Dear You (and you and you and you and you and you),

Have you ever felt alone? In our society we are told that we are individuals,
that we are all different and that “we” are not actually a “we” but an “I” that is
constantly fighting to be the best “I” because that’s what we do; we compete and
struggle and leave behind and get left behind.

What is the saddest thing you can think of? Think of all the saddest things people
can think of and then how many people there are and how their saddest might be
sadder than your saddest or maybe just different, but still sad.

Think of all that sadness.

It doesn’t seem like there’d be any space for happiness at all. Is happiness the
opposite of sadness or is it just different?

I think it’s that feeling of the familiar filling in the spaces of fear you mistook for
loneliness. It’s the scars on our feet from places we’ve been in the darkest parts
of night but it is a night filled with stars. It’s the person holding our hands and
reminding us to look up and breathe in deep. We are socialized into believing the
means to an end idea that the capitalist craving is compensation for compassion
forgetting what it means to love and I don’t mean what it means to not wake up
alone, but what it means to not live alone. It’s knowing that we are not alone.

It’s that push, that aching, that breathtaking - that fist hitting the wall just to break
through it-impulse - that reason, and hope. The hope that things don’t have to
be the way that society has constructed them to be. That it’s not this or that. It’s
knowing that it can be something entirely invented and created- empowered
creative acts that bring us together to discover difference, that bring us closer
to that roof top-arms spread wide, conscious shaking spoken poetry car ride
moments of listening and feeling and being.

It’s that discontentment with mediocrity - that deep down, demanding, pulling,
intangible reason, reason to see past the American Dream all the way through
to the bullshit oppression it perpetuates. It’s about seeing everyone as an equal
and knowing that despite what class or group or culture you are associated with
or associate with, you can give someone every possible ounce of love within your
body.

These strings pull at my heart like they’re at war with one another. The machine
reads: SLOW DOWN TO REDUCE HEART RATE. But then it pulls to a different
side of the mountain of vessels - the vessels of boarded up homes, and kids in
school buildings turned into family rehabilitation centers, of conversations about

addiction and recycled bottles turned into cities.

The feet dig into the muddy burrows of bloody veins.

It tugs so hard and the muscle contracts and squeezes out the want of wanting
love and releases to just the want – And the need to give it without thinking,
without planning, without hesitation.

Forever and always,

Koko

Vesselsà 1. Heart vessels that deliver oxygen rich blood to the arteries of the heart
2. An empty space to be filled
i.e. the school building (vessel) that was turned into a family rehabilitation center (filled)