Safe spaces

We wrap ourselves in security blankets, the flicker of TV shows, the hum of movies, books that whisper our adoration, music that wrings tears from our eyes. Saved photos, lost in the endless scroll, searching for a past that slips through our fingers.

Are these the pieces that built us? Am I just a creature stitched from poems, songs, whiskey, cheesecake, and Arthurian legends? We gather our trinkets, build our nests, surround ourselves with fragments of our essence.

Have all my kisses been forgotten, those pressed to the lips of women I loved, those offered to the sea, and those intimate pecks lost to the void?

Am I a lover because I’m enough, or because I know the ache of what’s not enough? Am I an artist because I watched others dance, or is it the metal in my bones, binding me, slowing me, turning my own dance into a cultural shame?

We gaze outward for answers buried within, questioning the colors, the mist, the dew, the snow, and the sun’s rise and fall since our youth.

Did the cigarette smoke, the fights, the running away ignite my romance, or did the books I cherished teach me the true tenderness of gentleness?

Was I deceived by caution? The craving for innocence and purity? Why does the lawless and tainted beckon, leaving us in doubt?

Why do we flee loneliness, yet seek it in crowded rooms? Why do Friday and Saturday nights come with a hunger, an urge to explore, to be surrounded, to feel whole?

If I knew the answers to these questions, would I be a religious man? Or just another knot in the endless thread of those who gazed at the stars?

Sometimes I wonder if there is no answers at all. Just art, delicacies, booze, and scribbles. We gather these things, soak in them, hoping they’ll seep into us, shape us, into something more, or at least something people are attracted to.

by Sebastian J. Blanchette