There is this phenomena I think of often. This awareness of a feeling with an inability to articulate it. I can touch my fingertips and feel it pulsing through my being. Sometimes it radiates around me, sometimes it vibrates inwardly. Sometimes it feels tight around my throat or hot and loose within my stomach. Others it weaves itself into my heart or fills the space behind my eyes. In any case, it is present. The moment of awareness before understanding.

My soul thirsts for the living. My hands reach for the dead.

Shame as my teacher saying I don’t deserve nourishment, that rest for those who have earned it, that an apology should precede my presence, that I should succumb to the whole world around me, that I should be content with the scraps, instead of demanding the whole damn thing.

And my whole being is such an oxymoron right now for I began this journey for this work and because of this work I need rest but it is the work itself that demands my attention and my energy and I cannot catch up.

I spent so long with an aversion to the flame with the fear that I would burn the whole damn place down in my own release.

Sit within the flames, scream through your engulfment for all the times you kept your mouth shut and your legs open. There is no woman more capable than the witch after the fire.

When I try to explain it my throat closes, erupting into my mind instead. I cannot explain, I can feel. There are no actions to be taken, no why to explore. There just is. I talk about fingertips stroking the soul, goosebumps running up my spine, my hairs standing at attention for the universe.

 Oil dripping down my throat into my soul, slowly, soaking my flesh and mind alike.

I cannot get enough of this life. I am hungry, I am ravenous.

Holding tightly to the spine of the beast that is my intuition, filling my lungs with her taste, waiting to see, where shall we go next?

I will sit naked on the front porch with a bowl of cheerios, and swing from star to star in the early afternoon. I will find sadness as a reprieve, and joy as a surprise.

I will burn myself at the stake for the cause of my own release, I will hold the match to my soul and revel in the destruction. I no longer fear the sacrifice.

At the touch of your words on my skin, I want my soul to erupt into flames equal to those fueled by the knowing of my self. I want you to bite into an onion as if it were the orange we shared last Tuesday and savor the tears as they fall from my face.

I hold no fear in acting in a way that holds accountability for my own needs. It is my god-given right to demand I be treated at the level I deserve.

Life savored, not saved.

My own whittling began as I learned starvation, how closely it mimicked the sensation I had accepted as my destiny. How I could shrink my physical being to match the nothingness that lied underneath, a coming home to the self I had created.

I have a personal history of not asking for needs because I don’t want to be a burden (want to stay easy) and it leads to resentment or anger towards someone, but I don’t feel as if I deserve to be angry because it’s due to my own inability to voice my needs and then I turn the anger intrinsically. It is cyclical.

How silly, I thought, that I would be afraid of myself.

The velvet touch of the wind across your skin. Fingertips gently stroking the embers of my soul.

And between the two former questions, of future and past, I’m left with a vacancy, a hole where the contemporary should exist.