Collared dove perched on top of the world, somewhere in France.

I. CONTEXT

At some point it must be time to write. When the dishes have been washed, the table cleared, the clothes piled neatly into the many corners of the room, the plants watered, the knives sharpened, the coffee half-drunk and abandoned onto the games section of last week’s newspaper; when all that could busy the hands of the muttering man has dissolved and he has kissed his darling, it must be time to sit at the desk and write the thing. 

II. CONTENT

As I bid farewell to twenty-five, I find that I don’t want to eat the world. I don’t want to breed the kind of hunger required to eat the world. 

What I want is to find myself in the way of beauty. I want to know the difference between firs and pines and spruces; and then I want to save the soil, the bees and the local beavers who’ve managed to collapse the same road for the seventh year despite the council’s repaving efforts (they just keep claiming a world wider than they know). To watch for days as the neighbour’s squash wraps around her fence with the vertical will of its own nurturing, and carve avocado pits into mushrooms and turtle husks that oxidize with the industry of dying. At the day’s end, I want to cook out on the balcony with friendly bugs all around me and don a collection of unflattering aprons. 

I want to hug the woman on the morning bus who blew a kiss at her unknowing daughter, and the lady who sat at my booth with her Migros salad only to unravel a neatly packed cutlery set that she deeply treasures, no doubt. I want to learn to care for something like she cares for her cutlery set. I want to cry into my mother’s arms. 

I want to learn the language of reciprocity so I may occupy my rightful place in the world, and then I want to stand at the crux of the four directions with fists undone and feast on the inevitability of a love returned. 

Above all else, I really want to like cucumbers.

III. CONCLUSION?

In the absence of general answers, I welcome my 26th year with dire questions: 

+ How do I unlearn separateness?

+ What does actionable love look like?

+ Is ‘eat the world’ even an English expression?