to all the souls we've lost​

(see you somewhere, someday)

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“I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night—we can live. And we will."

- Ocean Vuong, The Weight of our Living: On Hopes,

Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation
 

 

 

 

         I imagine heaven to look like those drawings I see in a children’s book. I want to reach a place where there are cotton clouds and mists so thick that I can no longer see the earth, and the ground I stand on will be the ether. 
 

          There would be a burnished staircase heading somewhere, and like I’ve seen on the posters plastered on the churches, a luminous light from above will take me to the spirits. I picture everyone I’ve ever lost standing by the stairs, a loved one on each step. Like how people would await your arrival after years away from home—because maybe it is. And I paint their faces similar to archangels but their bodies would be clothed with garments they wore when I last saw them ecstatic. 
 

         I will run. I will run so fast to get a hold of them and meet them when I’m worn out and out of breath. Exhausted enough to embrace them all ever so slow, like I have all the time in the world. 
 

        I want to be in the middle of life and death, even if it means that I can no longer grasp my own being, because I can transform myself again through love — through their presence.

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