, I remember more the person I used to be. The first death is in the heart, with all others after yearning the pain of something worth dying for.