How do you explain a laugh?

How do you explain a sigh?

How do you explain something that is just a part,

A part of what makes you

You?

A part as indistinguishable from the rest.

 

How do you explain where it came from?

Or what it would be like to go without it?

How on earth do you explain?

How on earth can you explain what minute of the universe’s infinite minutes

Became the first minute

To see your soul?

 

How do you explain a heartbeat?

Where did it come from?

When did it start?

What does it

Mean?

 

Or what about your smile?

What made you unleash your first?

What makes you do it even now?

Why do you do it now?

 

What beautifully strung collection of words first made you weep?

Or startled you into silence,

Silence among words holding you in utter ecstasy,

In perfect understanding that you are not alone?

 

When did you decide that letters were not just symbols,

But imprints we could use to stamp out our feelings?

What sentence, what poem, what god damn phrase first told you

That it was okay to cry as you read

Or cry as you wrote?

When did the first dam break

And the words come flowing out

Rushed by the undercurrent of emotion?

 

Was it Oliver telling you not to simply visit?

Or was it Collins’ pity for blind and lonely mice?

 

What poem made you fall apart in rapture at the

Feet of their

Wisdom?

 

How long did you stay there

Listening to their words jangle and purr,

Resonate through your skull and out the tips of your hair

Like drops into a pond devoid of movement?

 

At what moment did you pick up the pen

And think, please god, let me be good as this,

Let me heal myself the way this stranger,

Though a stranger no more,

Has healed me?

 

Did you get chills as you wrote?

Did you feel the same thrill run up your spine like the blind mice?

Did you take the world into your arms and hold it there for just a moment,

Feeling its warmth fill you?

 

How long did it last?

When you got to the end and the aftershocks faded,

Did it feel the same?

No? Me, either.

But that’s okay, right?

Because someone else read it.

And they too felt something.

 

How do I know?

I felt them.

How?

I don’t know how.

I found them the same way the blind mice found each other.

It is

Impossible

To send that much feeling

And love

And need

Into the world

For no one else to ever find it.

 

And who cares if no one else reads it?

I have read it.

It is now a part of me.

It is like a bottled message crossing the seas,

Causing a ripple to follow behind it even before it has reached its destination.

 

 

 

 

 

**Image Art is by Emma Uber