The action of finding yourself is realizing everything that built you is not what you are made of. And with that action, we remember every moment that impacted our lives with such intensity, that you could say it is a flood.
Define catharsis. A flood, the expelling of everything and watching it crash into anything we touch. It breaks all the furniture, takes down all the paintings, and everything we thought we owned is immediately gone.
We walk around the wreckage, look down, pick up all the things we thought were salvageable, hold onto them for dear life and get out of there as fast as possible.
God, didn’t you see me run?
Didn’t you see me thrown off a cliff so fast that by the time I hit the ground, a billion lives slammed into my pupils, summoning an explosion of dust, a billion particles of dust, a billion stories, a billion tales with the center of a sun, my son, my dearest love.
Do you remember the first time I felt a rush of devotion? You made me thrust my arms open in reverence.
Oh, how, how much I loved to try new things.
Feel the rush of a prick, like my nerve receptors dancing fruitfully amongst men that I wanted to own, to store in my cupboard. No one can know about them like no one can know about it. About the bottle in the dresser or the bag in the shoe box, or the lighter under my pillow.
How the fire cracks in crinkles into the sky. If you listen, you can hear my feet get higher, my heart palpitate into your veins, your cells, your oxygen. I give unto you everything I call body, everything I call drug.
Put me in a plane. Turn the engine on. Grab the stick. Press the pedal. Roll it out. Roll it out. Roll it out. Roll the paper. Light the fuse. Wait for an explosion of dust.
Nirvana.
I grew up writing poetry to fill my holes, made my trauma into entertainment for men who needed to feel it, whose lawns got greener on every corner, and man, what a green. You could see the fibers of grass from airplanes, the trees that emerged from dirt, the sun and all its moisture running down the embers of the sky and onto the yard. The garter snake creeping through the weeds.
He’s old. He’s no longer in touch with himself. If he was tight in his own home.
He has secrets like the bottle in his dresser or the bag in his shoe box or the lighter under his pillow, his skin is yellow, like the jungle, like my teeth, like my homeland, like Vietnam set on fire, the same fire that fills my lungs, the same yellow sun blisters his skin until he can’t move. So he breaks himself, cracks open his epidermis into a shell and slithers out.
Nirvana, my dearest love, my bottle of euphoria. My fuse of dust particles, the higher you rise, the harder you fall.
Catharsis. Define addiction. Define reincarnation. Define shedding your soul, not for satisfaction, but for the abundance of it. The need for trauma as a scapegoat.
My love. Please don’t let the snake get too comfortable.
My name is Aeris. I’m waiting till my past does not define me, and I’m learning to be satisfied with my own.
