• you told me once
    that before you were you
    you were a stone.
    heavy, immobile,
    stranded at the ocean floor
    by the cruel grip of gravity.
    you told me once
    that before you were you
    you spent eons in the depths
    of a quiet sea,
    feeling currents scrape over your surface,
    water rendering you smooth
    and slick with salt.
    you told me once
    that before you were you
    you were a pebble
    carved small by
    the embrace
    and departure
    of the fickle tides,
    carried by their overwhelming insistence,
    tossed through laughing liquid glass
    and supported by smiling seas
    and tossed upon a bed of your ruined brothers,
    forgotten once your weight
    was too small to be noticed.
    you told me once
    that before you were you
    you were sand on a beach,
    diamonds ground to gritty dust
    clinging to bodies
    that lay upon your sun-drenched warmth,
    pressed into palaces
    magnificent to behold
    by childish hands
    with plastic buckets and shovels,
    molding you into safe havens
    for their youthful
    burgeoning
    imaginations

    you told me once
    that before you were you
    you were imagined into being
    by the mind of a child
    with hands buried deep in warm sand
    who recognised a kindred warmth
    within their own body

    you told me once
    that before you were you,
    you were born into the world
    by the soft hands of a child
    given free reign
    over a small patch of wet sand
    whose abstract form
    was a blank canvas
    of innumerable possibilities

    you told me once
    that before you were you,
    you were a rock
    a pebble
    a grain of sand
    a castle

    you told me once
    that before you were you,
    my childish hands
    built you into being

    you told me once
    that before you were you,
    you poured from my mind
    into the sand

    you told me once
    that before you were you,
    you were me