45. Chisel
I’m watching the flakes of stone fall away from my body. Softening the rough edges over the course of months and years. Once a hardened block, formless in granite or marble, monolithic dense, immobile, but now multi-faceted and even smoothed and defined in places. There is still a long way to go. Each chiseled chip falls away and sometimes the sculptor’s gouges seem like irreparable errors, but I’m a work in progress, a man out of stone. These arms, once atrophied under the pretense of only doing ‘intellectual work’ now build and carry and create structures of their own. These legs have carried me and roads and paths around the world. This heart, buried deep within the rock, has softened and opened. And though this mind occasionally gets locked in strong blocks where hopes and fears feel like traps, on most days it is free, gazing outward with wonder at the sculptor’s work.