CITIZEN

Originally published in Fruitslice

I imagine a city where the buildings breathe. Water enters and they exhale water discreetly through their porous stone and wood grain like a soft sponge shrinks and grows on the back patio through summer storms and drought. I imagine in the city trees everywhere and fruit blossoms and I cannot see the end of each garden because it all feels like a garden and everywhere is a garden. The people who live here love their lives and they love to live and they move with intention and curiosity and their strangest movements result in grace. Sometimes they play games and play with each other, sometimes they are very quiet, enjoying the feeling of their own flesh wrapped around themselves in their homes and under the sky and sometimes they are very loud and their laughter rings through the streets and leaks out open windows and onto open hearts below and they tell each other stories and subtly salivate over fresh food with each other. 

The land grows and rolls across itself into hills and flat patches that you can see all the way across and the land has wounds and the land heals and there is a river that flows generously through everything and it pools up here and there into little ponds for healing and we swim and thank it for visiting before the water continues on in its own current. I say hello to the people and I say goodbye to the people and I feel tall and bright because I know that I matter and my presence here matters and I feel soft and strong and breathing comes easy because I sleep well here and I eat well here and I am not afraid of my neighbors and I feel alive when I wake up in the morning because the sounds of the birds tells me I am so and I feel alive as I walk through my city because I see it and love it and it sees me also. 

In my city we are not afraid of food or rot or fuit in the street because we care for ourselves and we move rotting fruit into piles of soil and the rats do not bother us because they want not for there is enough for them in the fields and forests nearby and when the people are hungry they eat food from the trees on the street and they wave at their neighbors and they do not fake a smile because they trust one another to care for each other in every authentic state and so they wave with a smile when they feel so and they wave with a scowl if they feel so or they wave with a flat face if they have no feelings in that moment because they are not afraid to be honest with their neighbor in the morning from across the road as the light of the sun says hello for the first time every time and when I see my neighbors scowling I wonder what they feel and my heart remains open and when I see my neighbor smile I wonder what they feel and my heart remains open and when I see my neighbor wave with a blank face I wonder what they feel and my heart remains open and I remain open in the morning as the sky pours light on me and I remain open in the afternoon as the sky soaks light on me and I remain open in the evening as the earth drips light on me. 

I walk through the garden at the center of town and I thank god for giving me skin so that I might feel the exquisite grace of the wind on my body while I walk and I do walk around the river bed and thank god for my tongue so that I may taste the air and the aromas and understand the robust the lives of organisms in the riverbank and I thank god for the sound of water and wind and of my neighbors laughter and for the movements of my joints in the meadow and I could cry with the knowledge that I matter both in the moments I share and the moments I tell stories about later.