A favorite person feels like a beacon of light at the end of a stormy pier, used to guide a lost sailor to safety. There’s no mistaking that big light for anything else. It’s so bountiful, and shiny, and safe, and beautiful, and enticing, there’s no way to avoid it. Like a moth to the flame, the curiosity kills us. How could we stay away if it has the possibility to promise a warm safety after feeling so lost in the world? So, we go to it, getting sucked in. It’s everything we could have hoped for and more, ego-stimulating. To feel touched without needing hands, to have more than a wall for company. Something to snap us out of the oblivion like smelling salts. They’re not just a tool, though. They’re so much more than a guide, or a comfort, or just someone to reach out to us from the rough terrains of our inner worlds. They’re so much more than the personification of all of the things that were clasped and ripped out of the hands of our youth. Instead, they're gardeners. Out of their own volition, they encompass our dusty worlds, take gentle refuge there, and they plant so many little flowers. We never thought anything could grow there. A real conservation effort. And god, it’s so wonderfully overwhelming. It’s like I can feel life for the first time, and I *feel*, and I can smell the air, and I can cry, and spin, and rejoice in such a wonderful discovery. To feel a sultry wind instead of a crashing wave, trees as opposed to soot. 

But flowers wilt when there's no one to tend to them, water them, speak to them. I'm filled with too much dust, it's so hard for me to take care of them. It doesn't take long for the drought to set in. The desperation of wanting to kill for just a drop of water. The frenzy, clawing at walls, all the questions without answers. We're blinded by the light, and once it's done its job for the day, it loses its luminescence. What is there to do when there is no more light? It's still so dark, but it's gone. When flowers go without light for long enough, when they run out of nutrients, they parasitically attach at the root to nearby plants. We grow on our favorite people, and we grow too much. Except this time, there's thorns, and venus flytraps, and if something graces us, there's blisters that form. The life in our eyes, that little sparkle, dims. 

I'm back at sea. It's cold here.