Breathe.

Sometimes, when the end comes, no one hears it. An apocalypse in miniature. The last wheeze of something beautiful and transient. In this world, it’s too easy to feel on the brink of extinction: all of us just endangered animals holding our breath. A microcosm of life and love not yet fully realized or discovered. Unable to neatly fit our lives into one genus or the other, looking for a match to make us feel less alone in a world where life has starburst into so many different versions of the same lifecycle, familiar in its unfamiliarity. Look at all the ways we grow from the same root.   I am the end of my father’s bloodline. His good name. His strong shoulders. A legacy on its deathbed. How do you say goodbye to an undiscovered species? Where is the biologist weeping for the life we never found? Does being the last make you beautiful or just lonely? What happens when we are nothing but a handful of photographs and a six sentence caption in someone else’s college textbook?   I want to believe that there is meaning in impermanence— that our legacy has nothing to do with how long historians go repeating our names and everything to do with our own ecosystem. Here is the place the television’s forgotten, but the grass only grows so green because of you.

I had to decide what I was going to do, and what I was going to be. I was standing there, waiting for someone to do something, till I realized the person I was waiting for was myself.