You stand in the doorway of yourself watching
time rearrange furniture. It flipped and sold your childhood
home and you lived there in the aftermath a stranger
in each room enduring well-meaning well-wishers adoring
the layout. Your mother calls it blossoming as you rot
before her eyes. This body is a triumph. This body is a blessing.
This body demands you remove your shoes before you go exploring.
You don’t stop there—you step out of your feet, take a leap and lose the legs—
you dream yourself a different life. Down there in the knobs of coral
there are no words to call yourself. The sun streaming through the water
doesn’t strip you bare for viewing—you are free to change unseen.
To call the transformation total would be a convenient lie
when the urge for ever-shifting reduxed transcending
was constant choking on fear and expectation.
They’d all call this change natural.
02/24/25, Currently Watching, Damien Niesewand
Hawkfish
The Junction Journal 
This blog sent a very important message to me. Change is inevitable, but one must be the one in control of it. Nowadays, many people change because of the people around them are changing. That is not what you want. If you change because you want to, you’ll appreciate your new body, otherwise “it will rot before your eyes”.
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Hi Ezra,
Thank you for your comment on my piece! I appreciate your thoughts on the message here, and I like your interpretation of this being the fact that we have to take control of how we want things to change because they’re going to change anyway. I definitely agree that there has to be more spurring our desire for change than to keep up with some ideal we feel is being set by others.
–Damien
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This reading was interesting to me because of how it handles the concept of change. Instead of accepting it like a normal force of life the author portrays Change as a dire force of nature. a glacier that moves ever-so slowly but can never be stopped. To them. calling change natural feels bizarre. the change we do out of fear. is weird to say that it is “just a part of life”. recently in my own life i’ve tried to cherish every moment more. I spent so long in my life thinking about whats ahead of me and i fear that i haven’t taken a moment to appreciate whats happening in the now. I feel this through the text. I also believe that it was extremely well written to encapsulate the feeling.
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Hi Julian,
Thank you so much for your comment! It’s so nice to see how you felt you could relate your own experiences to the piece, and I’m so happy to hear that you’ve recently been trying to live more in the moment. You’re certainly not alone in feeling like you haven’t been present in your life, and wanting to step back from the future a bit can definitely be super helpful.
— Damien
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