I had assumed we'd all picked our separate corners

and that was where we'd spend our time,

but it turns out there's a whole world to be seen

when you turn around.

And I never even noticed.

It seems daft, now. Now I know those long hours

that held hands to form years could have belonged to me,

rather than the corner. Minutes would tick and I'd form a blind contour,

following cracks and chips of paint with my fingers and eyes.

I thought if I scratched at them hard enough, I'd eventually get through to

wherever it was I wanted to go.

But two hands worth of bloody fingernails didn't earn me

what simply turning around would have.

An escape? I don't know that it would have been, to me.

I feel I would have taken one glance at that open rolling picture

and found a vicious fear had seized me, and that

I would have never opened my eyes again.

For all the words I have found to describe what it is I'm looking for,

I have found more numerous still those that would tell you why I have not

run to go and find it.

I am reflected in each person I see. I will always make you a part of me,

and it is less and less through a conscious effort that I achieve such aims,

and is now a reflex, holding that duality of self in my head.

You're so natural, the contours of your mind

settling and locking into the grooves of my own,

meshing and folding into an entirely different landscape

that is still somehow distinguishable as two separate halves.

Though I feel if I were to fall into a hole and die, or be carried away by a swift storm,

you would begin to fade too.

You wouldn't be able to stop it, and you might not realize what was happening,

might not perceive how deeply scarred you were,

but you would fade all the same.

Slowly and in small pieces you'd let yourself fall away from the vigor of living.

It is wrong to derive any spark of something hopeful from such a drastic picture,

but I can't help it. The ferocity that I have yet to fully unearth within myself,

with which I believe in the above, is what drives me further forward.

Without that focal thought to build around,

a structure so sound,

There would be just a shell of me.

I find no higher truth than you.

It's the moment when you look down and see footprints overlapping,

bringing you back to a place you never knew you wanted to be in,

that you begin to get an idea of how lost you are.

Sometimes you're lucky, and you realize what or who it is you were looking to find

right then and there, and you begin to set on a new path, solid and sure in your step.

But most often, you'll lift your head and look every which way,

sure you were meant to go left, while someone is pulling the string in you chest to the right,

and you'll find yourself even more puzzled than before.

No one tells you their names, and you're the last to know what is the task at hand.

So rather than attempt to entrench yourself in the present matter,

you keep walking forward, head down and heart set.

You'll only end up back where you started,

but there's a certain comfort to never really knowing where you belong,

rather than staying put and seeing you could have been stuck in a place you know you shouldn't be.

She's allowed to say the things I've so dearly wanted to plainly state

for such a long time.

The weight with which she throws around her words

is incomparable to that of mine.

If I were to utter the same phrase,

the world we've so carefully constructed together might crumble, indefinitely.

I have to avoid that at all costs, as it's the only home I really know.

We worked so hard towards that end, and for so long.

Give yourself some credit, this victory required a lot of subtle work.

But let me tell you a secret:

Soon, I'm going to ruin it. I'm sorry.

I love you.

Today I watched a fish die.

he was very tiny.

Out of the midst of the rest of the calmly floating creatures rocketed a body so frantic.

Like he was wiggling out of a straight-jacket.

He dashed himself against the sides, fellow inmates, and surface, stopping and going in sudden spurts.

The first time he stopped I thought he'd died.

Surely he'd realized his body was failing him and give in to the inevitable end.

But he kept struggling.

I don't know if he was trying to flop from

the water into the outside world,

so that a new land would be the last thing he ever saw,

so that he'd know at least he went somewhere, did something,

or if he was racing towards the end, eager to get away from the monotonous existence of a fish.

Maybe he was simply grasping for the few moments of motion he had left inside him before it all went away.

I don't know that I could ever be happy

knowing when I was going to die.

But at least in those last few hours, when I knew

there was no saving myself,

I hope I would spend them peacefully.

Calmly accepting that what I had done up to that point was all my life could count for.

Maybe that life will mean a great deal to a few.

But even if by some chance it ends up meaning nothing at all,

I hope I will have the sense to let it go.