Solitude She learns the language by listening to mourning doves. The dirge cascading from their pre-dawn throats finds her awake and alone, even when there’s a body beside her. She speaks fluent winter all summer long in an accent she picked up at the school of wounds, and it’s the hurt she cannot bear that drives her to the woods or the hills or the shore. She lives her despair quietly out loud. Scrawls it on the world in invisible ink. On everything she can and cannot touch. Flowers are laced by the stalks into tourniquets to stop the bleeding. A bright-blue sky is an atmospheric graft cut and sutured over all the places love flayed her open and skin never grew back. She talks to stones and bones. Feels less alone when she is being rendered touch blind under a moon, or punch drunk by sunbeams daggering through trees. She is a girl stitched together by shooting stars. A girl who knows feathers are gifts, knows finding one is what it feels like to be devastatingly loved. And I mean loved, like a piercing— straight through the heartiest flesh and healed up around the blade. A butterfly can make her whole again. A hummingbird crowd sources her soul. Her disease of aloneless is cured by the sight of nectar clinging to the legs of a godless, happy, hive-bound bee. Solitude tells you what hurts won’t kill you by showing you how beautiful the world is. By asking you in her whispered scream, how alone are you really? That’s how I know loneliness ends. That’s how I know we survive it.
Author's note: There are some people who live their lives and write poetry about it. And then there are the ones who live poetry and write lives out of it. This is for them. For us.
I’m so happy I found your work.
I needed this like medicine. You are amazing. Hugs.