by Demetra Szatkowski
I love you.
I love the parts of you that are murky, murky like swamp water where plants cling around your legs and insects bite. I love the half of you that is shadow.
Shadow is a nice term for nasty, dark, things that are hidden, things we cannot see. Worms crawling underground. Shadow — the part of you that likes death, hospitals, tombstones.
The part of you that has a thing for the smelliness of the world. For the body odor and pollution and trash. For the people with no teeth. The people barely surviving on the streets.
I love your acne and wrinkles and cellulite and you can fuck the rest of the world who tells you how to be because we like those things, here. You and me.
We love all parts of the world. The death and disaster and struggling and horrors and corruption and killing and starving and dying.
We are all parts of the world.
I love the part of you that struggles with this concept. The concept that we must feel and acknowledge and integrate everything if we want it to change.
That it can change only if the world stops pretending it is not there. That it can change only if we admit who is benefiting. Sometimes we personally are benefiting.
We must want things to change but love them as they are at the same time.
It starts with you and me, like we are the only thing that exists in the world. Let’s pretend we are the only thing that matters in the world. I adore your self-centered-mess.
I love you.
Who are you, really? This body, I don’t always feel attached to it. This hair, these eyes, this skin. I am not only in it. I expand outwardly.
I am not so sure that I am not every other part of the world combined, focused and expressed right now in this person you call you.
I love the parts of you that hoard. The parts that don’t share. The parts that are reactive. The parts that yell. The moody parts of you that only sex can cure.
I love the parts of you that are messy. Messy is such a cute term.
I love the parts of you that are destructive and dangerous and destroying. I love your fantasies. I love you, and I want to roll around naked in the dirt until you are filthy with it.
I love the parts of you that are unsure. The parts that are quiet. You love the parts of you that are confident and joyful and expressive and I love the parts that are anxious and depressive and insecure.
I love all of you.
The blood and the screaming and the laughter and the tears that come for no reason and sometimes don’t go away.
I love the part of you that feels empty. I love the part of you that feels loss.
We do not have to love the circumstances that brought you to this point but I love exactly where you are right now because that is all that is here. And we start here. We begin here. And if this is all there ever is that is okay.
You watch, watch for those people who don’t love these parts of you because they fear to see them in themselves.
We belong, this way. This way we belong to the whole universe. The burning stars and the black holes and the Milky Way.
The rivers, the sewage, the ocean. We belong to every part of everything when all our parts are recognized and we see we are the same.
Everybody belongs here, but only some can see.
You, my darling, you belong. You belong because you are me, too. We are the same thing. And we are expansive like Jupiter, hot like the Sun. Dark like Pluto. Fucking like Mars.
All parts of us are worth seeing and worth knowing. We are not separate from the world. We are not separate from anything. You are your own but we are the same.
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