EVERYTHING

BY ELLA SLATE ' 24

I am a thousand people at once.

I am the walls and the floors and the windows and the ceilings.

I am sorrow and grief and love and joy.

I am reality. I am delusion. I am the notknowing, and I am omnipotence.

I am your skin and your bones and your eyes and your lips. I am your desire, I am your longing, I am your repression, I am your bitten tongue. I am the words you speak and spit and refuse to say. I am everything you will never express. I am everything your mother doesn’t know about you.

I am your broken phone, your lost friends, your baby brother, the sister you don’t talk to.

I am Saturn and the Sun and the Milky Way and the universe. I am Heaven and Earth and Jesus and Mary. I am purgatory. I am Hell. I am the absence of everything. I am a black hole. I am matter and antimatter, gravity and the absence of gravity. I am the atom and the nucleus, the proton and the neutron. I am light and dark, the sun that sets in the West and rises in the East, and the Sun that never rises. I am a hurricane and a tidepool and a spinning ball of anger. I am immortal. I am primordial terror and agony and misery. I am hope. I am ever-changing. I am consumed and allconsuming. I am everything you haven’t lived up to. I am the parties you leave early, the car you drive home into the empty darkness. I am the void. I am solid ground. I am a sinkhole. I am quick sand.

I am your mother, your father, your uncle, and your best friend. I am your dog that ran away, I am the mice that live in your walls. I am the exterminator and the cockroach, I am the cat and the mouse. I am your best friend and your worst enemy, I am the love of your life and the love of your life’s girlfriend. I am the song that played when she walked down the aisle. I am the smashed guitar, the broken string, the scratched record, the wrong key.

I am the worst week of your life. I am the bad nights. I am the calm after the storm, the rebuilding and the rebirth.

I am the hammer that falls. I am everything that comes before.

I am everything. I am love. I am pain. I am fear. I am desperation. I am failure. I am mortality.

I am eternal. I am everything that is thrown across the room, I am everything cherished, I am everything buried and broken and shattered to pieces. I am everything glued together, I am everything forgotten, everything remembered, everything cast aside, everything unnoticed.

But most of all I am very, very lost. And very, very, confused. And so very young. My throat is rusted shut. I wanted to be something fiery, but instead I am something oxidized.