Throughout life, I have had the privilege of experiencing how delicate a beating heart is. One day, you are here, and one, you are not. When I was younger, I went through chemotherapy and stayed in a Ronald McDonald house, and I realized that life is fragile at a young age. I often met other kids who were going through chemotherapy or radiation at the house, and the beauty of being a kid is that you could be dying but have a smile on your face. There is an unparalleled mindset of being a kid, young and fruitful, not yet scolded by life, curious and naïve. Chemotherapy was the first event where I realized I was living, but I did not know this when I was seven, only when I was much older, looking back into my memories and undressing them one by one. As I continue to undress these memories, I am able to taste the air differently and feel those moments in time for what they were. They were time capsules being formed in real time, seeds being planted to blossom years later, conversations that I would never be able to predict, and love that you can only experience in fairytales.
Earlier, I said that this time in my life, time capsules were being created that I would later undress one by one. Every memory that has ever been created and harnessed is a time capsule, all with their own descriptors and emotions. Going through chemotherapy gave me life’s greatest gift. It has given me the ability to connect and understand others effortlessly and see and feel other people’s pain, guided by intuition and perception in a perfect symbiosis drawing from the deepest parts of my experience with life and death. The most beautiful stories lie in between those two extremes. The most beautiful stories lie between the cold veins and the warmest sunsets. Oftentimes, we judge ourselves for not being perfect; why would you ever want to be perfect? The moment we try to establish perfection as a metric, we cease to show the world the version of us that is meant to exist; you do the world a disservice when you mindlessly show up as anything but yourself. Our story lies in the imperfection. Somewhere along the road, someone told us you couldn’t be the way that you were, and it led to a hot stove effect; you never explored that part of you again, and if you do, you do it in such a way that you feel shame. There are older versions of you that only exist because other people give them oxygen, and you are not obligated to keep those versions alive to make other people happy. But you are obligated to keep the versions of you alive that make you happy.
The older I get, the younger my soul feels, the harder my heart beats to feed the parts of myself that have been malnourished, old tissues receiving the blood that they were parched from, veins dilating and expanding, adhesions slowly tearing away and creating space for new movement, still and septic blood diluting into the new. Creating new space for new thoughts and connections to form from within. I have understood in the past that there is a space that only pain can occupy in the heart; I have also understood that in my effort to romanticize pain, I also romanticize poison. Unencapsulating this poison has proven a formidable task; I have to walk through the valley of darkness, and when I run into the edges of self and fall off, I am the only one who can truly catch myself, yet I keep falling. I wait for the day that I catch myself from falling; I am walking in and around this abyss, waiting for the edges to grow their own guardrails so that when I run into them, I am able to observe the effects of my own gravity from my own reference frame.
Unlike school, in life, we are given the test first, and then we learn the lesson. The uncertainty that lies with every thought and heartbeat is a blessing from the deepest parts of the universe. Tap into the source that you have been ignoring for so long and experience the in-betweens. Experience the delta that occurs between life and death. As your story unfolds and your fingers glide across the texture of the fallen trees of your book, remember that everything comes at a price, but never let that price be your peace. As the artist, we get to pick the color that we paint our canvas with; the moment we start to live, we get to pick every color that has ever existed and create ones that have never been seen to share with the world. The universe has a great sense of humor, and, at times, the universe will let your deepest desires manifest just to show you that you deserve better.