It’s not uncommon for me to think obscurely, 

To seek the opposite of common thought or judgment 

But, in writing on ‘warmth,’ I find great struggle in  

pinpointing a singular aspect to discuss. 

 

I find the idea of the topic far broader than, perhaps, 'song’ or ‘people,’ even. 

I find that when one could talk about ‘kindness’ and ‘love,’ or ‘heat’ and ‘pain,’ 

in the same project, 

it’s almost impossible to settle on just one idea. 

 

So, I sit with my page in front of me  

blank, ready to be scribbled on, and scrunched, and torn, and loved, and thrown, and kept. 

It seeks my words but  

my words seek fruition moreso. 

 

Walking down my driveway this morning, 

with the shadows of each petal on each flower on each tree  

casting onto my torso 

in a perfect silhouette of themselves, 

 

the silver of my great-grandmother’s bracelet  

scintillating in the sun, 

I began expanding my narrow, humanly perspective  

and gave more thought to the topic. 

 

I stood in this thought for a few moments more, 

exploring which aspect of ‘warmth’ to focus on, 

as my page remains blank, say for the inconclusive lines and dots 

drawn solely out of apathy to encourage each moment to pass with more haste. 

 

Eventually, I realised that it is this expanse that prevails. 

That the mere scale of such a topic is what should be written about, 

for the beauty of expansion is what makes life so fulfilling, 

and it is not the mere singularities born of my initial assessment: 

 

The singularity of an idea, or the place one calls home, 

the singular group one calls their friends, or those which we cast off as enemies. 

Not even the individual attributes we praise ourselves for, but 

the very possibility of expansion that fuels the excitement in our souls. 

 

We are not built for solitude. 

Nor are we capable of it. 

 

We are built for community and care, 

for forgiveness and anger, 

for the way an argument escalates to passion 

And the way it falls straight back down again.  

 

We are built to interact and to say “bless you” when a stranger sneezes. 

We are built for all the “thank yous” and “good afternoons” that we give and that we get. 

For when the blazing sun is our worst enemy, 

and a stranger makes space on a bench in the shade.  

 

We are built for warmth in all its glory and all its pain. 

 

Warmth cannot be confined, therefore, to a poem about the sun or the rain, 

to a story about meeting your soulmate on the day you lost your grandmother. 

 

It remains the thread of existence, weaving between our love and our loss, 

as we navigate how to tell the waitress that you ordered a Coke, not a Pepsi. 

 

The feeling of brushing autumn leaves out of your hair, post tree-climbing with best friends, 

As you ice the ankle of the one who inevitably fell before they could even reach the midway point. 

 

We experience all that we do because we must. 

We fill our souls with warmth and wonder 

as we fill them with despair and destinations. 

 

And we would do it all over again if given the chance.