by Kate Tempest
When time pulls lives apart, hold your own. When everything is fluid, and nothing can be known with any certainty, hold your own. Hold it ‘til you feel it there, as dark and dense and wet as earth, as vast and bright and sweet as air. When all there is, is knowing that you feel what you are feeling hold your own.
Ask your hands to know the things they hold. I know the days are reeling past and squealing blasts, stop for breath and know it’s yours. Swaying like an open door when storms are coming hold.
Time is an onslaught, love is a mission, we work for vocations until in remission. We wish we’d had patience and given more time to our children. Feel each decision that you make, feel it, make it, hold it, hold your own.
Hold your lovers, hold their hands, hold their breast in their hands like your hands were their bra, hold their cheeks in your palms like a prayer, hold them all night. Feel them hold back, don’t hold back, hold your own.
Every pain, every grievance, and every stab of shame and every day spent with a demon in your brain giving chase, hold it.
Know the wolves that hunt you, in time they will be the dogs that bring your slippers. Love them right and you will feel them kiss you when they come to bite, hot snouts digging out your cuddles with their bloody buzzles, hold. Nothing I can buy, will ever make me more whole, nothing I can be will ever make me more whole. Nothing I can get my hands around will ever make me more whole.
This whole thing thrives on us feeling perpetually incomplete. It is why I would search for my happiness and whatever thing it is I crave in a moment, and it is why I will never find it there. It is why you will sit there with the lover that you fought for, in the car that you sweated years to buy, wearing the ring that you dreamed of your whole life, and some part of you will still be unsure that this is what you even want.
Stop craving. Please let me stop craving. Let me hold my own but, if I am satisfied with where I’m at, how I’m doing, I won’t need to buy new makeup, or new outfits, or new pots and pans, to cook new exciting recipes for new exciting people to make myself feel like a new exciting person I’m so sure that I’m supposed to be.
Happiness the brand. It’s not happiness. Happiness? Other people’s happiness, it’s not happiness. We are smarter than they think we are, they take us all for idiots, that’s their problem. We behave like idiots, it becomes our problem. So hold your own. Breathe deep on a freezing beach. Taste the soul of friendship, notice the movements of a stranger. Hold your own, let it be, catching.
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