You don’t have to rip your heart out.

I often wonder how to fully grasp the profundity of being alive in this body and soul; why not any other? Why — how — you.

Life continues moving.

That both scares and excites me deeply; but what about the here and now, this precipice… perhaps, of understanding.

Inching closer with each day toward the full embrace of I.

Ride easy.

I’m on the dock in Okinawa, laying with my feet outstretched, listening to the lapping waves. Earlier my dad and I sat on the edge of the water with a couple of Orion beers. We talked about life. It was dusk.

Families, couples and kids played in the water. The clouds were pink and warm. I couldn’t imagine how life could be better. And that’s what I can’t fathom. Why, how, me.

I guess, I hope, because I believe life is worthy of our devotion.

What we’re given is given in return through every smile and act of sincerity.

Each step towards my future becomes more defined, lucid, not with what I do to build this house of cards so easily swayed; but how I interact with the ecstasy of experience melting around me always — people.

Other souls just as much battling and striving as I, a universal letter composing we — a letter which overcomes all others, an opaque window of glass when the world beyond is asking to be seen.

That’s the only conceivable notion of how to use our blessings, whatever they may be: make this world better.

That’s how I understand myself, perceiving I as a congruent heartbeat with the endless intimate and enclosed perception we all continually embody.

We just don’t know how to deal with it; this never ending dream.

At least I don’t.

Maybe we’ll never understand. Yet we can love, try, fail, continue, despite the irrational nature of existence. Despite how it hurts or how we bleed.

I hope to make this better by being me, a human being, who’s trying and struggling and dealing and fucking loving with his whole goddam heart; the darkness and the light, the rain and the sun which pierced through the afternoon sky, illuminating the bright green and sprawling fields of Okinawa.

And now I’m here with my heart burning, listening to the darkness with a sea of stars above me, watching the swaying boats, wondering.

And I know I don’t have to rip my heart out to grasp the wonder of now; I don’t have to add to the weight.

If I can never cease to marvel at this life I have it all, and may just let it be.