Only water is meant to be breathing
Children. They are a creature with a mind made mostly of water.
And simple impossibility. And instructions that don’t lead them anywhere.
The weight of rain, if you could keep rain in sieves, or carry it in cardboard boxes,
or even just pour it through a bucket of sand.
 
I was a child, and I made a home by pulling garden slate onto my chest. I was hiding.
The way words can hide if you’re careful with them.
A kind of together.
 
Like when water pools below a row of stained glass windows. It’s peaceful. And breathing.
I was meant to be breathing.
The inside of a cave at night, how it feels like it’s circulating.
The inside of anyone. The insides of people you really like.
 
I was a child, and I was looking to build myself into a sturdy home.
But, oh, soul. Oh, edges of soul. Oh, souls that make the people we don’t understand.
I invented sadness instead. And I’m sorry.
 
Constellations move over the night sky with a predictability we have learned to value as a civilization.
The pure logic of it. The mathematical probability.
The tendency to be something invaluable without even thinking about it.
I built an octagonal freezer, with brass plates to tell people what mood I was in,
and bright copper tubing, and plexiglass. There had to be windows on all sides.
I was a healthy child. I would close myself in and then breathe, the way water breathes when it’s restless.
 
There’s not much else to do growing up.
I stepped inside. I sat on my little bench, and I looked at my family the way that men do.
It was so logical, really.
 
Ambitions can be logical if you hold them in one place.
It’s like what happens to water when the water can’t breathe.
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