I told him “Thank you for being like the ocean.” It was as if I’d floated atop the waves, a happy bunch of bubbles, to arrive at this gratitude.

Words didn’t teach me how my friend’s personality was woven into the palpable experience of the ocean. I felt it in the steady, teaching rhythm that pulsed towards me, as I perched in the branches that hugged my hips. Watching, hearing, feeling.

Golden and glossy, a wizard with libraries of wisdom, I felt him there.

Words also did not teach me that we live in our feet.

I examined my love’s toes, touching each with my fingers, and an abrupt affection rose to my cheeks. “You’re here, too. So I love your feet as much as I love you.”

When I hugged the root of a Banyan tree, just one of hundreds, it took me back to touching his toes. I looked to her center that was a stone’s throw away, then back at what was between my arms.

We are in all of our parts.

I’ve heard some say “It smells like June” or “This blanket, it feels like my grandmother.” And in the midst of learning how to ask questions, I began to ask why.

Why does anxiety feel like my soul is made of carbonated vegetable oil that’s building pressure between my ribs?

Why, when I hear him sing, does it feel like my hands are the pebbles whose edges have softened under years of tumbling white waters?

Why does it feel like biting into a crisp apple made of starlight when the smallest of infants looks with wonder at their fingers, realizing they are attached to them?

She feels like an umbrella that’s made of glitter when she laughs, and the sparkles fall as the rain does, too. When he is sad, he is water that is colder than ice, but for some reason it did not harden. And when they are together, they feel like the best belly drop that happens at the top of my favorite swing.

Why, in a world with so many words and the most calculated of technologies, is it like waiting for the fossilization of the abstract to tell you how I feel?

I rub my thumb furiously over my fingertips as if the feeling will materialize into something expressible. Something that’s defined. Or at the very least, something I can translate.

And I am reminded of the truth that we are each our own universe.

That words are often the chosen material for creating a door to come inside. But that some of us choose, or are forced by our synapses, to speak in other ways.

And I learned to take my feelings to touch, and touch to words. And with those words, I exist with you.

And we invite one another into the multiversal movement of connection.