“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”
Life slips into my room at night
when I’m finally sleeping, sits
at the foot of my bed, and considers
me. She tilts her head to listen
to me—somewhere, still pleading
my case.
She is forever weighing my fate, each
moment a grain of rice in her scales.
She seemed to enjoy my labor, and so
I went to work. She seemed to enjoy
deploying my people to her severed
garden, and so I learned to tend soil.
She speaks to me in thousands of
beautiful and horrible languages,
some dead and some profane, and so
I learned the subtleties of dialect and
semantics.
She fancies her entry wounds as stars
she says, creating constellations which
tell the story of why I needed to allow her
to rearrange my vertebrae into a spiral
staircase and construct in me a fifth
chamber. And so I learned to read
the zodiac and stop bleeds. I’ve learned
to live with some scars. I’m always learning
new things for her.
She’s forever inventing
new weapons to wield against me—you
being the most recent in a long and
formidable line—but I insist on charming
her into allowing me to persist. I know,
deep down, she loves me. But
not as much as I love her,
I suspect. And so I had to learn
humility to stay—which
carries me further
than courage, and better
equips me to survive.
Even the moon
might otherwise go
unseen.
So I learn to love the moon at her darkest
instead, when she thinks no one
is paying attention. And I suppose then
that it’s okay for me to wane away a little
too, sometimes.
Always learning, you see.
Life, forever searching for me to find lessons
worth keeping, falls back for me at last.
And once again, I dream
of nothing.
- C. Lowe, 2025