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Orlando
I cannot know you the way you know you. The way your brother knows you. The way your lover does. But I can hear your heart bursting, and I know it to be human like mine. I know your pain is a vast caldera, the void endless and un-refillable. I know this because I see it in your eyes, how they've lost half their light, how they search the horizon. I know this because I feel your vibrations, your guttural cries. They reach me and tear at me and tug at my bones. They vibrate and abrade the landscape as they echo past, like an iceberg calving or a landslide ripping away from its mother. And I look up to see an endless hole where something fine and intricately carved once hung. Its jagged new face is the other side of birth. What grows there now is more pure for the carnage, like a forest in carbonized relief. It feels endless. It feels empty. But it is once again in its mother's arms.
I want to reach for you. I want to get to you and hold you. I want to tell you it will all be alright, even though I know it will never be alright. I feel helpless and fraudulent and all too safe. I feel I haven't given enough. Or picked up enough rocks. Or carried enough of the weight. Please believe me, when I say that my heart is with you. The world is with you. You are not alone. LOVE IS AN OUTLAW. It is reckless and hungry. It is raging and virulent. It takes no prisoners and is without filter or judgement or master. It will never stop. It will never relent. It cannot. It must not. We stand with you.
