listening to norge

i have spent years

chasing

silence,

waiting for the spark of static to light upon the tip of my index finger, and for that singular flash of electricity to be followed by a deep, unyielding nothingness, dropped

into the pit of my palms. i’ve considered myself too

soft to withstand the wind of the world, the height of the noise overcoming the kinetic energy of my own cells to the point of breakage, the vibrations of my body forced to scatter into erratic, entropic un-patterns that fly through my fingertips with the anxieties of a bird that has a tight hand

gripping the circumference of

its neck.

here, i feel the blue glints of lightning connect the snowflakes around me into a perfect prism of possibility, paralyzed in position. the quiet sits so large that you can breathe it in, and

i do.

the cold lines the lace of my lungs like my grandmother’s knitting; the sting prickles inside my organs as though they’ve been put gently to sleep by January herself, and i think about thinking about the winter air the same way when i was a child, half a world away but still familiar with the vivacity, the bite and the kiss, of

my January. she taught me how to be a woman, or at least, an

American Woman,

ferocious and cowardly, born with a silvery knife bursting from the skin covering my hands and too obedient to turn my birthright blade towards any face but my own. the dead scream at my country

like an animal with nothing left to lose while i watch America

rage

through my hand-held window, but i still

have laundry to do. the machines spin and i try to pretend i’m not

pretending

not to listen.

cottoned eardrums, bloody fingerprints, blistered ankles, i walk. i gnaw on my own flesh as i wait for my shoes to find the perfect match of footprints, the

blunted tips of my teeth weathered down by years of relentless, aching hunger for something more than

the limits of what i am and the withered skins of the people i was supposed to become. the salt of my

body begs for the sea but

even when i sit over the water (new water, i say hello to this unknown ocean and she whispers nothings back), i can feel the layers and layers of billions on billions of molecules sitting above my head, the

air compressed into abundance instead of weight, the numbers of atoms sitting heavily at the tips of my temples like atlas is not a person but instead a palpable manifestation of existentialism.

i thought my anonymity would be exhilarating, the lifting of external perception like the unbound freedom to create that only god can truly experience. on cobblestoned streets, i wander through muddy lakes of isolation, feeling the lifelines and choices split off from my body like i have inhabited the shell of a sun. the excess of my unknowability burns off of me like i am running towards death, the heat blurring the world into nothing but colors and untouchable ideas, the unfamiliar a reminder at every turn of my own radioactive instability. i am

reduced to my molecular makeup, mirrored in pieces by every

thing around me and still somehow

irreplicable.

i stand undefined and unraveling at heights my organs have never before felt. the teeth of the earth burst through gummy soil at every turn, like this country was founded in the very

voice of the world, and from the mountain tops i stretch my soul, focus, there—it’s...

the traces of time and humanity whistle through the hollow spaces of my bones like an absence that never stops leaving: the pockets of people tucked neatly into the tunnels carved by ice, a millennia before, ice that made

this land its own one inch at a time and civilization that bought it all in an instant

(as though it could ever be

owned). surveying the miles, i feel closer to the unlived years of my life that stretch out before me like i might be able to

touch the tip of

that cloud,

from the peak of this varde which i claim, which claimed the mountain, which claimed the dirt. dirt that will claim me, one day. and every

one.

and everywhere in the world, music is

god; every

where people dance;

a little awkward and a lot free;

graffiti still not yet a lost art, i trace my fingers over the layered scribbles; when

i close my eyes, i can see the sameness of humanity through history like double-exposed photographs; i can

feel the give of time and space like the non-moments between dreams and consciousness; i can hear

the world

singing.