Human beings are living, breathing history books.

We are eyelashes that flutter and tell stories, the curves of our lips hold unspilled words of wisdom, our spines carry the weight of thousands of captured moments, feelings, and memories.

Day after day,

Month after month,

Year after year.

The entire history of you began the moment you took a wailing, gasping breath-- hospital lights and shouting doctors, loud and bright.

Your story continued when you learned how much skinning your knee hurts, it took dips and turns when you discovered the sting of betrayal, when you learned that you loved to play the piano.

I am a living, breathing history book.

I am a constellation of freckles that trail down between my shoulder blades, a testament to my disregard for sunblock. My eyelids fall heavy with hazy images of my friends laughing, with numbers and dates, my back straightens and stretches, every vertebrae holds a multitude of stories and sins.

Day after day.

Month after month,

Year after year.

The entire history of me began when I blinked and realised the sun was brilliant-- a shock of yellow-white, rising and falling every day; desperate for a fleeting glimpse of the earth.

My story continues now, with every mug of tea, stained with my lipstick. It has met apexes in the form of my lovers’ lips on mine, it has met lows in nights of puffy eyelids and breaths that can’t be fully taken. In the summer I glowed and in the fall I crumbled; three hundred and sixty five days of laughter, of weeping, of laziness and of contentment.

That is a year in the life of me.

What is a year in the life of you?