We take great account of the things we give away to the strangers who pass through our lives, and who touch those lives more closely than we touch theirs. We take great pains to attempt to explain to them how much we have lost, but still those things that we receive creep by upon stiller waters, reaching up, quietly deconstructing and rearranging, making homes in hard hearts where we'd thought nothing could grow.
We let them make homes in the empty places that seek still to reconcile all we let slip by, and never think to wonder why the holes have ceased to hurt.
This is what you have given me, my friends:
This is to the little boy who wore the Converse All-Stars in one hundred different colors, and whose ghost will not allow me any other kind of shoe.
Here is for the man in the bright blue pickup, that has alerted my eyes to any vehicle that matches the profile, even though I know it and he are far away.
This is for your favorite song, and how you played it like a harbinger of all that I would feel today, back when you thought that it meant something about us then.
This is left for all the ways that I will never be the same.
Here is for this new part, this tiny little seed digging down into the walls of a beating atrium, trying to push its way into the blood of my body, three cells down from the place where I swore I had lost my nerve. Here is for the seed of all of the love I never knew / pushed away / couldn't respond to; here is for all of the ones who felt just like I did/do when I wrote these miserable anthems and mushy diatribes, those poems and poems about loss.
Here is for the way that I gave so much away, and yet still I have so much more ( so much, so much) than I had. This is for the way the seeds have germinated, taken root, and begun to patch with brand new leaves those holes I thought I'd won -- those holes now overflowing, full of wonder, unaware of what I think they used to have.