Still Breathing

Will I endure the necessity of my history?

The Sky of Yerevan—taken by me

Sweet creature, there’s relief in understanding our in-commons. Roads, pathways, and windows share an immanent liminality, and as I become another pane of translucence, you mindlessly brush past, as if my canvas is nothing but cheap sheepskin, and the hair naught but heir to the most dreadful aspects of what I once naively thought was our immutable mutuality.

The tendency to start a paragraph with “in my dreams,” has become irrestitbily persistent, as if to remind me that there can be hope at the end of a long, seemingly-unending, unbearable sentence. Maman called last night to let me know that they’re still breathing, to make sure I was breathing, to let me hear her breathing.

Will I endure the nagging necessity of my unfolding history, or will I end it prematurely? Late teens was too late to realize we didn’t share those ideations, or at least the frequency with which they occurred to me. I saw the end everywhere I looked. Have you ever had the feeling that an odor has become entwined with your existence and you simply can’t get rid of it?

The question of how I haven’t lost hope in its entirety–despite everything I’ve been through, the atrocities I’ve witnessed, the scars I’ve retained–haunts me, as if it’s not the loss of hope that gnaws at the fabric of my survival, but the grand inquisitor I have cultivated within me to question not only the response, but whatever constitutes the query. The main objective, at least for now, would be to maintain hope’s integrity, and to prevent an all-too-possible falling apart.

Let It Be, Maman