All we ever are

Remember when

Prediction wasn’t predictive text

It was submersion

Lying still on the bottom of the swimming pool

Blinking upwards at frantic milee of kicking legs

Oh what a noise we humans make

Prediction was the rune you gave me at seventeen

The ink of your influence still in my blood

Riding the ferris wheel in Ireland, watching ourselves convulse

I could smell you on the old letters I kept until last year

I could guess what you’d be doing and what color you began to wear

As things changed for us both, still we stayed tethered

By our invisible dive and the angle of seeing the world

Without air.

There’s a little known secret

in the recess of a soul, put there before birth

find strength from suffering, then appreciate the good days two-fold

and when the time comes for a long hot walk

the road forks

one direction takes you back in a circle

where forever you’ll lament the reunion of your despair

the other road is perseverance, filled with danger

so high it goes, you cannot be sure of air

to breathe, you reinvent gills and return to the source

brine and water, that’s all we ever are.

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