To you I offer my life the way a river empties itself to the sea: calm and deliberate as the water that runs deep on days that never seem to end, assured that the only path that lays before it leads to nowhere else but the shore where it properly belongs, a place where the waves glide along the surface like my fingers on your shoulders when a touch is all that it takes for us to affirm that we are alive. And when all has been said and done I will bow before the sky and you, and earnestly say, with the purest of intentions that my innocence can muster, that I would have had it no other way, for I am with you now and there is no yearning in my soul to return to where I came from, simply because my heart is where you are, and rightly so. Your kindness is as boundless as the open ocean, and in your vastness I find you, my destination. This I say with nary a mote of regret: the journey has been worth the sun and moon and wind and rain and the days that the calendar forgot to count. I guess the universe was not strong enough to stop me.
To you I surrender my body. The skin and scars that make the man that I have become procure what heaven and earth cannot afford to create in most others just yet: a dauntless and doubtless human being emboldened by the errors that cripple the meek, fueled as I am now by this just desire to conquer the troubles that have, for a time before, beset my mind. There is neither arrogance nor blindness in this. My audacity springs from my singularity of purpose, which is to live this life with the choices I must take, to which the frail at heart might only find madness by design. But I do not blame them for I understand where they are, or where they are coming from. I, the living, have resurrected myself from an extended repose, away from this metropolis that thrives on the negation of aspirations, this ominous terrain of concrete and smoke that muffles our woes as though they have not been spoken of. My return has been long overdue, and I am now as alive as I have never been. So to you I surrender my body, and let it be the ultimate proof that some dreams we can hold.
To you I devote my time. I wager it with the confidence of one who has earned his keep. Yet, the past I cannot abandon, for it is impossible; I carry it with me wherever I go, like an ambulant darkness that trails my footsteps where there is light. The future I can only promise, for it is not yet mine to give. But the present I can deliver, cup it in my hands like a seed yearning for the goodness of the earth, protect it so that it may grow into the great things that you and I are more than prepared to see through, until each today overwhelms every yesterday and tomorrow, and I find myself the least bit surprised that today feels just like one of those days. I understand that there is no forever, but there is everyday. So it must be said: you are my everyday.
I say this, proclaim even, not as a gentle reminder but as my way of reaffirming, even if only in print, that resurrections are possible: I am alive again because I am yours.
For Kae
XIII: Resurrection