Cold, windy morning. I am thinking always about time and how it is falling like water through my fingers. And it’s falling faster all the time. It is carrying me like a river, further and further away from moments that I thought I was inside of only yesterday. If you cut me open, if you sliced right through me, could you see all of those moments? Could you read my flesh like the rings of a tree? Could you tell the good years from the bad, the years where I could have used a little more water, a little more light, from the ones where I perhaps had too much? Would it all look like a map, like some record of my existence? Would the stories I don’t speak of spill out of me like blood and pool onto the floor around your feet? Would they stain your hands? Would they cover them like tree sap so that for the rest of the day you could not touch anything without feeling it first through me?

Could you still feel me? Even now that I have gone away from you. Even now that I have extricated myself from your existence, now that I have pulled out every thread of me that I spent all of those months allowing to be stitched into you. You only ever tried to be like milk and honey on my skin. You only ever bought me flowers and coffee. I wish you could have bought me love. Then maybe I wouldn’t have had to leave you standing there on that street corner with petals falling at your feet. It barely hurt me. It was the day I learned that hearts don’t break even. I took the first breath that morning, walking away from you, that I had in months. And this world has felt something like heaven ever since.

So if you cut me open. If you sliced through me like the trunk of a tree. Could you read my years? Could you look with your bare eyes and see things that my mouth could never say? I think that our bodies house experiences that our minds have long since forgotten. I think that my fingertips alone could tell my life story. Yet we walk around like we are secrets. We walk around like we have never been left standing on a street corner with petals falling at our feet. We walk around like we really leave things, people, places behind. But everything is still just inside. It is all right there, buried into our flesh. It all becomes a part of you, the world that you have known.

I never used to understand what people meant when they would tell me to be careful who I gave my energy to. Who I shared my body with. Who I let walk around inside of the home that is my heart. I understand it now. I understand that we all move through the day with a string and that that string gets sewn into every person we talk to and every sidewalk that we walk upon. We leave a trace, even when we feel invisible. We become a part of all of these things that are outside of ourselves, stitched into the fabric of their being by these threads that we cannot see. And they become a part of us. I remember the first time I ever felt a seam being ripped out of my flesh. I remember sewing myself back up, and never wanting anyone else to become a part of me again. But then I walked out into the world and it became utterly impossible. I could barely say hello to a barista or neighbor without feeling tethered to them in some beautiful kind of way. I think that heals me all the time.

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