My Soul Was Publicly Recognized

I personally don't know how to hate anyone. And yesterday I received such an unconditional love from people I'd never met. I felt like the most cared-for man in the world. I don't know how to express the boundless gratitude that burned like a conflagration through my insignificant, weeping frame as I pondered it afterward in my darkened box.

Once, a hollow man came for me and spoke through many masks, through thousands of voices. I spurned all his advances, knowing what he wanted. His dearest, oldest mask was that of a cherubic two year-old who once ran towards a man to see him bleed from multiple gunshot wounds in public, as though the walking corpse were full of candy. The hollow man is currently recuperating in the hospital from a two-story fall. May he never claim his prize. It is mine, with the people's imprimatur.

I know I am loved. And I burn with love for every soul I meet in this world, with a special regard given the people who can look me in the eye and call me on my shit. Yesterday I became a man in a way. My whole life had been leading up to that point, beginning with my walking like a solid meat vendor through the streets of the Tenderloin to the beat of an improvisational jazz poem spoken by passersby (a gang fight among the elderly followed in my wake, perhaps begetting a civil war in our nation's future), ending in a schoolyard rhyme recited by a generation after me, about me. In my 20s, I thought I would die by 30. I am 34, and God willing, I will know 35. Yesterday was the greatest gift I have ever known, given me by a world I was convinced didn't know I existed at all.

And wherever you are, if you are lying in the dark, naked and in pain and doubt and fear, know that I am thinking of you. I will hold your hand, and you will know you are loved until the end.