How Are You?

How often we find ourselves standing in the darkness, exchanging pleasantries.

"How are you?" "Fine, and yourself?"

Staring off into the distance, listening but only just.

A record on repeat, a fish bumping into the sides of a small glass bowl.

Meanwhile the sky slips out of its skin to lay beside the earth and the universe unravels and unfolds like scarves from a magician’s wand.

Still I am here. Running my fingertips along the lines between the stars above me, looking for answers.

How are you? How are you holding together when we’re all just particles and frequencies gathered into space?

There are mirrors all around you. Who are you? What do you see?

When do you feel the most alive? What drives you? What are you starving for? What do you need? What can you create? What are you falling in love with? What is falling in love with you?

I want to know what makes your breath catch in your chest. What you are afraid of. How you are fighting back. Tell me what makes you hope. And if you have learned to turn that hope into fists. The flames of disillusion burn, but the fire of becoming can burn brighter.

How are you? I mean it, I want to know. Tell me how you are growing, how you are pushing back. How are you opening? Like a flower or a wound? It’s a big question.

How are we here and ourselves. Swimming in possibilities. Wonderful and unlikely.

And yet, here we are.  

So tell me, where do you want to be? Keep going, dig in. You get to fight. Remember that sometimes fighting looks like joy. And sometimes it looks exactly how you think it might. Whatever you do, do not let that light go out. That spark in a long dark night. Do not turn away. Keep looking, keep working. Do not be led astray.

What can you do? Tell me...what you are going to do next?

© Elizabeth McLaughlin