On a good day, I drink the world like a cold glass of milk. I let it cascade down my throat and nourish my bones. I look up at the sky and I feel every ounce of its blueness seep into my skin. Today was one of those days. I can always tell by how it feels to wait at the crosswalk. I think you can tell a lot about a person by how they stand when they are waiting. Do they stare at their phone? Their shoes? Do they talk to whoever is nearby? Do they stare into oblivion, fidgeting their fingers and going over their grocery list? Or do they just look out at the world for those few moments of the day where there is nothing else to do but wait. Most days, I try to embody the latter. Today was one of them.

Today, I walked upon the earth as if suspended three feet above it. I felt each breath coming into my lungs, a simple ability that is never lost on you if you have ever known what it is like to not find air when you need it most. That’s the thing about having walked through a world that felt like it would swallow me whole—it makes this one so much lighter. It makes standing at a crosswalk and feeling the sun on my skin on a Monday afternoon the best thing that I have ever felt, simply because I can feel it at all. I remember when the sun used to burn my skin. Now it just feels like honey. Now it just feels like art.

So perhaps how we move through the world is our art. Every step, every breath, every turn of the head, a quiet revolution. We’re always giving ourselves away. We say everything in how we pour a cup of coffee. The way that we look at someone when they speak to us tells a story that would never touch our lips. And standing in line at the grocery story? Riding the subway? Forget about it. Whole biographies could be written from how we occupy those spaces. We like to think that it is not this way, but it is. The body is the most accessible medium, and there are stories housed within every corner of it. Bare skin is a just map of everywhere we have ever been. Our hands spill secrets every time we open them. We like to think that they don’t, but they do. Of course they do.

On a good day, I open my hands willingly. I let the stories fall out of them like flowers that I have been clenching to death in my fists. And if they give me away, if they blow my cover, if they make me more human, I’m alright with that.

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