Worthy of Your Love, a prose poem

I am the Unknown in this family. My name is such-and-such a name, fairly standard, welding me to the tree from which we all spring like branches. Or maybe the correct metaphor is leaves, each person a lush green leaf in the opening days of Spring, studded with raindrops like military medals. I, however, am a brown leaf with no medals, dry as a funeral director's wit. Accustomed, it seems, to my own cycle of seasons, divorced from the cycle of the leaves around me. My Autumns and Winters are perversely long, where theirs are nothing compared to an almost perpetual Spring, ending in a perfect Summer.

This bothers me less now than it once may have, because although the surface differences might burn themselves onto my eyes like shattering revelations, I remember that all us leaves are fed by the same tree. That beneath our skins and even deeper than our bones is a simple, essential idea that links us all, one to the other.

This idea is that we are humans, a kind of animal, one of the kinds that Noah gathered in the ark and Charles Darwin traced the evolution of. As individuals we might be driven by any number of fears and desires. We might be grotesque, monstrous, carnival-esque repositories of cruelty and hate, fit only for the freak shows of the human soul.

We might be love itself distilled into a human form, set walking in this world to bring forth gardens from the hardest soils, a constant joy to those we know and many we've yet to meet. More likely, we are somewhere in-between.

And that alone is worthy of your love.