To Live

No, death is not the answer, ever. And although the pain of a deteriorating friendship, a lover lost, a mother dying, a world unfriendly to change, is enough to stall me for a day or two or three or twenty, it is the living, the continuing to breathe that will fix it all, that will mend the broken toys in my chest, patch up the holes in the knees of my jeans; it is living that will wrap its warm arms around my throat – a flannel-fleece scarf, not a noose. I do not ask for forgiveness that I cannot wring from the wet sponge offered to me as my life. My life is only mine and I will swallow it whole.