Yael Olalde-Garcia

what the bloodshed forgave

i actually enjoy life beyond the screen.

i am glad i have lived.

i’m glad i’m perfectly imperfect.

 

i thank god i wake up able to feel—

everything:

the grass hitting my soles,

the sun rays penetrating my pores.

the art of living is so beautiful

even the dead would agree.

 

i am able to feel.

i am able to experience the light i call god,

and for that, i am eternally grateful.

but sometimes i yearn for more—

 

to be celestial,

to be ethereal,

to be art,

to be the stars…

 

but i should be more than grateful

i am able to feel in ways some life forms cannot

the way stones don’t sense moisture,

the way sand doesn’t know smoothness,

the way leaves and veins

mirror one another without knowing why.

 

i am blessed to interpret

wavelengths and sound waves alike.

i am grateful i can see light

where darkness lies.

 

i’m not pixelated, i’m just flawed.

i can make mistakes, and laugh about it.

 

to be ethereal means to ascend farther than the skies you see—

to not only touch the cosmos,

but to laugh with them.

to be in their presence would mean all the bloodshed forgave the knife because it finally understood it.

 

to be the blood in your veins,

endlessly looping through your body,

unwilling, unknowing,

yet brighter than red.

 

to be ethereal means my image

no longer equals beauty—

because how can you scale beauty

when no scale is large enough

to make sense of it all?

 

i could be everything—

but i am human.