Hermit

Maybe one day I'll be crossing the open sea on a ship, breathing air that belongs somewhere else. Maybe someone I love, and who loves me just as deeply, will be standing beside me. The seagulls disappear the farther you get from shore, and every now and then you can see sea creatures following the currents broken by the hull. I don't even like heights. When I was younger, I don't think I understood danger very well. I'd jump from seven-meter waterfalls without thinking twice. The other day I went to the dentist. His office was on the twentieth floor. I looked through the glass window and immediately felt dizzy.

Why do we build things taller than century-old trees? I think when I used to say I wanted to be a bird, I never considered the height. Do birds fear heights? Is fear a gift that reminds us how small we are? Or is it simply something we evolved? When animals are afraid, it's often because humans have come too close. But what about when a deer sees a hungry lioness? Is it fear that tells it to run?

My God. So many emails today. What a busy week. It's vacation season. The town fills with strangers while my neighbors leave for somewhere quieter. I haven't been to the beach in so long, even though it's close enough to walk there. My family keeps bringing up the idea of buying a car. They think I waste too much time on buses and airplanes. I like wasting time on buses. Everything depends on someone else. Please, driver, take me to this stop. From the window I can watch a city breathing. I hear fragments of lives I'll never cross again.

Except for one man and his disabled son. I've seen them almost every day for four years. He once told me this is the only bus that stops both in front of his house and in front of the clinic where his son receives treatment. The little boy is impossibly sweet. He always smiles at me. Every pin I used to carry on my backpack, I gave to him. One day I found the last toy car from my childhood collection inside an old box and brought it for him. Only afterward did I realize I don't own any toys anymore.

I stopped taking my transition medication for a while. I need to take care of my mind first. I think I'm just tired. The bills keep growing. Being an only child isn't as easy as people imagine. Somehow everything ends up depending on me. Maybe that's why I can be so stubborn while secretly dreaming that, one day, I'll be able to melt into someone's embrace for a few hours before my alarm clock rings.

I honestly think we need fewer private cars. They're practical, sure, but traffic is unbearable. Everything is expensive. Sometimes it feels like people aren't even living in the same reality. At least the same evening news still plays on every television.

After college I realized I'd rather postpone all that consumption for as long as I can. There's a new bus route now. It passes by a little café that also sells secondhand books. I'd never have noticed that from inside a car. I'd be too busy signaling, braking, or yelling at some reckless driver. Pointless. Exhausting.

I never wrote the date. Why would I? It rained all night. The streets stayed wrapped in fog until eight in the morning. The father and his son got on the bus wearing matching Spider-Man beanies. He had attached my little toy car to his keychain. I laughed. A few stops later I got off. I should probably choose another book. Maybe this time I'll actually finish it instead of abandoning it halfway through because my schedule leaves me too tired to care.

This morning I woke up to opponents of the current mayor shouting through loudspeakers. She raised property taxes, and people aren't happy about paying forty-three percent more. I understand. But did they really have to start yelling from a campaign truck at seven in the morning on a Saturday?

I like silence. I think I've said that here a few times already.

I've been writing more these past few days. I've been speaking less, too. Sometimes my mouth gets so dry I almost forget what my own voice sounds like. I didn't feel like answering a few clients today. I think it's just another burnout.

It's been happening for months now. It comes, it goes, and then it comes back again. I guess it's hard to recover from something when you never really get the chance to recover at all. It's like filling a glass halfway and expecting it to overflow. Or maybe expecting it to empty itself. I don't know. Almost nothing makes sense.

You probably think I'm a little troubled.

I think I'm gentler than I seem.

I'm just… quiet.

I watch the world through the security cameras mounted around the walls. People walk by with the ones they love. They leave empty-handed and come back carrying groceries, flowers. Babies cry in their parents' arms, then a few minutes later they're laughing and playing with those same flowers. The palm trees sway. Rain darkens the pavement. Children jump into puddles without thinking twice. At night, teenagers hide behind the palms to steal kisses from the strict parents waiting on the street uphill. Some couples walk past holding hands and come back on opposite sides of the road.

