We live on a blue planet that follows a path around a ball of fire.
Every year you age means you have traversed 
So many millions of miles even if it doesn’t feel like you’ve moved a single step
the place you live has carried you around this vastness, this star.
You may not look in the mirror and see yourself for what you are
but believe me when I say that you are made of the same things 
that you look up into the sky and admire on the nights when you wish
that you weren’t alone – you are not alone – you are someone’s sun,
someone’s daughter, someone’s son, you are a star in somebody else’s sky,
and together, all of us humans… all of us living things, what could we be? 
Who could we be? What could we become if only we would cease warring against
each other – what could we be? 
We could be like the galaxies. 
We could be colour.
Creation. 
We could be the very concept of imagination
if only we stopped fighting each other and fighting ourselves,
there has been too much bloodshed. 
I know how much it hurts to wage a war you know you cannot win.
I have been there.
A twenty year old veteran, a child soldier, we have all been there.
We have all seen more than we should ever have had to see
and yet we have not seen nearly enough.
We are all one in the same. 
I don’t know how that’s such a difficult concept to understand
But your blood
and my blood 
show very little difference or discrepancy. All that differs is the blonde of your hair
And the black of mine, your blue eyes and my brown ones,
the colour of our skin – the amount of melanin we have inherited from our mothers and fathers
and they from theirs, and they from theirs. 
When it comes to hearts, and lungs and stomachs and hands
we are the same. We breathe the same air. We are made of the same things. How 
is it possible to say that one person has more of a right to life
over anyone else? That some are not entitled to feel the grass
beneath our bare feet or the speckling of clean water on our skin –
One in nine people do not have safe water to drink.   
Who are we to not be entitled to see the sun rise every morning
or watch it set – there are people in Beijing that haven’t seen the sun
unblemished through the smog since 2013, 
but we are not the sum of our mistakes: we can only learn from them. 
We can only change the future – and not the past. 
We get so caught up in the lessons we haven’t learned 
we forget to learn the ones that are laid out before us:
We are all stars. And you must remember and understand that even 
stars fall and die – and when they do they reassemble themselves from what they have left. 
Their lives aren’t theirs to change: all they know is that 
they must play the game of life with the life that they are given. 
There are so many things beyond our control that we tie ourselves up in knots with, 
weigh ourselves down with, hang ourselves in nooses with, 
but let me tell you it’s not worth it.
You are a star, and you and your family and your friends and everyone you know
are all suns and planets and meteors caught inside of each other’s orbit 
with tails of ice and fire, and together we 
are a collective of beautiful and extraordinary things. 
But just picture this:
throughout your entire life you will never see your face
the way anybody else sees it. 
You only see it encaged in picture frames or inside mirrors or 
plasma screens - 
you never see yourself through the eyes of someone who loves you.
And stars never see themselves.
It is easy then, to see how much we have in common with the heavens,
though we live on earth.
Picture this: before the Big Bang ever began
inside the palms of God’s hands, there was a single grain
of heavenly sand, and that grain became the sun.
You are a grain of sand. And maybe you are a just a single atom 
born into the vast colour of a nebula, but love, that is where 
all stars are born. One day, you will become a sun, 
but only you can decide whether or not
you become a galaxy. 

Of Suns And Stars

My cheeks are wet and my throat is dry from all the words that withered on my tongue the moment I heard the news. My body ached as my soul cried out to ask the Great Unknown, “why?” and for what feels like the millionth time, there is no good answer. There is never a pretty answer for why tragedy exists. There is only one answer: hate.

You do not get to say that this wasn’t about hate.
Hate is hate. Whatever the source may be, that does not change what it is, what it does: rips life from the young and tears at communities until their shreds of dignity have been all but incinerated in this hellfire we create through Indifference, through Silence. This Hate is nothing more or less than just that.
Hate anywhere is a threat to life everywhere, and your silence does nothing to end it.

My hands are stained red and brown with the blood of my brethren, kith and kin, people I will never meet and people I have trouble speaking for because I am privileged in so many ways: privileged to not have to be out to my family because I am privileged to “pass” as cisgendered, privileged to “pass” as straight, privileged to be born into a white body, privileged to live in the middle of nowhere, hidden just enough that “this could never happen to me.”
But it could. It could always happen to me.

Hate anywhere is a threat to life everywhere.
Fire still spreads, still destroys, whether or not you are the one being burned.
Silence is what remains when everything else has been wiped out, when the fire of Hate has taken everything. We are still trying to live inside of this burning house, the forest is in flames, and all we can do is stand in silence? And when we do speak, it is only to blame someone else for what is turning into ash before our own eyes? We do not stand between a burning house and a burning field and call ourselves “safe.” Where are the firemen? Where is the bucket brigade? When there is no one left to help, we must either fight the fire with water, or we must run, and vow that something will change.

We have said that we will change.
We have said that we will change.
I have yet to see a change.

Fire only brings more fire. Hate only brings more hate. 

-where are the firemen? where is the bucket brigade?
(my heart is burning in Orlando)

June 12, 2016

~MRM~

where are the firemen? where is the bucket brigade? (my heart is burning in Orlando)

fearlesslywritten

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