To Live.

I tried to tell you once, what it would feel like to die. You threw your hands up to your ears and shouted that you weren't listening, that you didn't want to know. That night, as we were falling asleep in our too-small bed, I asked you why.
'Why what?'
'Why did you do that?'
'What did I do to that cat?'
'No. Why did you react that way?'
'I don't know. I guess, I... I just want it to be a surprise or something', you mumbled.
'Oh.'

And even then, I think you already knew. You knew in the cigarettes you smoked before breakfast, and then every hour, thirteen minutes past. You could feel death settling, making it's home in your lungs as those hands of yours continued to force it past the air your lungs needed. But I suppose they were in on it as well, there was something they needed to forget just as badly. You felt it in the force that pushed you backwards into your seat as you sped around corners without slowing down. You said it was like searching for the universe. You had to try and get as close to it without letting it claim you, and then, only then, would you know what it really looked like.

You told me one drunken summer night how you tried to find the universe in the veins of your wrists. I held onto your hands like you were slipping away from me and you winced from the bite of my nails as you explained that you were fifteen, young, and only halfway to double the completion that had taken half your life twice over to reach.

I stated at you in confusion.

'It's a Jewish reference', you shrugged.

And you told me that you found out that we do not bleed stars, lestways not in the way that the universe bleeds stars. I wondered that in all the effort we make to get closer to dying, constantly encircling it in it's deadly dance, when is it that we truly live?

Is it in the moments we spend before breakfast, in the clink of cutlery as the table is laid? In the colours we hear, resonating in the songs of our heartbeat? In the eyes of the strangers that no longer remain that way, in the embraces from friends of old? I tried to see life, to run my fingers over it's surface and pull it towards my lips with two impassioned hands. I tried to taste the path the sun carved into the night sky, chasing desperately after the moon. Tried to have the scent of your neck fill my head, tried to have it be too much. I needed it to be too much. I needed to see something of everyone I had ever known in your face, needed to know that there was something other than our ticking hearts tying us to this place.

I tried dyeing fabric that week. My hands became stained the colour of the sunset, and my heart found the poetry of the sky as it seeped through my skin into my blood. I had a dream that you were an artist, painting the stories of your life onto my bones. You painted birthdays on the small bones of my toes, each time you ever laughed on my fibula. All the universes you had her found with impassioned strokes you painted onto my left collarbone, the wonder you saw around you on my right. On my hands you painted every way you had ever loved me, on the back of my skull; your lips. Your breath on my pelvis, your favorite set of cutlery; behind my shoulder. Your heart on my ribcage, your embraces on my jaw. Each moment you had ever loved, ever breathed, carved into my spine. 

I awoke with your stories in my lungs, your universe in my veins. You woke with the taste of galaxies on your lips and as we sat beneath the covers, you took me by the hand and began to show me them all, piece by piece. I think all this time we already knew what it was like to die. But with you, I found what it was like to live.