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You are what blooms between my thoughts. Relentless, like the roots of a poplar, or the mold swelling from neglected corners of a home echoing with silent disharmony.

You slink through my star-ridden veins, haunt my magma gut, occupy the warmth I carry for the denizens that trawl my skin. I cannot shake you, cannot fathom a sunrise without picturing you basking in its crimson glow, cannot relish in an earthquake without pondering how your bones may rattle.

I am helpless under your sonorous essence, an untethered leaf wracked by thunderous mountain storms.

. . .

I wasn’t always like this, you know.

• • • •

They say it took myriads of coincidences for us to assume these forms, myriads for us to exist. How many myriads more for my arrest—this most unlikely of unlikelihoods? When I was given my due, the last thing I expected to happen was you.

My due is simple, this: homeland, safe harbor among icy cosmos, and—perhaps most important of all—detachment. For life rises and life falls and there is nothing anyone can do about that, you know?

When the saurs fell, when woolly mammoth footprints melted from the ice, when the chirps of the dusky seaside sparrow dwindled, I grieved, yes, for I am not of stone (though stone is of me), yet remained detached; with every loss there is birth anew.

But then I happened upon a singular wonder: you.

I approached you the day your universe upended—do you remember that day? Of course you do. Untimely death of someone you held close, perhaps. Or your very first taste of betrayal, or your first encounter with another snatching away your control. The nature of the incident is irrelevant, what drew me is the surge, the tumult of waves thrashing beneath your skin—because oh, oh, you do know an ocean courses through your veins, do you not?

I felt the vicissitudes of its tides as curiosity propelled me; had I known my own universe would unravel then reform around you as nucleus I would have protected myself.

Detachment, ha.

I saw you from everywhere all at once, from the leaves hanging over head, from the sighs of the building’s stones, generations-worn, from your own shadow stretched across the pavement.

I saw you when you were that baker in Cairo, when you were that scientist in Oxford, when you were that cobbler’s assistant in Taxila, a mere child, curled under a table, dust and oil in your dream-soft lashes. I saw you in all your prior forms.

And then . . . I watched you. I watched you stumble down a path lined with petals and thorns, shared in your triumphs from the clink of glasses, your regrets from the starlight soaking into salt-wet cheeks, your numb indifference from the cracks in the concrete you stared at for a good few hours on a vapid Tuesday.

In Ceylon, I watched when your husband walked out the door, you a new mother. In recent months the words between you had grown strained and glacial, a gulf stretching darker than the one you had once crossed on the Silk Road. The limp, a-suckling body you clutched to your chest was the final straw—for you both. I saw your bone-dry, sunken eyes from the oil swirls in the lamps, from the crackles in the fire, from your shadow stretching forlorn across the walls under the flickering light.

I saw too your artist self in Barcelona, chasing pavements until one night you locked eyes with that raven-haired bartender, soul as restless as yours. And later when your tattoos writhed against her sweat-sheened skin, and later still when you spilled your fears, head nestled against her chest, I was there in the venules of her window plants, the streaming moonlight, roach patters, the shadows of crumpled clothes on the floor.

How could I not be drawn to you and all the forms you carry in your depths unbeknownst to you?

And how then can I not despair, knowing what is to come, knowing the path they embark on leads only to my changing in such a way I would no longer be hospitable to you?

Mine is a primal, throttled fear: all I will have left would be the ghost of your memory prowling my thoughts, your last body buried deep within my bones, that you will never rise again to walk on two legs.

That you will no longer be mine.

• • • •

You, here, in this form, with your soft skin and delicate pairs of limbs—no matter how much you work them you will never match strengths with the lions or elephants that traipse my African pelt—you would not survive my new face.

They arrogantly assume the world is dying, even as it is they who propel this “death”, they with their skyscrapers and artificial grounds, and yet the truth is: the world will prevail, I will prevail; it is they who will be lost.

And you.

Unacceptable.

I resolved to help, to interfere as I had never done before: I speckled my body with gifts, solutions to reverse the changes usurping my sinews, if only they’d paid close enough heed. But even as they shout for change they destroy, my gifts turned to ash, some quite literally so, like those in my grand rainforest tendons. I see them gasping and choking as the air thins, as the winds shift and change and grow angry, as the waters rise, as the concrete pools and smothers, and think: to what end?

They say each great story has a hero, a “chosen one”, who embarks on a quest to save the world.

The world . . .

But remember it is not I who needs saving, my sweet. You are the result of myriads of coincidences, you are a walking miracle, you are the only you in all of me.

If you peer closely, if you contemplate far within you, into the depths where countless lives rest folded—your precious forms—you will find my final gift, the one that may keep me in my current state, keep me that I remain able to embrace you.

This, this is the message I relay to you in all my forms.

Find me in the post-shower mist of your mirror, find me in a child’s laughter, a kitten’s purr, and find me in shadows, stretched long and wide, underfoot on the pavement.

Find me.

And listen.

Listen.