I don’t want to write my way out of this feeling, cut it up and twist it into submission until its essence is nothing but ink on white paper. I don’t want to find words for how good it has been to sleep with the window open and to walk up the stairs without running out of oxygen and to walk outside without a heavy coat, wandering, truly wandering, in the woods, searching for frogs and rocks and mosses to touch. I don’t want words to capture what it’s like to be in love, love in its most platonic sense, lying on the couch fully clothed and tucked into another’s arms against a still life of breath and white noise and other grayish anima. Some things are too sacred to be spoken, like the feeling of white tadpole clouds drifting underneath a backdrop of dark gray altostratus that stretches out beyond the horizon, an inverted lake of sky frogs, or the outline of a single twisted yew on the bald side of the mountain, or the sound of keys jingling outside your door, warning of human company, or the way that shoveling snow in the middle of the night reminds you that not much has changed, really, that some things are eternal, that the white wisps in the sky are really sheets of ice and shards of them collect on airplane windows an inch away from where you can touch, that both the water you drank last month and the water that once kept your grandparents’ bodies inflated has passed through those shards and may well be in them now. And other things are too sacred to be touched, like the pond frog who peers at you with indifference or understanding but not awe–you’re in the wind and he’s in the water, holding onto a branch with two tiny translucent hands which the salt of sweat on your hands would burn. I don’t want to write because I would never speak to him in any language but his own, contorting my throat to make his frog mating sound, because otherwise he is prone to vanishing into the bed of leaves below, running from my human presence or arrogance with two snaps of his hind legs, and those two snaps are all that separate being alive from simply being organic.
(2026-03-27)
Zoe Pian 