Lose “weight”, and gain everything

We’ve been taught to add pieces to our lives,
and exhibit these pieces on our bodies,
in shelves in our homes,
on walls, too,
and even the floor.

At these items we have acquired we are told to point and say,
look, this is me here,
and that is me, there,
see how far I’ve gone,
whom I’ve met,
what I’ve earned praise for,
whom I’ve loved, lost,
and maybe found.

We are thus taught to take wholeness,
and divide it into spaces,
to fill these divisions of spaces with measures of ourselves,
and in them to be proud, or sad.

But what we aren’t taught as clearly is that in the end,
all the exterior exhibition zones will be wiped clean,
the brands we once sought ourselves in,
pawned at garage sales or sold at flee markets,
tossed in dumpsters, or piled in landfills,
that trip, those postcards, that carving, that logo,
dust,
forgotten in the first generation,
or later.

But what does it matter anyway,
if we came from dust and return to dust,
we are only ever becoming our true selves,
every acquisition from beginning to ending is simply exterior decoration,
storing and relocating ephemeral goods for distant manufacturers,
marketing for those who wouldn’t know our names.

The interior space is far more pleasing a palace,
its expanse as large as the universe itself,
the logo in every tree, every stone, every atom,
every living creature is written within us,
and every breath, shared among the original founders.