What does life feel like? Feeling life is when your hands rest on someone’s shoulders and you recognize muscle and pulse. Knowing someone next to you is alive, living breathing. Knowing that someone else’s heart is beating, just like your own. Knowing someone has tears inside, and hopes, that someone has the ability to sustain and create another existence, and the ability to express, and break, and heal.
Feeling life is the tender skin of an infant as he or she grasps your thumb.
The kicking inside the womb before prayers become reality. Life is in the trees when they shed leaves and dance in the wind. Life is in the seashells and tiny fragments of sand pressed into the shore.
Feeling life is when your body relaxes, when your skin is warmed by a lover’s touch, when your breathing is slow and you am rooted in that present moment. When you close your eyes and are not afraid.
Life is spinal fluid, liquid electricity. Holding us together and making us see, hear, run, know.
Feeling life is a pounding heart and aching limbs.
It is nerve endings buzzing from between your shoulder blades to your ankles. The terrifying stretch of muscle. That moment you fear and believe simultaneously. And then you exhale, inhale, feeling life.
It is 33,000 feet in the air, watching mountains stand proud and clouds brush delicately by. Knowing there is a purpose somewhere. Knowing it will reveal itself eventually. Trying to seek patience in the process.
It is that hole in your stomach before you do something you never thought you would, or knowing something you wish you didn’t. All the while recognizing this momentary pain will only eventually bring you strength.
Feeling life is pain.
It is forgiveness—raw emotion that cuts deep. Like the core of an apple, shaved, faltering, but real.
Feeling life is laughter, is falling in and out of love, is breaking bones and hearts. It is mistakes, and many of them.
It is closing your eyes and realizing it isn’t a dream. That you are here. And this is beautiful, in all the chaos, and confusion, and mess.
Featured Image Credit: Fernando Brasil
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