Long before my mother bore me, I lived with myself freely. Twenty-one years of flesh came into the earth as a child first, smiling at the reality I lived in. As time aged my skin, those around me aged my soul—hands feeding off my innocence, grabbing, taking, maintaining their hold. Some years ago my heart was born—away from the suffocation of the old. It opened its life and gave birth to my soul. It looked into the ages that passed me, it smiled at the pain it had given me. It cried and drowned itself in it’s own blood for there was nothing left it could not love. It looked into the eyes of the devil and forgave him for his sins, it looked into my own eyes and took everything in. Love gave freedom to my legs, painted paths into my eyes. Love conquered all my fears and told me reality had died. I become my own world, my legs hanging in the skies of my own words. I flew and bathed inside my heart—sometimes my skin reflected light and other times it sunk in dark. I walked and listened to its beating feet, I watched it stay but most often fleet—into its own conquered purity, in its own security. My hands too had their own journey, pointing themselves around, showing me everything that lived inside. Colors became words and stories were painted around what seemed to me so speechless. I lost myself in the unfamiliar, finding pieces of me alone in the distance. There was no place that had completed me, no person to share myself with, nothing to keep me looking. But in the chaos of footsteps I leaped into the darkness, blinded I saw a single light—constantly glittering, reflecting, living. 

Inside. 

Twenty one years ago it was birth that killed me. 

somewhere in between, I welcomed death and in itself it gave life to the me I had so long lived with.