Beginning at the ending...

The human body is astonishing in its resilience - you walk on even after you've been riddled with holes.

The brain, though all but obliterated as you sealed shut wings of your memory, still remembers how to tie your shoes in the morning. The heart, though you swore you'd felt it rip in half as you swam lost into some midnight disappointment, still pumps blood to your lips, your tongue, your vocal cords, so that if anyone were to extend you a kindly banal "How are you?", you could answer back, "I'm fine."

You sleep, you hunger, you breathe, you tire, you move, you blink. The body doesn't wither. It doesn't wait. It doesn't care, because it doesn't have to. It just itches, expands, contracts, ages, as your wounds fill in, or as they don't.

Pieces of you may fall off - an arm, a tooth, a dream, scabs of old regrets - but the whole marches forward, lurching you recklessly to new dawns, fresh blood, and the nagging and beautiful capacity to want yourself riddled with a new set holes, valleys in the skin that dive straight into the soul of your want, where light suddenly dances on the faces of long-buried desires, taunting them to rise, to breathe, to walk, on, on, on forever, on.

On, like the body that refuses to let you drown in stillness, that carries you like its leaden anchor, slowly, so slowly, on, on, dragging you along the depths despite your refusals, more constant in its pull than God and need.

Until one day you simply stop moving. Maybe you've been still for days, weeks, without realizing.

You blink. You breathe.

You're on a shoreline in a foreign land on an unfamiliar day.

Your flesh is dry, the sun beams down brighter than love, and you have no recollection of how you arrived there. Sand warms the creases of your toes. A gull swoops low, calls, drifts out to sea on the lapping wind. "I'm fine," you answer. "I'm fine."

You stare at the water until it becomes the only thing you know for sure. With your eyes closed, you still see every ripple, can follow and trace them past the point of their eventual disappearance. There is nothing but the tide and its endlessly evolving history.

It doesn't matter how you came to this place, only that you arrived at it, and that you'll leave it again just as quickly, before it becomes a wound.

Before it becomes home.