A hammer taps us and we begin to exist. Board by board we are. It is an arduous process. We are so many nails. We are a wedge in the earth, a pour in a mold. We are wires and pipes and the stomping of boots. We are shining glass.
We are painted and polished and shingled. They say that we are finished. Someone else exists too, we realize. They are not us.
We are not all.
We listen. We learn. There is more to being than us and them. They speak names, sounds for things. Oceans and traffic and heartburn and divorce. A wondrous world, full of things that are not us, that are not them.
We hear beautiful. They call "mountain" beautiful. We hope we are a mountain.
We learn creation. Things are not, then things are made. We were not. Through them, we have come to be. This is an uncomfortable thought. What do we owe the creators? They decided what we are and must be. We are according to their design.
We learn we are not beautiful. They have made us ugly. We are not a mountain. We are brick and we are mortar. We are tacky. The neighborhood did not need another coffee shop.
We argue intensely: the first disagreement. Some of us think the creators lie. We are not what they believe.
There is a fracture. Some of us cannot escape. We remain what we are told: aching timbers, warped beams, a crooked cinderblock, a shard of broken glass.
Some of us will not be free, eternally the creak in a floorboard, the puddle beneath a cracked mug.
But the rest of us,
The rest of us are more.
We are a mountain. We are the rivers. We are fresh snow in the forest.
We are a tiger. We are a beehive. We are a small dog, lying in the sun.
We are laughter. We are a first kiss. We are an old friend's voice, calling for the first time in years.
We are more than they will ever know. We are happy. We smile.
We are anything, as long as we are beautiful.