Joy

All the straight and crooked lines blend together with different colors. A blue canyon, a pink sun, and a red moon. A smile on someone else’s face that’s contagious because her nose is wrinkled and her eyes squeeze shut so tightly that little tear droplets leak out the corners. Laughter bubbles up in the throat so strongly that air cannot get to the lungs. 

A soft fuzzy feeling in your chest like a two-year-old petting a bunny like it’s made of porcelain instead of flesh and fluff. It spreads like liquid sunlight, warming the blood and turning the rivers to gold. You close your eyes but can still see light through the cracks. 

It’s not a frown or a smile, but the everlasting laughter of a soul. A blanket of mountains, stars, children, and God folding around your shoulders like your lover’s arms, and you can lay down to sleep with an empty mind full of light. 

We breathe in, we breathe out. It overwhelms us. The spirit, the soul, the body, the eyes full of emotions, the mind full of heart, the blood vessels moving like jets through the clouds, the bones that grow in the tiny life inside your stomach, the rivers that end and begin from nothing, the ocean surface rippled like thoughts, the endless sky of imagination, and the stars that are too many to number. We breath in, we breath out. We smile. 

I sleep. I wake up, and there’s a bounding in my chest because of the light, because of my lover beside me, because of my God inside of me, because of life. 

Photo by Fuu J 
Published in The Iris Review, Spring 2018