will & testament
as in, a sign of life.
There’s something incomprehensibly powerless about being young.
This whole sea of life ahead of me. The river I have traversed may be a mere trickle. Maybe the comfortable warmth it once gave me is truly a sign of rot. A forebear to algal bloom and barely masked ugliness.
Love holds no candle to commitment. We expect little of each other, exchange our pleasantries, say thank you for the time we had. It all moves so fast. It all blurs together.
When I am older, I will write people I have loved in and out of my will. Now it is all I can do to will them out of my writing. Overdraw my bank account and write every day. Some things are infinite. Some things don’t play by the laws of maths. Like love and the way it pours itself into different shapes, lifetimes of togetherness sculpted into what time and distance demand of us. Dreams, too, are defined by time. Create them and achieve them and lose it all in the process.
But a word does not belong to the young or the old. It does not age the way I do, though I change and shift away from the phrases which used to ring true. I try to read a poem I wrote when I had not loved you and my tongue grows thick with naïve bitterness. I was scared. I was holding back. Those words belong to someone else now.
There is a disbelief in the months dissolving around me. The days stretched thin and worn through, each one mismatched and spilling from their bounds. I love within them and it’s all I know how to control. I write and I write and I say nothing. My will is not strong enough to erase you and I’m not sure anything ever will.
I have been uncertain in the past about things I now accept. The sea before me will glow and fold itself into tempest and I must keep swimming. In those restful moments I will look back and realise how far from the shore, the sure, I am. A new truth arises when I reach foreign shores, uncharted sures.
I’ll weave together the people, places and stories which have shaped me. They will be my raft. My lifeline. They will guide me to the next. There, I will mend it all with newer, stronger material. This is the ship of Theseus. Red threads slowly wearing away like a mother’s patience. I don’t know who I’ll be when I stop moving, don’t know who’s words will float me across the ocean, don’t know what will come out in the wash. I don’t have the power to see forward. All I have are nineteen years behind me. A pittance compared to the miles others have travelled. A blessing in the face of unwinding clocks and dry riverbeds.
I rest in my soft bed. I will you from my writing. I burn with the promise of power, someday.
One day distant tides will slip across shores which might’ve held my footprints and feel the same grief I do for all I have yet to learn.
inthiscorneroftheworld i’m concussed again and not sure how much sense this makes… but it’s nice to be writing again, hello friends <3.