Someone gave me a jigsaw puzzle and no picture to match it to.

At 2:45 AM on February 7th, there is dissonance.

There is a red door I have never seen that screams life and pain at equal levels. There is a feeling like the ones wind chimes give me--deep, resonant, and hollow.

I am not inside my body. I am on a front porch with a girl whom I love more than anyone I have ever met, and I cannot explain why. I am telling her that when she laughs at me, it hurts my feelings, and she laughs again, and I love her more. God help us both, I love her more.

I am not inside my body. I am standing in front of that red door, with its broken telephone dangling from a stretched cord, waiting for my best friend to come back. She won't. She has fallen in love and in need with the people inside that house. I can't even say I blame her.

I am not inside my body. I am watching my loved ones cry. I watch my brother as he watches the world end and inscribes it in ink in his sketchbook. I can't say that I've ever seen an apocalypse myself, but it doesn't matter--he has. And that dread is more real than any life I will ever try to lead.

I am not inside my body. I am not outside of it, either. I am barely a soul, existing on simple, failed dreams and a desperate love so strong it rips me to shreds every time I dare to probe it. I want to be a lighthouse, even after all these years. I want to be a harbor. I want to be the shore. I want the hurricane inside a five-year-old girl to pass above me over and over and overandoverandover until it stops. Until the clouds clear and maybe she can do better than me.

I am not inside my body and I wonder if that means there is space for someone else's fears to nest in the bowl of my pelvis, or roost on my sloping shoulders. Can the people I've met with no voice borrow my vocal cords? Can they find peace in the newfound silence of my inner ears?

I am barefoot on the porch with the girl whom I love more than anyone, and when I watch her reach for my hand I am filled with vehement passion. I am filled with poison. I am filled with the question of existence--hers and mine, here. Someone loved someone else, and neither person was us, and now here we are, the Big Dipper shining pin-point bright over our heads, and we are here. We are here because someone else decided we should be, with not a single thought spared to what that means.

I watch the hurricane-girl spin and spin and spin and I am filled with anger. Because here she is, volatile and beautiful, and no one ever thought about what that would mean for her. Only for themselves. Only in her creation. But she's the one who will deal with the storm inside her small and hurting head every moment from now until her world ends. Until she is not inside her body.

I love them. With the atoms in my blood, I love them. With the neurons in my head, I hate that they are here. That I am here. That someone else pulled us all from the void and said, it is your job to exist.

There is dissonance.
I am not in my body.
There is dissonance.
I am in one someone decided should be mine.
There is dissonance.

There is love.

Even here, where there is no choice, there is love.