Do you feel it too?
When you go home
and visit the monuments to your youth?
Is there an out-of-phase figure
standing in the periphery
Haunting your revery?

Do you feel a chill deeper than your bones?
Down where the soul resides between the gaps in molecules that structure your cells?
In that vacuum of space is there a sentient being trying to communicate?
Does it pray that this mass of salt and water will bend to its will?

Does your soul shudder as
the ghost of a life you didn’t lead
passes by?
Do you feel the pull
when the phantom pushes to permeate your pores,
pleads to nestle into the folds of your DNA?

But your skin is too thick.
And it’s messy
and you want to cry
and run
but you know
the only way to feel warm again is to let her in.

So you do what you can—dissolve.

Will you spend your life marveling
at the joy of witnessing the
building blocks of life re-form
into this vessel?

More recognizable and
less empty
than before.

-Benna Hergert