I was in debt, mostly to my life. I owe it to him—to be more smiling, happier. Let my world turn again despite all the spinning globes, and me to be myself, the flame in me burning still. I owe it to myself—to love and be loved. Isn't that the whole point of all that surrounds us? But people have shrunk and dressed themselves up— some in selfishness, some in stinginess right to their final breath. And how they fear the goodness burning in my eyes, when they glimpse it, they turn away for a moment! They've lost their nights and squandered their days, hurried, throwing away perhaps every moment that follows. And I'm rushing too, walking these roads of my life, and I see them there—all the shrunken, cold, and wandering souls. They drift like little scrolls, do they, folded and compressed into themselves, in the rainy days of June. And what debts they've accumulated to themselves— I don't know if they've seen it, if they ever will, now. To be alive and real in this timeless age, it costs everything to keep your soul untouched.
# Debts I owe the morning its rosy awakening, the way it breaks open the dark like a pomegranate split on stone. I owe the rain for its patient drumming on tin roofs, for teaching me that persistence need not be loud. I owe my mother the debt of her sleepless nights, those vigils I can never repay, only pass forward like an heirloom of care. I owe the river its ancient forgetting, how it carries away what we cannot bear and asks no questions in return. I owe the trees their oxygen, their silent work while we rage and rest, their roots holding the earth together. I owe my hands their labor, my feet their wandering, my eyes their witness to small mercies. I owe the dead their memory, the unborn their inheritance, and time itself its thieving passage. I owe the stranger on the street the courtesy of my glance, the acknowledgment that they too are real. I owe the night its mysteries, the stars their distance, the moon her silver accounting. I owe my own shadow the grace of following me, faithful even when I forget myself. And perhaps, most of all, I owe this moment—this breath, this word, this pulse— the debt of being alive when I so easily might not have been.
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