I once held this naive notion that underneath everything and anything, there was a discernible purity that nothing could displace. I thought that if you could only peel back our layers, no matter how thick and crude they may be, we were all just luminous and waxy, glowing under moonlight. I believed that we were all multi-faceted crystals that caught spectrums of light behind our teeth and in the reflection of our slippery limbs.
Was I wild to think that we were all just bewildered angels? Was I mad to think that we had only misplaced our wings? I believed that if you stripped us all down to our core, to the marrow within our marrow, in the vast expanse of our atoms, int he galaxies within our protons — we’d be explosions of light. Blinded by these colors of reality, we can’t see past them to get to the soul of all that is, all that was, all that remains to be. We’re all tendrils of hope in open palms, and only we hold the light that can keep the darkness at bay. But yet, we stare at the world and can’t get past the surface to see what it truly is: teeming, breathing, pulsing.
Believe me when I tell you that there’s more to this world than what meets the eye — that if you stare long enough into the eye of a rose, you’ll see the blood of its petals bleed int our veins. Believe me when I tell you that the beauty that you so wish you can witness surrounds you, engulfs you, is you. Let me hold your writhing soul in my palms so I can kiss those lights, so blindingly beautiful, and strip away your shadow of flesh. Let me show you where your wings have been clipped, how your chest is bursting with wildflowers, how your breath is the sigh of god. Let me read you the stories of our lives in these petals.
