The blood that pools around my feet isn’t recognized as my own.
A foreign fuel source.
The very thing pumping me full of shame and pain.
I release you from my veins as a desperate attempt at relieving me of your weight,
only to find that you’re not even mine.
I look at the veins that spider up my parents' limbs and notice a familiar pattern.
I, too, have arterial branches that extend from here to there and there to here.
I am carrying lifetimes of unprocessed shit in my body.
I can feel ancestral presence within my throat, like phantom hands closing in on my source to fresh air.
Even with the lifetime of gasping I’ve spent this far fighting against, I’ve always found air squeezing itself into my lungs somehow and somewhere…
Seemingly no other option than perseverance.
I’ve chosen to believe that everything means something.
Nothing is insignificant.
You can say that I put a lot of pressure on the coincidences that find themselves in my general vicinity.
I choose to believe that these few desperate breaths that kept me alive were for some reason.
I mean I don’t know it yet, the reason.
But I can feel it.
The blood underneath my skin is coated in this ethereal essence, like the golden braid that hangs out of that one isolating tower. My body obeys the commands of the gold by following it further and further within myself.
I tug and I tug at this makeshift breadcrumb trail until I find its roots.
Tangled around intentionally laid out pieces to a puzzle.
With every discovery the bigger picture just becomes clearer.
I still don’t quite know all the details but I can already tell that it’s a beautiful picture I’ll end up with.
So if you see me struggling,
If you see me resisting the golden nudges
Or burying myself into the farthest corner from the world,
Remind me to breathe.
Hold my fingers next to yours as we trace the path my veins have spread across.
And together we’ll count in for 4 and out for 8.
Bring me back to my body and listen with me to my blood soaked messages.
Sometimes all I need is a witness.
-KN
