To a friend.
You caught me in the cradle of your words and your smile warmed me with a confidence that traversed the thousand miles between us, I felt that heat as though it burned through India, the equator, and straight into the frozen landscape of my mind. I blinked at it then, because usually I cower from sunlight and hide in the shadow of my past and insecurities, but you dragged them mewling through the open skies and even though it hurt to see my blood across a page, you wrote my happy ending before it came to pass.
You put a glass up to my face to show me that my reflection was my own, not the fragmented faces of a past. You showed me I still had something to look at, because I spent so long as a skeleton trying to disappear but you didn’t need to see me, to see through me.
I never thought I could connect through this space. But you have the power of a God in your ink, and call me sacrilegious but I’d rather bend to you and cry at your feet, my friend, than the statue of a man I’ve never met. You may not work miracles, you may not feed the populace with meager fish and bread but I’m glutted with your mind and the beauty of your expression. I’m drunk on your insight to the point where I’m drowning in the waves of your rhythm and your rhyme. I don’t know how to say thank you, I never have. But I wanted to say that when I read you, when I hear you, I can picture you dancing to your own beat, sun drenched and smiling, with eyes catching light in a way I never knew the dark could. I see narratives in your dimples, and the shimmer of your skin rivals the moon. You’re up there with her, absorbing the light of her sun and sharing it with us, these minute little stars in remote galaxies. But you remind us that somewhere in infinity, we’re as vast as the world, and as grand as life itself.
