Lines.

Parallel. Straight. Paperthin and perpendicular, 90 degrees of perfect; marking the spaces where our fingers used to twine together until the beginnings are indiscernible from ends and disappear into the slow half-moon of your smile. Thick, bold strokes of watercolor, imparting stains of dyes the hue of sunsets and the color of eyes; and where the tears fall the lines blur and leave hazy streaks that cloud over and wash quietly out.

Crooked. Curved. Overlapping spirals, sharp angles and simple fragments, careful chaos, transversals. Smooth diagonals across the length of a doorway and the effortless arch of a swan’s pale neck. Dusted lead, fuzzy sketches of blended shadows; the tiny precision of ideas imprisoned inside the cramped lines we scribble and call “words”. Jagged emotions scrawled in the form of a poem with curled edges; clean contours of a city, the tracery of a stained-glass window. Lines on a lavender wrist, mapped out in the natural creases of your hand.

Then there are the lines we can’t see, the ones we draw when we face right and wrong and right and left and the lines that separate the mind and the heart. There are the undefined lines between rhetorical questions and reality, between good and evil, between free will and destiny; the thin one between love and hate, the one between the person you pretend to be and person you are. The pen is poised and ready in our hands and we’re drawing mazes to escape and routes to follow, drawing walls to shut others out and drawing boundaries that may never be crossed. But we’re also finding release within these lines, particularly the ones that lets us know that someone loves us and the ones that tell the world that we are not devoid of emotion after all. We’re circles and corners of squares, ellipses and the points of stars. We’re boundaries on a map and words in a story. We’re lines in the endless sweep of infinity.