I wake up, each morning, with a heart at the intersection of a thousand new ideas and a thousand old pains. I am forever caught between the bounding ahead and the holding onto everything that came before.
On my palms are handwritten mantras, hard-earned lessons from the act of honest living. There was beauty even in the way the pavement cradled me, and you cannot love a person’s selfishness away, and take up space, and you are worthy even on the days you don’t do a single thing right, and sincerity is a revolutionary act, and only the strong remain gentle.
There, in ink visible only to me and the eyes of the ones I trust most, are the names of people I can no longer know. As it turns out, the love persists –– like matter, it cannot be destroyed or erased.
My optimism is persistent, resilient, defiant. To me, everything matters. Keep your lowercase song titles, lazy cynicisms, cool cruelties. I am radical in my hope, self-assured in my loving. If I love something, regardless of rational thinking, every atom of my being shouts a chorus in its name.
I am a writer on the days words won’t come, a lover on lonely mornings, a believer in the face of starless nights. I am wildly inspired by the riddle of myself, and I am bored and tired with the riddle of myself.
The bravest things you ever do, I write, between daydreams, looping gently among the bloodlines of my forearm, will feel a lot like foolishness.
michael king 