They say when death comes for a man he hears footsteps.
Mine came with wings.
An ordinary morning, an interview to prepare for,
a man stepping out of his front door
into a swarm of wasps, as if the old stories
had sent their smallest soldiers first.
Then the fall, the head against the driveway,
and the sun standing directly overhead
when i returned to myself,
a Texas heatwave pressing down like a hand,
and a fire in my blood reading one hundred and five.
Write their names in this story, for they earned it.
Kaitlyn. Andrew. Friends who came running
before the asking had finished leaving my mouth.
This is the first mercy. Mark it well.
Some of us are alive today
because somebody answered a text.
Then the hospital, and the needles,
and here the story turns strange.
One draw. A second. A third,
the nurse's face working hard at blankness
and failing, failing.
Then the doctor himself, fourth needle in hand,
speaking the sentence that divides a life
into before and after.
Either our machines are wrong,
or you have hours.
Understand what had happened inside me.
The factory in my bones had gone silent.
Red cells, white cells, platelets,
all of them gone the way harmattan strips a tree,
leaf by leaf, until the branches stand bare
and no one can say which wind took the first one.
No reason, they said, that i should be speaking.
And yet i was speaking.
(Why are you alive, the readings asked.
Why are you alive, the doctors asked.
I did not know yet
that a question can be a door.)
They wheeled me toward the room of gas and sleep,
and terror sat on my chest like a stone,
and i, a man who had wandered far
from his father's house,
whose prayers had gone quiet in his mouth
through all the busy years,
ran home the only way left to run.
Father, it is me. I am sorry i turned away.
Save me, and i am yours.
Heal me, and i am your instrument.
My story has only begun. My work is not finished.
I vow it. I vow it.
A man does not forget a prayer like that.
A debt like that does not expire.
Then the night of blood.
Four bags of a stranger's mercy
hanging above me like dark fruit,
and my mother beside me through all of it,
torn between her God and her son,
refusing to release my hand.
What she prayed that night is written whole
in her own praise-song, where it belongs,
and i will not spend it twice.
Know only that she offered heaven a trade
no court in any world could refuse.
(Somewhere tonight a stranger's blood
is still walking around inside me.
I never learned their name.
I have become their thank you letter.)
And days later, listen well,
the fires in my bones were lit again.
Slowly, the way green returns after harmattan,
branch by branch, tree by tree,
until the land forgets it was ever bare.
No diagnosis. No mechanism. No answer.
The doctors closed a file
on a question that cannot close.
They never found what tried to kill me.
I never found the edge of what saved me.
So i live now as the answer
to a question no one can properly ask.
Alive on purpose. Alive like a vow
walking around in shoes.
And when the work grows heavy
and the race feels long,
i return to the man on the gurney
begging heaven for one more chapter,
and i tell him,
we got it. We got the chapter.
Now write it well.
— tachi