If the moment comes in the long years of loneliness when you’re offered a sip of stone and you recognize the weight in your veins as a mother’s palm, you are loved. If you mistake crystalline fractures for being adored and breathe their vapor, if you open your arms, your hands, your toes to the needle, if you tap the absence you can’t forget and only ash falls from the bowl, you are loved.
If you mistake the field as a freeway underpass, as an alley, ditch, cardboard mattress, plastic blanket, your own carved arms, and wake to find your fingers black with cold, you are loved. If you recall only half the path back, the field never disappears. A wide-open space where sunlight pours over every surface lives inside of you. Above, the small, almost weightless bird alights on the tallest branch and looks as far as any eye can measure. Inside you, the field’s horizon is infinite. Below you, networks of microscopic threads sing. Their song holds every part, every touch, every darkness, every joy. There is no burden the earth can’t carry. This earth is inside of you.
And even if the ones who found you could not see the rare shape of your existence, contorted you to their own troubled inheritance, even if you were raised in the company of no one with only loneliness to name you, others can bring you back. You are welcome back.