And it's not even noon yet.

I'll make another coffee. Check my schedule one more time. Take a cold shower. I put my playlist on shuffle and remembered how much I love Lenny Kravitz singing It Ain't Over 'til It's Over.

Definitely Kravitz.

Cold water always settles something inside me on hot days. Even with the rain, there's no one I feel like calling. No messages waiting for me either.

I think I forgot the kettle on the stove.

Half the kitchen ended up underwater.

I checked the news. A cold front is putting a few states on alert. The same madmen are still in power. War. More sad headlines. Nothing new. No beautiful flower discovered after millions of years. No new bee species that isn't already disappearing, one that might pollinate forgotten corners of the world.

The world being the world.

For anyone wondering, it's 7:00 p.m. now.

I decided to walk to the bakery for a coffee.

This is the last page of this blank notebook.

I spoke to the girl behind the counter. I laughed when I heard my own voice. She laughed too when she realized I never answered whether I wanted sugar or sweetener.

A red ribbon in her hair.

Tiny flowers painted on her nails.

There are five tables.

I picked the one against the wall.

"Coffee for one."

Around me there are three couples. Two women sharing coffee and pastries. One ordered blackberry tea. Two elderly people splitting a slice of cake with orange juice. The old man watches the news on the TV while the old woman quietly steals the cherries from the cake. Two teenagers drink soda, eat savory pastries, and laugh louder than they probably realize.

My coffee's gone.

I walk back to the counter, pay, and take one last cigarette with me as I head down the hill toward home.

I'm trying to quit.

I've said that here before.

Life.

8:40 p.m.

Oh, please, if it is not too much to ask, do not love me. Do not love me. Do not love me. Not because I believe you would, but do not love me. It feels as though to love me is to leave, and I have been alone long enough to endure any more farewells spoken in silence before the sky awakens with light.

Do not love me like that. I would rather you sit beside me on the curb in silence while this cigarette burns away between our fingers. We can follow the fading stars as the morning star slips toward the other side of the world and the first bird wakes to greet the day. I think what I need is a friend, someone who will not flay my skin to stitch themselves a fur coat and then shine beneath the spotlight of my grave, someone who will not stain my name when I am no longer there to defend it.

And yet I do not want to give up on love. Perhaps, one day, there will be a love that does not steal the air from my lungs, a love that lets me melt my armor in the furnace and forge it into goblets from which we may drink to the passing years.

I do not know.

Only, do not love me like that. I am far too weary for anything that reaches into my chest, takes hold of my heart, and reminds me why these towering walls crowned with broken glass had to be built in the first place.

I find it beautiful how so much beauty in this world hides itself behind curtains, how there are loves so pure that they draw near the divinity of being itself. We bind ourselves to the fear of sin and the end, though the end is inevitable, and existence itself is perhaps the most prophetic and sinful divinity there is. All these restraints tighten around our throats and leave us breathless.

Oh, beautiful one, if only you knew that your eyes, passing by on the street, once caught a heart, and that heart has carried you ever since, even though you never walked that path again. If only you knew that your soft lips taste of fruit, and that there is nothing in this world quite like them. You do not know, beautiful ones, how many hearts have already belonged to you somewhere far away, untouched by lust, hearts once frozen that began to race at the sight of your measured steps.

There is a beauty within you that your mirror cannot reveal until the full moon rises. There is a beauty within you that you do not even know exists, a beauty that has left hearts quietly bound to the curves of your legs, waiting in the shadows until the night becomes a full moon.

1:20 PM

I used to be afraid of talking about my feelings, of showing affection and ending up doing nothing more than feeding someone's ego. Like, "look, that person adores me." And letting that become the reason so many things were left unsaid.

Time is good for so many things, even though I think it's the god of everything.

"The god of everything?"

Yes. The god of everything. Isn't it?

