Life is temperature, freezing flash or creeping warmth. It’s me, trying to look alright. It’s you, trying not to breathe. It’s us, and the calamity that we are and that we cause. Life is a ruin, and not even one of historical significance; it is a toddler’s tower of kicked-over bricks. It’s a heartbeat that you feel in your bones, in your teeth, that you don’t feel at all— it’s a monstrous thing, that heart keeping you alive, and in the same moment that you want it to stop, you want it to race. You want to feel warm rain and the cool arms of another wrapping around your skin. You want to taste cold ice cream and lay in the sun in the middle of a lake. You actually crave night’s tender cruelty, and despise light’s clinical caress. You would kill for understanding, and understand that you will never be understood. That is life, maybe not all of it but my portion of it. There is not one of me, there are many. Not voices or personalities; just facets. Parts of a whole. But the whole isn’t, and only wants to be.