The world is always telling you to be a cup half full kind of person: Look at the bright side, buck-up (whatever that means), turn your frown around, but what if you were born missing something, just plain missing something from as long as you can remember, clear back (and beyond) the time when you were old enough for your thoughts to become words?

Like, in a former life, if there is such a thing, maybe you died while embracing your lover only to wake up missing him.  Or, you were in a war, like WWII–the last good war, and on a bombing raid, but shot down before you made it to your mark, only to wake up in ’67 still wanting to fly.

Or, maybe yet, you’re your great-grandmother, Alice, returned to life after dying in childbirth on a dusty little farm in Bisbee.  Your husband couldn’t get the car started to get to town and bring the doctor back to save you, only in time, rather, to write your death certificate and explain your cause of death was hemorrhage.

Is it so crazy to think you are Alice, even though she died fifty years before you were born?  Is it possible that a death like that could go on for some fifty years, taking place in an in-between, limbo-style universe as you struggled to live and save your baby, Roderick, even as your body died and was buried in an unmarked grave?

That would explain it at least as well as Plato did with his half-hewn humans always trying to make themselves whole and strong with one another.  (Whatever this is, there’s a long history of it.)

I know my cup will never be full, and that’s the beauty of it. I’ve become so comfortable with this lack, I’ve learned to need it, too.  Like the need to seek out frost on trees as the sunset bursts into fire, ride along half-dark trails through forests echoing bird sound, and the need to lay barefoot and bare-legged, itching like crazy in spring grass while watching the hawk and raven war through blue skies and low clouds.

And, also, so like the need I have to find the soft part of your chest each night and fall asleep in your arms, imagining myself all put back together: healed, protected, even raptured to some good heaven for the completely undeserved.