{ oh god, i am getting well. }

à demain, je vais.

tomorrow, i go.

tomorrow i go to a place that's more quickly become a part of me than any other place. i'm slow to adjust, you see, which is why i've never traveled often. being in a perpetual transitional state frays the ligaments of my soul.

but things are different now.

somehow i am different.

for a very long time i've believed change made me fragile. (maybe it did, then.) but now my bones are beginning to tell me that change may be what makes me stronger. there's an elasticity to my thoughts that hasn't been there before. lately i don't always recognize myself, and it's been a bit unsettling since knowing myself well has long been something of which i'm proud. however, this strangeness comes from the fact that i'm meeting a better version of myself --- and that's the best form of unfamiliarity i can think of. (not "better" as in "bad/better/best" --- "better" as in, more well.)

oh god,

i am getting well.

how strange, how strange, how strange life is!
how absolutely incredible the minute adaptation and stitching that happens over time,
how utterly infuriating the incomprehensible mystery of being mended:
how it eluded me when i tracked it, ran after it, snapped at its heels.
finally i fell face down in exhaustion and defeat, a crumple of twisted limbs
and a damaged, terminal soul. but wouldn't you know
i woke to that beast of healing curled beside me, great feathered head on its paws.
we had slept in tandem for three years, sharing dreams, tossing and sweating through fevers of loss.
there were patches of baldness where i'd yanked its fur, purples and yellows on my skin
where it had held me down, both of us marked by the other. with a sigh, the creature stirred.
i kissed its piercing, unfathomable eye and it pushed its velvet forehead against my chest.
i understood somehow that its tendons and skin had formed with time; it had not hid
from me as i suspected. it was a creature like me, formed from a thousand previous injuries.
so i climbed into the valley between its shoulder blades, my ankles pressed against its carotid pulse.
and with a thunderous beating of wings, we were borne up mightily on thermal columns like invisible geysers,
pushing us high,
high, higher.







--------------------------------