GAEA, DÉESSE
Whenever I visit a museum, I make it a point to touch every sculpture, inspect every painting, watch every visitor. The true skill is in avoiding the security guards. The thrill in ignoring the do not touch signs. Modern rebel and all.
My mother does it too, sort of, with trees. She reaches out her hand and touches the trunks, grazes the leaves, whichever. Sometimes when we’re walking in the more well-kept parts of the city, the ones with the streets all lined up with trees on both sides of the road spacing out the pavement like soldiers, she doesn’t even let her hand drop.
I find it embarrassing. On my walks back home, I do it, too.
And I like to think this is what it means, to carry the core of the earth in my little beating heart. This hunger to swallow down the earth and its people and keep them all inside me. And the sun, too. This need to know all the people and flowers and lizards that have existed before me, the mayan children who have loved each other and their lingering laughter, and the ruffles of the uncut grass in a field in Sweden, and the roars of the Roman revolution.
I don’t think we are made out of love, and maybe we don’t die with it, either. Maybe it stays here to haunt all of us and maybe that’s fucking terrifying and fucking beautiful.
Because I can take a history class and appreciate the byzantines and the Egyptians, but my mother, she touches trees. A gentle hunger, if that sort of thing even exists. Or maybe because she is a mother. I see you, she is saying. You can rest with me.
Or maybe she doesn’t think much of it. I wasn’t that hungry, anyway.
Avrey, 18, Beirut - Lebanon ✯ IG: @aveinspace
“Tired psychology student.”