My world is rattling again. From open to closed. Like an iris dilating with the brightness of the sun. Is it light? Or is the moon overhead? I can’t seem to tell. Everything I am is bouncing between the safe hold of your raging, cascading arms, and the deep haloed breaths of a new boundless freedom. Something in me misses the walls you put me in. The way I decorated them around your foundations of disparages made me feel powerful. Like I could make anything in the world mine. Like anything I encountered could be softly curated into a taste that was complex and detailed just with the way I entered my finger into its stream. It wasn’t what I wanted. All I wanted was love. But pride in myself is what I got. It took me until you started tearing down our walls to finally realize the frailty of the pillars we laid. Your nails dug deep within the splintering of its wood. Peeling back slowly, with eyes fixed to the stars, everything we’d tattooed across those walls’ surfaces. Stories of us collaged, glued, spat on, sweated against, peeled away one by one with blood speckled claws ignored by their owner. Your eyes sucked to the moon. Waiting for the opportunity to say it told you to. The moon told you the sun was coming up. Why risk the chance of our home being ugly in the light if it was already so beautiful in the dark? Destroy it all before the shadows change. Before everything we thought was a glinting hymn is exposed to be another faulty crack. Wall by wall you tore it down. The home we loved. Until the golden sun steeped slowly into the waning navy sky. And the awakening light of morning changed the shadows of our walls. But, no walls stand. All that’s left are the ashes of memories from everything we tried to be. Everything we could be. But, how beautiful. How unique. The colors of our past sparkling across the dirt like fallen petaled clues of a blacked out night. I couldn’t tell you exactly everything that happened that night. But I know how it felt. It was love. Pure. Like soil after rain. I don’t know how this day will go after we’ve walked away from this glistening memorial of wreckage. A day in the sun is revealing and you knew that. So, we’ll spend it apart. Learning new techniques of painting and assemblage for walls to come. And who knows, maybe when the moon starts to awaken and the day tars over with night, we’ll reconvene at the sight of our wreckage. And there amongst the damp soil and candied ashes will bud a bright green plant opening itself to the hearts of all that are ready to accept it. Ready to build with it. But if your nails are sharp and eyes once again glued to the sky, I know at least that you can hear even if your ears aren’t open. The darkness doesn’t deafen words spoken to your heart. So, tell the moon, I like to build with you. Tell the moon that with you, I’ll build again and again. Through endless days. Until each new budding plant that grows from our future wreckages creates a shrouding forest thick and mighty. Mighty enough to leave no space for shaping walls. No space for plastering our adornments. And we’ll be forced to decide whether we chop everything down to build again, or stand in reverence of everything we’ve ever been. Either way, I’ll be happy.

The sun already knows that you like to build with me.