Orpheus

My whole life I have been trying to tell a story so beautiful that the world would fall in love with me.

That is why I befriended words and stage lights.

That is why I watch the details of the world

when it would benefit me more to be practicing or studying something other than the pink feather clouds,

or the feeling of my blood longing to run,

or the rain ricocheting off my eyelids,

or the soft patterns of light behind my half opened gaze.

Maybe I am collecting them in my memory to be worded perfectly,

or remembered as the war the world wages on itself breaks around me.

The first picture I ever took was of ferns of frost growing on the cement of my middle school basketball court.

Why would I do this?

What purpose could this possibly serve? 

It would not calm the propaganda and hate that lead to the election the day after my sixteenth birthday.

It would not heal the world from our manically clever and painfully aloof mammal minds. 

It would not spare me the despair that ripped its way out of my body the night I finally understood you were done with me. 

And yet...

And yet such little acts of love to the world, 

From the world,

keep me hoping.

The way she caught my hand as if she wanted to catch some bigger part of me,

the fox I startled with it's rusty fur, dark feet, and that graceful mystery that seems to favor wild things,

these are the bite sized bits of wonder it takes to love a planet that is so much more massive than humans could possibly fathom.

No one can make that world love them. 

But they can love the world,

story by story, leaf by leaf, person by person.

I have, all my life, been trying to build a story beautiful enough so that I may love the world.