Time builds and destroys everything we know. Gravity shapes the universe, but everything it touches exists within time. The Big Bang is usually explained in a few minutes, maybe a lecture or a couple of textbook chapters, as if it were a single explosion. It wasn't, at least not in the way we imagine an explosion. It was the beginning of space and time themselves, followed by an unimaginably rapid expansion that lasted only a tiny fraction of a second. Nearly 13.8 billion years later, the universe is still expanding. In a way, the Big Bang never really "ended." We're still living inside that same expansion. Everything since then has simply been time continuing to unfold.

My mug broke last week. It took less than a second while I was washing the dishes. It's been two weeks now, and I'm still complaining because I was the one who dropped it.

Time.

Time.

I met someone when I was… I don't know, maybe fourteen. Long fingers. Beautiful, delicate hands. Black hair. Eyes with the most beautiful color I'd ever seen. And I don't mean beautiful in the conventional sense. I mean they were simply the most beautiful person I had ever looked at.

Our first kiss happened years later.

And I never saw them again.

It ended.

I thought time had ended too.

But years later, time still hasn't erased them.

Maybe it sounds like I'm trapped in time.

But I'm not.

Why am I even talking about this?

So many tides have come and gone since then.

Oh, right.

I was talking about time being the god of everything.

2:15 PM

I'm not talking about the Christian God. I think it's curious, and sometimes troubling, how much influence Christianity came to have, but that's another conversation.

I'm talking about God.

The scientific kind of God.

Time.

Or whatever god you choose to bring into your home while you're reading this.

I like that freedom. The idea that, in this world, when we close our eyes, there's only us and our thoughts. Our bodies can be bound by old, rusted chains, but with our eyes closed we're still able to wander through an endless field of possibilities.

2:33 PM

Nobody has to accept me, or even understand me.

You were not the one who stitched my open wounds, nor the one who dried my tears. You did not wear my grief, and you do not know who I am, where I have walked, or where my ancestors came from, the ones I never even had the chance to meet.

You know nothing of the land we built with sweat and struggle.

You know nothing, young one.

The world is far too vast for so many closed doors. There are prayers whispered inside rooms you have never seen. There are people who have never known the shelter of a roof since the day they were born.

Who you are is not my concern. I hope who I am is not yours.

I respect you and where you come from.

Do the same for me.

We walked these lands long before iron ships found our shores.

We sang songs that belonged only to the wind moving through the trees.

There is paint upon our skin, and there is protection in it.

There is an animal strength that does not care which body it wears.

Here, women plant their feet firmly and speak with the voice of thunder.

Here, men weave their nets and tend their flowers.

Here, the moon teaches us when to return and when to leave.

You do not speak my language.

But I speak yours.

The nature of the soul cannot be changed.

Still, we move like water.

Like the sea that wears away stone.

Like the river that listens to the wind.

Like the rain that feeds the earth beneath our feet and clears the mind.

What you know is nothing.

What I know is nothing, too.

A day before I was born, a woman arrived.

Hours later, standing on her own two feet, she pushed open the door to a white hallway flooded with harsh light. Somewhere inside the pain, she had forgotten the documents.

It took me almost twenty-four hours to be born.

1:59 a.m. 1996.

Somewhere tropical, I arrived.

Where was I before this place? Did I think anything? Do we think? Does some small part of us look around and whisper, Here I am again, before forgetting everything?

Maybe that's why I've never gotten along with the cold. Then again, too much heat doesn't do me any favors either.

I was never the tallest kid in class. In the lists of beauty and love, my name always seemed to appear somewhere near the end. But I've always thought those things were a little absurd. Unkind comparisons teach us to love ourselves a little less.

So I learned how to be alone.

To walk without hurrying. To feel the wind. To listen to strangers and whatever they had to teach me.

Some of life's most important lessons came from people I never saw again.

Once, while waiting for a bus, an elderly woman taught me how to make good coffee in the span of a few minutes. Before she left, she blessed me without even knowing my name.

That day, I learned about coffee.

And kindness.

Eight. I woke up.

My mother still tells the story of the day I was born. The day before, she had argued with my grandmother. She wanted nothing more to do with the man who had broken her heart and filled her doorway with flowers, hoping to be forgiven.

