to gnats, hands, and what is left

I think that there is a permanent spot where loss settles in the base of your stomach. It’s like a layer of sediment that sits there and builds up over time, something you cannot get rid of but you can learn to live with. You learn that you are an ocean and you are capable of creating waves big enough to chip away at your insides overtime. You learn that everything and nothing is permanent.

Like when you think that you’ve caught a gnat in your fist and open your hand to see it’s not there, leaving you to wonder where it has gone and if it was even there in the first place.

At the end of the year you toast to the gnats that did not die to your hand

And all that you have lost-- the souls, the love, the freckles that line your cheeks

And all that you have learned-- how to cope, how to hold a seizing dog, how you could have just as easily been the one being held on the kitchen floor.

You are thankful for the gusts of wind that have tried to knock you over, a reminder that you are human; that the earth is pushing back against you.

Thankful that you are still whole: sediment, hands, nails that have not chipped off, and the small silver hairs you have yet to pick from your scalp.

You hope that when you are a gnat in your next life you can learn how to escape from murderous hands just as you have learned how to escape from your own all those years ago.

So here is to lives, gnats, hands that have not killed, and everything that this year did not get the chance to take from us.