How would you choose to measure your life?
Tell me, not in coffee spoons, please.
Measure your life in lightning bugs at twilight,
in the brush of fingertips across a brow.
Count up all the moth kisses and giggles that broke through a bad morning.
Don’t forget every golden afternoon tangled up in white sheets,
each grin and grunt, and all those living room dance parties.
Tally each ghost found in a graveyard on winter nights.
Number all the mushrooms that emerged, seen and unseen,
in the forest of your backyard.
Every fairy for whom you built a home, each twig and flower petal you gathered up
to wither and decay, a place of love and growing.
All the sunrises and sunsets, birdsong beckoning for you to
please, pay attention.
How could you presume to measure your life,
to enter in each number as if they had equal weight.
Imagine if all you had to present at the end of your life was a slide deck, a dashboard,
an impressive compendium of data points
each more meaningless than the next.
Give me your gasps, your cries, give me each strangled sigh and fierce pulse of hands held together in shared strength. I will tabulate them for you and in the end
I will tell you what you have amounted to, and my darling,
it will have been enough.