She never forgave him.

She left without saying goodbye.

It was always just the two of us.

I remember it was never easy, but it was always good. The hardest part was how alike we were, and how easily I could turn a quiet moment into chaos whenever my solitude and my need for space were interrupted.

Eight. I woke up.

A pot of tiny red anthuriums, the same ones I had mentioned months ago.

A fragrance of bergamot, rosemary, and patchouli, with a soft ending of wood and amber.

Sensations.

Can you understand me?

If you can't, that's alright.

I will understand.

The world is vast, and life has never been easy for anyone.

We keep going in peace.

Sometimes, all it takes is a vase of flowers and the scent of bergamot and patchouli to remind us that life keeps moving, all the time.

hope your bones arn't as weary as mine

Oh, hey, weary-boned stranger. =D My bones aren't nearly as tired as my mind over here...

I want to leave.

The air here has grown so heavy, so thin it barely feels like air at all.

But there is still something I have to care for, something I have to protect.

I want to leave.

Still, night after night, I prayed that I wouldn't have to. I asked for a cool breeze to find its way in, bringing change, bringing endings, clearing this air so I could finally breathe.

Have you ever wanted to leave?

If you happened to pass me on the street, you might not even recognize me. I would never ask for your attention. I walk so lightly I almost leave no sound behind. My voice is quiet, meant only for the ears of the person I'm speaking to. I would disappear into the crowd before your eyes could settle on me.

Whoever sees me like this could never imagine the words I turn into poetry. You might think I'm too sad, or burdened by things I do not even own.

I find it beautiful how there are countless versions of us scattered through other people's eyes. To some, I am too quiet. To others, my words are sharp. To others still, I am gentle, a place to rest. Somewhere, I am the villain in the highest tower of the most distant castle, where the sun has never risen. There are a thousand fragments of me living in other people's stories.

I am quiet, but I could take you into conversations you never knew you wanted to have. I could tell you which dinosaurs I would raise in my backyard, like the Flintstones. I could tell you how every inequality we call natural was carefully built long before we were born. I could speak about love while admitting that I often find it difficult, even exhausting, to let another human being come close. I could confess the apathy that sometimes visits me and still tell you that the spirituality of my bare feet, walking beside my ancestors, keeps me alive.

Who am I?

But then again, who are you?

You write as beautifully as I do. What have you done with your tamed demons? Did you teach them how to become angels? Or did they quietly inherit the whole house before you noticed?

There are so many versions of everyone that, if we were only one, perhaps we would be no one at all.

By day, I am one person. By night, another. After midnight, it depends on the moon. Tomorrow, it will depend on my calendar. Today is Carnival. By December, it will already be Christmas.

From mud to chaos. From chaos back to mud.

I want to know what it feels like to be home.

Do you know what I mean? How do you describe a place that finally lets you breathe?

I don't think it's about having more. I think it's about needing less. The quiet of peace, so deep it almost becomes boredom, but never becomes fear.

Before boredom has the chance to settle in, I make coffee.

I sit on the porch. I watch the sun sink low. I listen to the wind moving through the trees, to the birds giving the day back to the night. I dim the lights. I wait. I let sleep find me when it's ready.

Maybe that's what home is.

Not walls. Not a roof. Not an address.

A silence that asks nothing of you.

Feeling at home is not the same as being home.

It's almost our birthdays.

It's strange that I still write about you. Almost impossible to move through my life without some small thing bringing you back. Maybe I was only a small-town boy who passed through your life.

I hope the world has laid itself at your feet, the way you deserve. I hope life has been gentle with your heart.

It's almost our birthdays.

There is no bonfire. No sound of your laughter. But if I close my eyes, I'll feel warmth returning to my body. I'll hear that funny little way you breathed while you held me, as if I were a blanket against the cold.

Hello.

It's almost our birthdays. I don't even care much about mine anymore.

This morning, Venus was still hanging low in the sky. I looked up, and somehow, it was you.