a little more alive A.R.ABDULLAH I woke with the window wide, the morning poured itself inside, and for a second I was nothing but a body full of sky. There was water in my eyes, but I couldn't call it crying, I think the heart has little rivers that it runs without deciding. And oh, I don't know why the sunlight makes me sad, how the brightest things can break you just by showing what you have. I've been learning how to lose without becoming lost, how to love a thing completely without asking what it costs. I've been growing around grief, like a tree around a wire, with the dead beneath my branches and the leaves reaching higher. And I, I want to be here. I want to be here. Even when the evening puts its blue hand on my ear. I want the ache, I want the bloom, I want the little patch of sunlight on the bedroom floor at noon. I want the laugh that comes too late, the tears that come too soon, the sound of somebody washing dishes in the other room. I want the years that change my face, the hands that change with mine, the crooked little constellation of mistakes I leave behind. Let me be a little broken, let me be a little bright, let me carry all my shadows like a lantern through the night. 'Cause maybe being alive isn't feeling good all the time, maybe it's finding something golden in the middle of the decline. Maybe joy is not a doorway, maybe joy is just a thread, and you find it in the sunlight on the pillow by your head. Maybe love is not forever, maybe forever isn't love, maybe it's the way you keep on reaching when you've had enough. And if I disappear someday into the dust and dandelions, let the earth say, he was here, let the rain remember my name. Let my little piece of sunlight keep somebody warm at night, let my sorrow feed the roses, let my leaving leave some light. Because I was here, with a heart like weather, with a mouth full of questions, with two hands learning better. I was here when the world was unbearable, I was here when the world was beautiful. And somewhere between the breaking and the becoming, between the crying and the singing, between the leaving and the loving, I felt it, that impossible, nameless feeling: not happiness, not hope, not peace just the strange, aching wonder of being a little more alive.
5
2
1
