I am human. I am a soul.

To be a human is to spend decades weighing knowledge and emotion and tangible sentiments with a fervor we detest and tire of, but could not quit. A human will search for a balance that others can recognize and name, a spacial ownership and a style.

A human will either thirst for or stave off relationship that other species will imitate or adapt to, but can never quite match. A human will see or smell or hear or touch a palpable, physical mass and have feelings about it. Feelings of repellence, curiosity, lust, defense, desperation, desire, jealousy, depression, anger, love.

How do we define this?

A human will blame serotonin or dopamine for what they cannot explain. A human will hear a string of pitches and correlate it with the pounding they feel in their feet, the rumble inside their ribs, and then let it make them be happy or sad, and then let that make them laugh or cry or smile or shiver. Humans will sustain themselves purely on thought--the scribbles they mark on shavings of wood, the sound that comes out of their mouth, the things they can imitate and duplicate with a brush and paste. Humans will build in invisible empires based on their thinkings and will kill each other because those thinkings and feelings differ.

For all the scribbles we have named and arranged, I cannot find a single one to describe what occurs inside and outside of me. The extension of myself, of my emotion, my thought. The very purest root and core of my being. The essence of my soul.

As humans do, some will disregard this essence and blame it on our romanticism--out of fear they will disconnect and selectively forget the unwritable, unexplainable existence of themselves. But romantics aside, I will not be afraid to claim that though I am absolutely terrified of my soul--I have one. And I am undeniably convinced that my soul exists for more than my fearful repression, more than the years I will spend striving for balance, more than the development of my identity.

I am convinced that my soul was intimately created by an essence that loves it fiercely, desires it's safety, cares for it reverently, and when my humanity is no longer tangible, I will not be finished.