Sandstorm

I am a sandstorm.

Which is another way to say I’m drowning, which is another way to say I am three years old and holding the Milky Way in my hands.

The Milky Way is just my ceiling light, but when the world is shaking and I close my eyes, the fractured beams look like galaxies, and I can pretend I’m drowning.

When I grow old, I hope I know the difference between dead and dying.

I am a sandstorm, which means I ground planes and bury houses, which is another way to say I am my mother the day after Christmas, and we see ourselves in mirrors and the people we love the most.

I look like ocean waves and bloated pores, and drowning is an explosion of sorts.

Drowning is bulging, and I collect rocks and keep them in my pockets and let them tell me stories when no one else is listening.

When I grow old, I hope I forget the way water sits in my lungs.

When I grow old, I hope I remember my parents as people who slow dance in the kitchen on Christmas Eve, and love is a strange and damning thing, and we blame women for the children we birth together.

When I grow old.

I lay down in deserts at night and pray for a downpour. A downpour or for the sky to open up, and I am three years old.

I am three years old, and all I remember is water. Lakes and ponds and bathtubs, and I sit cross legged in desert sand and wonder where the sky meets the earth, and I remember I exist in space at all times.

When I grow old, I hope I remember ceiling stars and earthquakes.

I hope I remember overwhelming birth, and I hope I know the difference between having a child and raising one, and I am drowning, I am drowning, I am constellations and the ocean waves that pull the earth.

I am three years old.

I am a sandstorm.

#writing #prosepoetry #prose #poetry #sandstorm #oceans #drowning #death #dying #threeyearsold