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by
Tahereh Mafi
killing ourselves by trying to stay alive. The weather, the plants, the animals, and our human survival are all inextricably linked. The natural elements were at war with one another because we abused our ecosystem. Abused our atmosphere. Abused our animals. Abused our fellow man.
My life is 4 walls of missed opportunities poured into concrete molds.
It’s the kind of kiss that makes you realize oxygen is overrated.
Hope. It’s like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It’s fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence.
But he looks different to me. His gaze is too heavy, his eyes, too deep. His expression is too full of something I don’t want to recognize. He’s looking at me like I succeeded, like I shot him in the heart and shattered him, like I left him to die after he told me he loved me and I refused to think it was even possible.
My lungs are liars, pretending they can’t expand just to have a laugh at my expense and my fingers are fluttering, struggling to escape the prison of my bones as if they’ve waited 17 years to fly away. Escape, is what my fingers say to me.
I have a heart, says science, but I am a monster, says society.
“I think there’s something about the impermanence of life these days that makes it necessary to etch ink into our skin,” he says. “It reminds us that we’ve been marked by the world, that we’re still alive. That we’ll never forget.”
No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.
I keep sniffing my skin, pleasantly surprised by how nice it is to smell like a flower.
And we are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives we did not choose. It’s time, I think, to break free.
