She, he, and I
were born within kilometers of each other.
Months apart.
Close enough for it to matter.
She—
had a difficult childhood.
No solid adults.
No one to lean on.
No one to grow against.
Still, she grew.
She got strong.
Maybe hardened.
She traveled.
At first, without a map—
following people, instincts,
wind.
Until she landed
in a place
where suffering wasn’t abstract.
She stayed.
She went back.
She listened.
She learned their recipes.
She slept
with some of the men,
some of the women.
She entered
the flesh of that place—
its woundedness,
its tenderness,
its toughness,
its love.
In that flesh
lived a heat
no one could hold:
a hatred,
raw and quiet,
always just beneath the skin.
Sometimes,
she and they
look toward others—
those far-off people
with solar smiles
and futures in their hands.
They watch them with a kind of stunned grief.
And behind it,
beneath the surface,
there’s always
a spark.
It doesn’t mean violence.
But it remembers the shape.
He—
had a near-perfect start.
A rare mother.
A different kind of father.
Both present,
both kind.
He grew up in a clear frame—
guiding,
flexible.
Surrounded by people who’d suffered
and stayed standing.
They taught him to see the world
for what it is:
brutal, beautiful,
fixable.
He learned the formulas.
Applied them.
Built some of his own.
And the world bent to them.
He stood firm.
He built.
He repaired.
He passed things on.
What he’d been given—
he spread far.
Far enough to touch lives
he’d never meet.
He has a family.
They care for one another.
To watch them
is to feel
like life
has been solved.
And still—
he recoils
at the cruelty
of those who hate.
Their rage,
their lust for destruction,
their sheer numbers,
their conditioning—
and when hope thins,
there it is—
the quiet truth rising at the edge of his thinking:
the bare limit
of what a man can do.
They look at each other from a distance.
Not enemies.
Not allies.
Bound by something older
than agreement.
They are both
inhabitants
of human history.
I see what links them—
what they hold
that I don’t,
and maybe
what they’ve missed
in what a life can offer.
Have they felt
a volcano stir
in their bones?
Has she
sunk—body and mind—
into the pitch-black of ocean depth,
into the maze of a cave
with no end?
Have they
hallucinated their own erasure
in the fever-wrecked hours
before dawn?
Have either of them
broken
in the stillness
of the desert?
Or the green hush
of a forgotten jungle?
Have they
stood
at the edge of everything,
eye to eye
with death?
Do they know that breath
that sings through the ribs,
burns in the hands,
blows the lungs wide open?
I do.
As my blood runs like a river.
As my fingers rise from snow.
As the folds of my skin
are ridges,
valleys,
moved by wind.
In their dreams—
what shapes visit them?
We’ve been watching each other
for a long time now,
living.
We—
cousin houses
built on parallel grounds,
their facades shaped
by divergent storms.
But those facades,
they only half conceal
a shared human ground—
the wall
between home
and the universe
we’re all meant
to walk through.
