love is a lot like fixing a sink for the first time

you learn a lot by breaking things.

I stood before the prominence of my soul

hissing through the salt and steam

that i deserve every last bit

of the misery i'm buried in.

but I'm still not sad enough to be happy.

I wish i could mend my veins

with all the roots in the ground between us.

and send my love through the channels of earth,

the trees and the grass, the sun and the sky.

If only for the entire Earth to tell you how loved you are.

I watched out the window, to the east

where the city lights burned into the night sky above,

a permanent sunrise, an eternal rebellion against the night.

but we should not forget,

the only permanence in the world is death.

for the sun had risen before these lights first hummed

and will continue rising when the wires run dry.

you could journey into that nothingness

to see what only the blind have seen,

a darkness much too strong to carry hope upon its spine

unless by force or by letting it go

you wander to that idea of an exit

follow the trail, by echos, by ghosts.

but slowly you come to realize

you're only going deeper.

and you eventually get lost in it,

become nothing in that dark sea.

And die, never knowing what it is

that you were missing.

or

you could bring a flashlight.

to everything,

there is a romantic answer and a logical answer.

love is where that answer is the same.

When she was 18, she decided that her life would never be fulfilling unless she lived it like a ride that didn't end. So she left home and made a plan to see everything.

And then she did it.

She believed in every major religion, but only until she found something that bothered her about it. She lived on the edges of the earth, surviving on what she could find only to do it again somewhere else. She'd even learned all the ways to tell a fortune, but her favorite one was reading palms.

She told me that a hand was a person's journal. That stories both past and future could be told from it. And that even if I looked closely, I'd never know the traits of a hand's owner. Only the kind of person they were.
"The hand is not a place for prejudice.
In the palm, there is no woman or man, poor or rich
there is only an endless spring of human expression."

But then she told me that her life had still felt unfulfilled and ended her story with, "So here we are", like she'd taken me on a weekend trip to her parents' house. I searched for the usual words, but they were empty words. Words not worth the weight of her story. Had she seen me as I'd felt, i'd have been no more than a speck of salt that escaped onto the table. Did she think I could actually fill the void that the entire sum of Earth failed to?

"I'm glad we did this. I haven't really talked to someone familiar in ages. It's been a pretty lonely set of years to tell you the truth. You think the strangers you meet will be all the company you need, but that's not true at all. You feel so small when you're floating with the wind."

And I realized. That she too felt like a salt crystal. That there was a limit to how superhuman a superhero could be.

Everybody needs somebody. It was really that simple.