Feelings come and go, sometimes in abundance and other times in scarcity. Often they are familiar, but just as regularly unknown. It is unbearably excruciating to attempt to voice such feelings to those surrounding. And yet you wonder if others would understand.

I have become consumed with the need for my soul to become my flesh, for far too little people know me. I cry with the need to be known in my entirety, with the need for people to acknowledge the depths of my being that theirs’ and mine would comprehend each other’s existence, would understand the depth of feeling within one another, within me.

It is a depth that can only be known in conversation, addressed in listening.

It is in the eloquence and spice of words that understanding arises. Here in the quiet, in the settling of words in our bones we come to realize empathy. In fellowship and times of confession we acknowledge brokenness and in brokenness beauty and in beauty life. Might then my words dance like my body never could, graceful into the ears of another.

But I do not always find. So instead I take comfort in pen and blank paper.

If only I could capture all of my fleeting thoughts

In words

Make them tangible and paint them on the sky

If only I could recall their significance in the beauty of language and verse

If only these thoughts would stay

If only their meaning was not stolen by my tongue’s translation

Then, only then

I might relieve the earth of some shadow

Or rid its emptiest corners of dust

In and through these words, I build myself a house. I find a comfort here in its shelter. But forlorn by the hands of my own making and I recall what once consumed me. My attempt to scrawl my soul in the flesh of the world in verse proven faulty for I still yearn for a house meant for company.

“Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler’s trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world;” Ralph Waldo Emerson may have found his house in words too, but what about his world?

I am still looking for perfect.