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I once told my brother I was a herbivore. It feels more right than saying I can’t eat the flesh of something that once lived. He said it sounded like I could be a dinosaur. I said I was a dragon in another life and he agreed. I didn’t tell him that my skin burns with all the lives that could have been, and my stomach aches with the hollow echo of loss.

At night when I call out in my sleep it is like all my past lives are trying to live through me once more. My room holds the choirs of everywhere I’ve ever been and when I wake up, my presence makes it empty. I walk through the empty rooms I’ve wrapped myself with and I wonder if every life has been this way, and one day I’ll be crying out through my sleeping mouth at myself as a king, or an elephant, begging them: this time, please live.

My mother tells me that I stay up too late and rise too early. I asked her if she knew the feeling of drifting off to sleep and jolting awake with the feeling of falling. She said yes and I told her that this was nothing like that. The reasons why people can never sleep are never the same, yet everyone in the world knows them intimately.

Sometimes I feel so much that my fingertips burn. They say that the solar corona around the sun can reach millions of degrees higher than the surface. I feel that if I let them, my hands could get that hot. And one day, I will have to put a sign around my neck, saying “please, don’t touch me” because I’ll be too afraid to burn anyone. And even the notes that I put into my children’s lunch-boxes, saying “I hope you do not hurt” will be singed around the edges.

I cry so much these days that I’ve stopped noticing. I could be looking at the sky or talking to a friend and someone will ask me why I have tears streaming down my face, to which I must truthfully answer, ‘I don’t know.’ Sometimes I think it’s just because life is too beautiful, but then I look at all the scars people carve into the forests of our lives and wonder if it really is.