I tell myself I do
not know what it
feels like to be so dead and so
alive at the same
time and then remind myself of all of the times I feel exactly that.
I am still a master at
escaping my own body.
I want to know how far away
you have to go to feel far away.
Distance is always moving.
I am learning spaces, space, here, now, centers of my own being.
I am crawling away and toward.
The answers do
not always come to
me in the ways I want them to but
always in the ways that
I ask.
There is no substitute for what you or I feel. There is no substitute for a beating heart.


sometimes you have to search for the
places where love can hold you.
sometimes you have to crawl so
deep into familiar pain you
wonder if it’s one of your oldest friends.
if you can start to laugh with it or at it.
sometimes you have to listen to
the shadows and to
the places where the light shines forth.
stepping forward doesn’t always mean
one straight line.
there are ways of holding like
my arms
and the ways they move like
talking like loving.
there are spaces that
bring more room to
show up in than others and
there are ways of loving that
mean remembering why you want
to stay here, over and over
into wider spaces of coming alive like
arrows shooting forward.
the momentum is real
and full of the motion of your arms.


Emma likes traveling to foreign worlds in her imagination. emmaheldman.wordpress.com