At night I feel alive
At night I think about my best friend who moved away, I think about his brilliance and openheartedness, the ways we’ve cared for and challenged each other, and I think about how preposterous it is that I was able to find a friendship like this, a person like him, even just once in this lifetime.
At night I think about my parents, about how lucky I am that I can still give them a call, that I’m still their child in the moments that I don’t feel so strong.
At night I think about how I have so much love inside me it hurts, how I don’t take enough chances to tell people how much I think about them and miss them.
At night I think about how badly I want to live, how precious this life is, how every mistake and regret was worth it, I think about how we are all on this little boat riding the waves, trying to stay upright, trying to make the most of what’s given to us.
At night I think about how one day I’ll be gone, and maybe my friends will remember me for the way I made them feel, maybe some of them will look back on these words and hold on to a small piece of me, how I’ll somehow someway still be there for them.
At night I think about how strange it is to be able to say “for some period of time I existed,” and I feel sadness and happiness at all of this at once, and I wonder if sacred experience is this feeling when all of the emotions are superimposed onto each other into something I can barely put to words.
At night I think about how time doesn’t stop hurtling forward, but every now and then, if I close my eyes and look at the darkness in just the right way, it feels like time has stopped, or I have stepped outside of it, and I wonder if I’m something more vast than all of these things I see and hear and think.
At night I think about how one day I’ll be 40, one day I’ll be 60, one day I’ll be 80, and one day I’ll be a bunch of dirt and fertilizer underneath the grass. I think about the song I Have Never Loved Someone the Way I Love You, the one that goes: “when I grow to be a poppy in the graveyard, I will send you all my love upon the breeze.”
Cover art credit to Alisa Onipchenko-Cherniakovska.
Goodness, what a gem to read. What a beautiful tiny slice of the human experience. And what richness is still left to uncover that we can’t utter in words!
this was beautiful. we are yearning boys fr, keep going