Poem

When you are young,
and it feels like you are invincible,
it’s because you are.
From this moment forth, you will never die.

YOU are the first stirring of a new world, smuggled across every border, transcending every ideology, evading all control.

What was in front of everyone’s face you made visible. What was on the tip of everyone’s tongue you gave a name. All the words they wish they could speak, all the life they wish they could live— that is you.

YOU fight like they wish they could fight.
YOU love like they wish they could love.
You never submit or compromise
You are free in all the ways they wish they could be.

You needed it, exalted it, made it breathe and stir. Freedom is your dominion, that reality under this one. And you told us to burn it, burn it all away— “your fake reality! your false ideologues! your rampant obligation!”

“You have a right to a public trial by a jury of your peers! You have a right to remain silent! Your freedom is bestowed. What about the right to live life like you won’t get another chance? What about the right to have reasons to stay up all night in urgent conversation, to look back on every day without regret or bitterness? To feel like your life matters?

“You have to make these rights, because freedom is an act. You must birth freedom from your soul into this world anew every day. You have an opportunity to make the blind see, and the forgetful remember. You have the opportunity to show people it is alive in this world, and teach children not to merely survive, but live.

“One hundred thousand of us can found a new civilization, one hundred can transform a city, two can write the bedtime stories our children have been waiting to hear—and sow the seeds for millions to come. When one of us denies public opinion and the protection racket and drops everything to live as she has dreamed, the whole world receives the gift of that freedom. We create new relations between ourselves and a cosmos that is suddenly ours. If we risk our lives, it is because we know only by doing so can we make them our own.

“These days can be difficult, even terrifying. Don’t be so timid— you are not alone. There are millions of us waiting for you to make yourself known, ready to love you and laugh with you and fight at your side for a better world. Follow your heart to the places we will meet. You are the blood rushing through my body. You are the oxygen in my lungs. You are the tears running down my cheeks. You are my future. I love you more than life itself.

“You are the journeys that I take through lush green fields in my mind. You are the respect which I deserve. You are the poems I write and put into my shoebox. I know you will never break no matter how impure the world is. Follow your heart to the places we will meet. I will miss you until then.”