Begin with marble, untouched.
Not white, nor black, nor gray,
but the color of your earliest memory.
Start to chisel, not with a steely heart,
but with the breath of a newborn’s cry.
Soft, but piercing, so that it may shape the stone
Your sculpture is your birthright.
Carve the flesh with a gust of wind
Gentle, yet persistent, like the thoughts you never spoke aloud.
Let each rib hold your fears in its cage.
Curve it just enough to cradle the shadows
that dance behind your eyelids when you blink.
For the heart, you must dig into the earth
and capture its pulse, where magma meets the ocean.
Mold it with hands dipped in your own blood.
Warm, but not too warm.
Let it beat to the rhythm of your doubts and your dreams.
The cadence may be unsteady, but don’t be alarmed.
This is normal.
Veins and arteries must be drawn anew
Submerged in the tall tales of what you might have been
or who you thought you were before you began.
Fashion the muscles from the tension in the tendons.
Stretch them tight across the bones.
Each ligament is a lie that you have told yourself,
But the joints are where truth met fiction.
For the eyes, find the gaze of the moon,
captured in a drop of dew at dawn.
Hold it steady in your palm
until it reveals all the things you’ve lost,
but never truly missed.
And if you’re lucky
you can catch every dream
that has slipped through your fingers.
The hands must be crafted
from the touch of every soul you’ve met.
The brush of skin on skin,
then the warmth that lingers,
then the cold that follows.
Shape the fingers long and slender,
to hold the weight of all you’ve carried.
The mind will be the hardest to do,
as it must be forged from the sparks
of every idea you abandoned.
Recall the embers that flickered, and died,
before they could light your way.
And the soul, should it choose to exist,
must be sculpted from the quiet moments,
when you were truly alone.
Not the solitude of the body,
but the isolation of the heart,
when the world outside did not understand you,
and you wondered if anyone could ever truly know you.
When you have finished, take a step back and see.
Not just the form,
but what it means to reflect on the work you’ve done.
This is a masterpiece of imperfections,
and it should have been an impossible task,
for no hand can truly mold life from stone.
But you have sculpted,
knowing full well that true life
is born not from the marble,
but from the spaces
between the hammer’s fall.
You’ll find that you have created not a life,
but a reflection of the life you seek.
You’ll find that you have created
an astonishing sculpture of you.
And that, in itself,
May be all that you’ve ever needed,
and all that will ever be.