THE FLESH

Silently freeze our bodies in a drum circle around the fire.

Breaths held, not to spark the air,

Eyes fixed open, to ward off the night.

It's eighty nine seconds to midnight.

The hearts are ticking.

And ticking.

We're waiting for the answer:

Would the sky still hold once the clock hits midnight?

We're feeling the power of time.

And we want to stop it.

Eternalize it.

Here I stand at the edge of the city, my vertebrae clicking like train doors, my breath thick with the heat of an engine – the limbs stretch long, too long, thin by all the roads I have walked. Beneath my skin, they flicker – blueprints, street grids, the ghosts of every place I have left – stories and histories, losses, desires, sensations – cities pour dripping through me, spill out of my ribs, my tongue doesn't speak but hisses of concrete and glass, hums of bodies moving in currents nobody's able to see – through bridges and parks, buses and cars, office buildings and showrooms. We're all wired together for hunger: for comfort, for pleasure, the illusion of order, material purity. Not connection, not really – only its shape.

Days wearily drip, one at a time, heavy with the weight of heads full of noble intentions – minds set on fire, kindling bright blue ideas of how the world should be set, every head knowing what's right and what's wrong – if only – blind before the quiet ache of the heart of each other, too often forgetting how to keep the flesh soft, and that voices can bend – oblivious of how to be people to each other, not hell. A small inconvenience: we're all devils in disguise, scrabbling for our sliver of land to stand on.

Every day we keep striving to be something better than yesterday, a more acceptable human, it's true – but we also try to be human at all. And what's truer than the mud and the ruin, the fragile, the wild? We'll never run away from mistakes, destruction will always be first – all that's left is to bow – humble and brave, before our very existence – a mess, incompleteness, uncertainty.

Curious creature, that human.

So beautifully and with an even pitiable grace it tries to be who it is not, to cut its ties from any other life around, to build a fortress for its kin – from what?

What does it know... From its own nature, its own soul, it seems – maybe from its own destructive power that scares itself.

I know that I am

what I am told I am not.

Freedom, chaos, madness, life –

not order, not a finite building –

even if sometimes I'd like to be that

so that it's easier to endure this age.

Having nothing of this strange realm of the West in myself,

I grow empty in its grueling stomach –

alien to this world,

I am also alien to myself.

It's not scary, not wrong,

and it's nobody's fault –

it's just the way it is,

and I have to start writing myself

from the very beginning.

Putting glass faces on, like clowns we mimic the structures we build – aspire to be those perfections, smooth skins wrapped around sturdy shapes. And yet, deep in our bones we remain ice and dirt, fire and stones, water, flowers, jungles, flesh and body. We are life, we are alive.

But too loud shouts the craving to be seamless in our natural forces, so loud that its scream gives us the power to forge the world into a lucid fraud – walking the borders, I have searched for the tear, the fault line where natural splits from artificial, trying to carve out a space in this dichotomy for humans – and I discovered, in this clash, the celebration of imperfections as an element that keeps us separate from fabrication. Look – we answer our flaw of thirst with water, the flaw of longing we answer by adding touch. We're creatures of renewal, breaking down and building up, skin sloughing, hearts repairing, laughter born from crooked teeth – we make them sacred, spin joy from them like threads of fate. Imperfections in the artificial systems flee the celebration – a way is given to new structures after tearing down the obsolete ones. We, in our shifting, stumbling ways, will never be perfection and will remain a shining wreck, impossibly persistent – and that's the stubborn beauty of existing that I hold on to. So I keep walking, and with the hopes of keeping the quiet triumph of this chaos burning in my chest, I'm in search of the feeling that the world is right – that the human is right – in search of failure and its celebration.

This is a story about imperfections etched into being human

and the light that proves them worthy.