Wings

I believe in words on the back of a greasy diner napkin, scrawled with dirty fingers and a stringy sense of absolution.

I believe in the colour blue — of indigo and teal, navy and sky. The swell of grey rain clouds in the early hours of the morning — tender as the branches that beat against my window and hide me from the taste of sadness outside.

(It tastes like giving up.)

I believe in weakness. I believe in crushing vulnerability; saving myself from sinking like an anchor into the mud of inadequate words,

threads of self-recognition rising through the hazy sickness engorging my ribcage — there’s shipwreck in them, but it reminds me that I matter, I matter, I matter.

I believe in escaping, sitting on wet cement until my clothes are soaked and so are my thoughts.

I believe that the mind is a canvas, streaked with the colours of doubt

of forgetting what my parents told me and remembering only what I told myself.

I believe in “I’m not okay,”

and writing and writing and breathing and choking.

I believe in hatred — thick, gooey, disbelieving. Of holding a grudge in the palm of my hand, viscous and fluid like mercury tipped from a thermometer when I was 5 years old and wide-eyed and still curious.

I believe in TV shows and curling up with a blanket to forget, and holding your mom’s hand because you can, because you want to.

I believe that fiction can teach more about worth, can burn with the tang of reality, of release, of promise in the future — something actual.

I believe there are ten thousand ways to say “I hate you.”

but only one thousand to admit “I love you.”

Yet I believe in nothing, too, sometimes.

But I guess if I believe that an eagle has a heart even while it spreads its nimble wings silhouetted in the red-hot rays of the desert sun, then maybe,

I have wings too.